DOSSIER - Nazis

THIRD

REICH ORGANIZATION

CHART --- BOOKS

NAZIS

THE

BANNED BY

T4

MARCHES

EUTHANASIA

AKTION

PROGRAM AND

DEATH

HITLER

ATTEMPTED

ADOLF

ASSASINATION ON

MOST

IN

NAZIS WHO

THIRD REICH ORGANIZATION CHART

Adolf Hitler Fúhrer and commander in chief of the armed forces

Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg Panzer Group West

Gerd von Rundstedt OBW (Commander in Chief West)

Wilhelm Keitel Chief of staff Alfred Jodl Chief of operations

OKW (Armed Forces High Command)

Karl Dönitz OKM (Navi High Command)

Theodor Krancke Navy Group West

Surface Fleet Coastal Batteries

Josef Dietrich 1st SS Panzer Corps

Panzer Lehr Division 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitler Youth”

Hans von Salmuth 15th Army (Pas-de-Calais)

Friedrich Dollmann 7th Army (Normandy and Brittany)

84th Corps (Normandy) 25th Corps (Brittany) 74th Corps (Brittany)

Erwin Rommel Army Group B

21st Panzer Division 352nd Infantry Division 716th Infantry Division 709th Infantry Division 243rd Infantry Division

Hermann Göring OKL (Air Force High Command)

Hugo Sperrle 3rd Air Fleet

Fighter and bomber wings Anti aircraft Batteries

Intelligence Service of SS

Rudolf Hess Vice-Führer Heinrich Himmler Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel

Ernst Bohle State Secretary in the Reichsministry of Foreign Affairs

Gestapo

1

department; Foreign countries

Gestapo Consuls and passport

2 Falsification of documents (Passports, money, etc.)

Joachim von Ribbentrop Minister of Foreign Affairs

Richard Walther Darré National leader (Reichsleiter)

Alfred Rosenberg Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories

Julius Streicher Gauleiter of Franconia Joseph Goebbels Chancellor of Germany

Foreign Department of Nazi Party

German Diplomatic Corps

Ribbentrop Bureau Non-military information

Ribbentrop Bureau Ambassador and council general Ministry for propaganda and information Library of information

Military Intelligence Service

Support points in case of war

Foreign propaganda and counter propaganda Council of commerce and industry chamber of german culture

Molding Public Opinion

German Sympathizers

Military Training

Espionage and Sabotage

Cultural Propaganda

German Mass Organization

Opinion

BANNED BY THE NAZIS Hitler waged a culture war against the free press

by Travis Greene

In this data analysis, we will explore the authors, titles, and locations of books that were banned by the Nazis in 1935 using a data set provided by Berlin’s Open Data initiative.

Why Is This Relevant Today?

In the era of the “war” on the media, filter bubbles, and misinformation, we should remain aware of how those in power can control the flow of information to support their political agendas and re-narrate our collective history.

Goebbels and the Nazi Ideals of Culture

According to the website, this list was drawn up by the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskultur kammer), which was the brainchild of Joseph Goebbels, and was passed on to all libraries and bookstores. According to Wikipedia: “[The Reich Chamber of Culture] was meant to gain control over the entire cultural life in Germany creating and promoting Aryan art consistent with Nazi ideals. Every artist had to apply for membership on presentation of an Aryan certificate. A re jected inscription de facto resulted in an occupational ban.”

Two Kinds of Banned Books

There were actually two types of ‘flags’ used by the SS: the first type was for books that ‘threat ened the Nazi culture’ and the second type was for books that were ‘unsuitable to fall into the hands of youth (children under the age of 18).’ These books also could not be shown in storefront windows or placed in bookstores ‘where the general public could find them.’

We see most of the books were published in the 1930s, though it looks like the second type of ban (aimed at youth) targeted books published slightly earlier. The books published in pre-1900 were likely related to communism. Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunis tischen Partei) was published in 1848 and is the earliest published book shown in the histogram.

The Most Dangerous Ideas We noticed a lot of attention paid to German poetry. It’s likely the Nazis were trying to ap propriate the German cultural icons and use them to support their ideology. We also find lots of references to Communism in Russia and China (the Far East). Finally we see the obsession with controlling family values and youth (young generation). The focus on sexual topics is particu larly interesting (erotik, prostitution, sexuelle).

Many of the banned books focused on topics like: Love, War, History, Germany, Marriage, Youth, Jews, Soviet Union, Hitler, Women, Revolution, Psychoanalysis, Socialism, and Church, among many more.

Re-Narrating The Past

Based on this, we could infer that the Nazis were trying to control how Germans viewed their own history and the events of the Russian Revolution. At the same time, the Nazis were worried about the role of the family and the institution of marriage-particularly the sexual mores of women at the time. And finally, they were attempting to suppress the free expression of ideas related to Christianity and the church. All of this supports the familiar historical narrative that the Nazis used censorship of the press to support the party ideology of racial superiority. Any books containing ideas that might make people question the party lines were banned from publication.

Where Were Banned Books Published?

In this graphic, we will look at where banned books were published. In order to do this we will need to geo-code the cities and join them with counts of publications.

The Nazis Hated Soviet Communism

We see that Berlin of course published many of the banned books (over 1000), but also many of the books came from Moscow. These are, again, likely related to Communism and the Russian Rev olution, which occurred just a decade or so earlier. We also can see relatively more books coming from major cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna. Interesting, Switzerland seems to have published many books as well.

Topics and Locations of Banned Books

Topics like Love and Revolution were banned mainly from Berlin, which was known at the time for having a burgeoning Communist party that the Nazis obviously were not a fan of. It appears the Nazis were also fighting off counter-propaganda from the Soviet Union.

In the south of Germany there were references to the Catholic church, and in Vienna there was suppression of ‘Sittengeschichten,’ which translates to ‘history of morality.’

Again, these examples show the extent to which the Nazis waged a culture war on media in order to control and limit the free expression of ideas that went against the party’s social, histor ical, and religious narrative.

This is exactly why Donald Trump’s war on the media sets such a dangerous precedent: by con trolling how the populace understands its reality, those in power gain the ability to emotionally manipulate and agitate them in predictable ways.

Which Authors Had the Most Banned Books?

To get a better idea of which authors the Nazis found most repugnant, we will count the authors with the most banned books and then give a (randomly selected) example title to understand the type of books written by that author.

The Nazis Believed The Free Expression of New Ideas Is Dangerous

It is interesting for me to see that Rudolf Steiner is one of the most banned authors. There are now many ‘Rudolf Steiner Schools’ all over Germany and the US. Also Ludendorff was one of the most famous German military leaders in WWI, and later was part of the Putsch that attempted to assassinate Hitler unsuccessfully in Munich. It’s not surprising his books were banned. The relatively benign titles listed here show just how worried the Nazis were about any books related to history, mythology, morality and sexuality (Caeseren, Aphrodite, The Sex life of Women, The Big Sin).

One particularly strange title is “Die Hochfrequenz als Verjuegungsmittel”, or, roughly trans lated ‘Using High Frequency Waves in Order to Look Younger.” I’m guessing this book went against the Nazi party stance on scientific research.

Which Authors and Topics Were Most Banned?

Theodor Hendrik Van der Velde (a Dutch Gynecologist and partial discoverer of the curve of human body temperature) wrote books about marriage ( Ehe), while Siegfried Lichtenstaedten wrote often about topics related to Judaism. He published works dealt with topics related to political ques tions of Jewish history, law, and customs. Sadly, he was murdered in a Ghetto in Theresienstadt in 1942, according to Wikipedia. I encourage you to Google some of these people to learn more about their writings and ideas.

Beware of any politician or political party which limits the free expression of ideas in society, particularly those relating to the history and culture of particular groups.

Topics which are seemingly unrelated to politics, such as morality tales and mythology, can be appropriated and used by those in power to control popular discourse and keep opposing ideas away from young people, who might be willing to revolt against the system. If the party narra tive is pushed hard enough and long enough, people will start to believe it. Perhaps this was inspiration behind Orwell’s 1984.

Regardless of your view of certain media publishers, such as the New York Times or CNN, the next time a political figure says they are the ‘enemy of the people’, you should remind yourself that the Nazis used the very same tactic to carry out one of the most heinous crimes against humanity and plunge the world into one of the most destructive wars ever fought.

Quantity of books banned

Grau, die vom Himmel f ä llt

Ludendorff An meine Mitk ä mpfer!

Wolf Anregung zu einer V ö lkerbundsreform auf christlicher Grundlage

Reik

Schrecken und andere psychoanalytische. Studien

Reinhold Wulle Caesaren

Louys Aphrodite

Pfister Analytische Seelsorge

O’Flaherty

M ö rdeer

Hermann Kutter Das Eselein

Reimann Das Parodienbuch

Ebermayer

Tier

Emil Felden

grosse S ü nde

Woodman

seuil de la guerre

Farr è re Die kleinen Verb ü ndeten

I. Kuprin

Freudenhaus

Richter AEIOUfúnt Urkraftstr ö me

Foregger

Liebespredigt

Friedrich Marby Aus dem Liebesund Geschlechtsleben des Weibes

Kesser Beethoven der Europ ä er

Fleischack § 173 Reichsstrafgesetzbuch

Bruno Hart 11 Uhr 13 Minuten

EUTHANASIA PROGRAM and AKTION T4

by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

with

The goal of the Nazi Euthanasia Program

n the Nazi view, this would

and a financial burden to society.

KEY FACTS

the “Aryan”

1) The term “euthanasia” means literally “good death”. It usually refers to causing a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual who would otherwise suffer.

2) In the Nazi context, however, “euthanasia” was a euphemistic or indirect term for a clandes tine murder program.

3) The “euthanasia” program targeted, for systematic killing, patients with mental and physical disabilities living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories.

Program to Murder People with Disabilities

The Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabili ties in Germany. It predated the genocide of European Jewry (the Holocaust) by approximately two years. The program was one of many radical eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial “integrity” of the German nation. It aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their support ers considered “life unworthy of life”: those individuals who—they believed—because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.

Child “Euthanasia” Program

In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. They were led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hit ler’s private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician.

On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physi cians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.

Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children’s killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.

At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators included only infants and toddlers in the operation. As the scope of the measure widened, they included youths up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 10,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child “euthanasia” program during the war years.

Aktion T4: Extending the Euthanasia Program

“Euthanasia” planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled pa tients living in institutional settings. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures.

The Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party appara tuses. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the “euthanasia” campaign. The program’s functionaries called their secret enterprise “T4.” This code-name came from the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4. According to Hitler’s directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation. Under their leadership, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the “euthanasia” action. These were: · Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin · Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany · Bernburg, in Saxony Sonnenstein, also in Saxony Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria Hadamar, in Hessen

Using a practice developed for the child “euthanasia” program, in the autumn of 1939, T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statis tical data.

The form’s sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the patient’s capac ity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify. The categories of patients were:

suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders

not of German

“related”

those committed on criminal grounds

who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years

Phenol Injection

Injection into the heart State of cramping

Timeline of death Loss of consciousness Death

The toxic effect of phenol on the central nervous system causes sudden collapse and loss of consciousness in both humans and animals; a state of cramping precedes these symptoms because of the motor activity controlled by the central nervous system. Approximately one gram is sufficient to cause death.

Secretly recruited “medical experts,” physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the “euthanasia” program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing.

Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionar ies burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims. The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death.

Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to con ceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the “euthanasia” program quickly become an open secret. There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy. Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen. He protested the T-4 killings in a sermon August 3, 1941. In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941.

According to T4’s own internal calculations, the “euthanasia” effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.

Second Phase Hitler’s call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the “euthanasia” killing op eration. Child “euthanasia” continued as before. Moreover, in August 1942, German medical pro fessionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, although in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing.

Using drug overdose and lethal injection—already successfully used in child “euthanasia”—in this second phase as a more covert means of killing, the “euthanasia” campaign resumed at a broad range of institutions throughout the Reich. Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims.

The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.

People with Disabilities in the German-Occupied East Persons with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied east. The Germans confined the Euthanasia Program, which began as a racial hygiene measure, to the Re ich proper—that is, to Germany and to the annexed territories of Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and to German-annexed parts of Poland. However, the Nazi ideological conviction which labeled these persons “life unworthy of life” also made institu tionalized patients the targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union. There, the killings of disabled patients were the work of SS and police forces, not of the physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the Euthanasia Program itself.

In areas of Pomerania, West Prussia, and occupied Poland, SS and police units murdered some 30,000 patients by the autumn of 1941 in order to accommodate ethnic German settlers (Volksdeut sche) transferred there from the Baltic countries and other areas.

SS and police units also murdered disabled patients in mass shootings and gas vans in occupied Soviet territories. Thousands more died, murdered in their beds and wards by SS and auxiliary police units in Poland and the Soviet Union. These murders lacked the ideological component attributed to the centralized Euthanasia Program. The SS was apparently motivated primarily by economic and material concerns in killing institutionalized patients in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union.

The SS and the Wehrmacht quickly made use of the hospitals emptied in these killing operations as barracks, reserve hospitals, and munitions storage depots. In rare cases, the SS used the empty facilities as a formal T4 killing site. An example is the “euthanasia” facility Tiegenhof, near Gnesen (today Gniezno, in west-central Poland).

The Significance of the Euthanasia Program

The Euthanasia Program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent geno cidal policies. The Nazi leadership extended the ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the “unfit” to other categories of perceived biological en emies, most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies).

Planners of the “Final Solution” later borrowed the gas chamber and accompanying crematoria, specifically designed for the T4 campaign, to murder Jews in German-occupied Europe. T4 person nel who had shown themselves reliable in this first mass murder program figured prominently among the German staff stationed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Like those who planned the physical annihilation of the European Jews, the planners of the Eutha nasia Program imagined a racially pure and productive society. They embraced radical strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within their vision.

Gas Chamber

Timeline of death

Gas into the chamber

Headache

Shortness of breath

Chest pain

Nausea or vomiting

Dizziness Loss of consciousness

Collapse

Death

DEATH MARCHES

By United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

In

the

on the

organized “death

As Allied

of

ap

(forced evacuations) of concentration camp

in part to keep large numbers of concentration camp prisoners from falling into Allied

Key Facts 1) The term “death march” was probably coined by concentration camp prisoners. It referred to forced marches of concentration camp prisoners over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.

2) During death marches, SS guards brutally mistreated the prisoners and killed many.

3) The largest death marches were launched from Auschwitz and Stutthof.

Death marches concentration camps nazi camps ss liberation

In the summer of 1944, a massive Soviet offensive in eastern Belarus annihilated German Army Group Center. Soviet forces then overran the first of the major Nazi concentration camps, Lublin/ Majdanek. Shortly after that offensive, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that prisoners in all concentration camps and subcamps be forcibly evacuated toward the interior of the Reich. Due to the rapid Soviet advance, the SS had not had time to complete the emptying of the Majdanek camp. This had allowed Soviet and western media to widely publicized SS atrocities at the camp, using both footage of the camp at liberation and interviews with some of the surviving prisoners.

The evacuations of the concentration camps had three purposes:

1) SS authorities did not want prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive to tell their stories to Allied and Soviet liberators;

2) the SS thought they needed prisoners to maintain production of armaments wherever possible;

3) some SS leaders, including Himmler, believed irrationally that they could use Jewish con centration camp prisoners as hostages to bargain for a separate peace in the west that would guarantee the survival of the Nazi regime.

In the summer and early autumn months of 1944, most of the evacuations were carried out by train or, in the case of German positions cut off in the Baltic States, by ship. As winter approached, however, and the Allies reached the German borders and assumed full control of German skies, SS authorities increasingly evacuated concentration camp prisoners from both east and west on foot.

By January 1945, the Third Reich stood on the verge of military defeat. Most of German East Prus sia was already under Soviet occupation. Soviet forces besieged Warsaw, Poland, and Budapest, Hungary, as they prepared to push German forces back toward the interior of the Reich. After the failure of the surprise German Ardennes offensive in December 1944, Anglo-American forces in the west were ready to invade Germany.

The SS guards had strict orders to ki ll prisoners who could no longer walk or travel. As evac uations depended increasingly on forced marches and travel by open rail car or small craft in the Baltic Sea in the brutal winter of 1944-1945, the number who died of exhaustion and exposure along the routes increased dramatically. This encouraged an understandable perception among the prisoners that the Germans intended them all to die on the march. The term death march was prob ably coined by concentration camp prisoners.

During these death marches, the SS guards brutally mistreated the prisoners. Following their explicit orders, they shot hundreds of prisoners who collapsed or could not keep pace on the march, or who could no longer disembark from the trains or ships. Thousands of prisoners died of exposure, starvation, and exhaustion. Forced marches were especially common in late 1944 and 1945, as the SS evacuated prisoners to camps deeper within Germany. Major evacuation operations moved prisoners out of Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Gross-Rosen westward to Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen in winter 1944-1945; from Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to Dachau and Mauthausen in spring 1945; and from Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme northwards to the Baltic Sea in the last weeks of the war.

As Allied forces advanced into the heart of Germany they liberated hundreds of thousands of con centration camp prisoners. This included thousands of prisoners whom Allied and Soviet troops liberated while they marched on the forced evacuations. On April 25, 1945, Soviet forces met US forces at Torgau, on the Elbe River in central Germany. The German armed forces surrendered unconditionally in the west on May 7 and in the east on May 9, 1945. May 8, 1945, was proclaimed Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day).

To almost the last day of the war, German authorities marched prisoners to various locations in the Reich. As late as May 1, 1945, prisoners who had been evacuated from Neuengamme to the North Sea coastline were loaded onto ships; hundreds of them died when the British bombed the ships a few days later, thinking that they carried German military personnel.

The Maps In January 1945, the Third Reich stood on the verge of military defeat. As Allied forces ap proached Nazi camps, the SS organized death marches of concentration camp inmates, in part to keep large numbers of concentration camp prisoners from falling into Allied hands. As said be fore, the term “death march” was probably coined by concentration camp prisoners. It referred to forced marches of concentration camp prisoners over long distances under heavy guard and ex tremely harsh conditions. During death marches, SS guards brutally mistreated the prisoners and killed many. The largest death marches were launched from Auschwitz and Stutthof.

Flensburg

Neustadt

Hamburg Neuengamme Bremen Bergen-Belsen

Celle

Frankfurt

Buchenwald Weimar Plauen Eger Pressath

Allach

Gera Jena

Flossenbuerg Dachau Munich

Regensburg Neustadt

Bad Toelz Gmund Tegernsee

Aichach

Ingolstadt

Dora-Mittelbau

Wolfratshausen

Sea

Sachsenhausen

Oranlenburg

Sassnitz Lauterbach

Lauenburg

Hela Warnemuende

Gotenhafen Danzig Stutthof

Friedberg Gera Glauchau

Chempitz

Zwickau Lugau

Berlin Komotau

Radeberg Bautzen Weissenberg Reichenbach

Halle Geppersdorf Dresden

Leitmeritz Aussig Teplitz

Theresienstadt

Goerlitz Hirschberg

Kittlitztreben

Lauban Friedland Landeshut Glatz

Carlsbad Eger

Prague Pilsen

Regensburg

Mauthausen Linz

Vienna

Gross-Rosen

Lodz Schweidnitz

Frankenstein

Liegnitz Neustadt

Leobschutz Ratibor Wodzislaw

Althammer Gleiwitz Blechhammer Rajsko

Auschwitz Monowitz Kunzendorf Neudachs Sosnowitz

Tschechowitz Jawischowitz

Prerau

Mosonmagyarovar

Gonyu

Tata

The victims of UNETHICAL HUMAN EXPERIMENTS and COERCED RESEARCH

by Paul Weindling, Anna von Villiez, Aleksandra Loewenau and Nichola Farron

There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. This paper gives the first re sults of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,754 documented victims. Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943. The experiments remained at a high level of intensity despite imminent German defeat in 1945. There were more victims who survived than were killed as part of or as a result of the experiments, and the survivors often had severe injuries.

Background

The coerced human experiments and research under National Socialism constitute a reference point in modern bioethics. Yet discussions of consent and the need for safeguards for research subjects to date lack a firm basis in historical evidence. There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. The one partial estimate is restricted to experiments cited at the Nuremberg Med ical Trial. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. In 1945 liberated prisoners from German concentration camps began to collect evidence of the experiments.

The scientific intelligence officer John Thompson then pointed out not only that 90% of all medi cal research under National Socialism was criminal, but also the need to evaluate all criminal experiments under National Socialism, and not just those whose perpetrators were available for arrest and prosecution. The Nuremberg Medical Trial of 1946–47 was necessarily selective as to who was available for prosecution, and since then only clusters of victims have been identified.

In the early 1980s Günther Schwarberg named a set of child victims: his reconstruction the life histories of the ‘twenty children’ killed after transport from Auschwitz for a tuberculosis im munisation experiment at Neuengamme concentration camp was exemplary. The question arises wheth er what Schwarberg achieved in microcosm can be achieved for the totality of victims. Our aim is to identify not just clusters of victims but all victims of unethical medical research under National Socialism. The methodology is that of record linkage to reconstruct life histories of the total population of all such research victims. This allows one to place individual survivors and groups of victims within a wider context.

This project on the victims of Nazi medical research represents the fulfilment of Thompson’s original scheme of a complete record of all coerced experiments and their victims. Our project identifies for the first time the victims of Nazi coercive research, and reconstructs their life histories as far as possible. Biographical data found in many different archives and collections is linked to compile a full life history, and subjective narratives and administrative data are compared. Results are aggregated here as cohorts because of undertakings as regards anonymis ation, given in order to gain access to key sources. All data is verifiable through the project database.

The criterion for unethical research is whether coercion by researchers was involved, or whether the location was coercive. The project has covered involuntary research in clinical contexts as psychiatric hospitals, incarceration in concentration camps and prisoner of war camps, the ‘euthanasia’ killings of psychiatric patients with subsequent retention of body parts for re search, and executions of political victims, when body parts were sent to university anatomical institutes, and persons subjected to anthropological research in coercive and life threatening situations as ghettoes and concentration camps.

Without a reliable, evidence-based historical analysis, compensation for surviving victims has involved many problems. Victim numbers have been consistently underestimated from the first com pensation scheme in 1951 when the assumption was of only few hundred survivors. The assumption was that most experiments were fatal. This project’s use of several thousand compensation re cords in countries where victims lived (as Poland) or migrated to (as Israel), or were collected by the United Nations or the German government has corrected this impression. The availability of person-related evidence from the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen further helps to determine whether a victim survived. Major repositories of documents like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Yad Vashem archives, court records in war crimes proceedings, and oral history collections notably the Shoah Foundation have been consulted. Record linkage of named records is essential for the project, and shows how a single person could be the victim of research on multiple occasions. Father Leon Michałowski, born 22 March 1909 in Wąbrzeźno, was subjected to malaria in August 1942 and then to freezing experiments in October 1942.

A further issue relates to the methods and organisation of the research. From the 1950s the ex periments were viewed as ‘pseudo-science’, in effect marginalising them from mainstream science under National Socialism. For the purpose of this study, the experiments have been viewed as part of mainstream German medical research, as this renders rationales and supportive networks historically intelligible. It is clear that prestigious research institutions such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and funding agencies such as the German Research Fund were involved. It has been argued more recently that some experiments were cutting edge science. Another view is that the approach and methods were scientific albeit of varying quality. For the purpose of this study, the experiments have been viewed as part of mainstream German medical research, as this renders rationales and supportive networks intelligible.

Defining what constitutes research is problematic. For example, a listing of operations in a con centration camp may be nothing more than a clinical record, may have been undertaken by young surgeons seeking to improve their skills, or may indeed have involved research. As stated above, only confirmed data of research has been utilised in the project’s category of a verified instance of unethical research. The only exception is the corpses sent to anatomical institutes for re search purposes. Separating these out often does not appear possible, but the project includes anatomical research on body parts and brains as separate categories.

The project has graded victim evidence into two categories, so that there should be a set of verifiable and proven victims established as incontestable evidence of having been a victim. The unexpectedly high numbers of identified experiment victims makes this necessary. The two categories are:

Confirmed — Those who were identified as confirmed victims through a reliable source such as ex perimental records kept at the time.

Pending — Those who have claimed to have been experimented on, but confirmation could not so far be obtained.

used for

and

The project did not set out to adjudicate on the authenticity of victims’ claims. In Warsaw ca. 3600 compensation files of victims of human experiments were viewed, while there are a further 10,000 files representing claims deemed unsuccessful. It is sometimes unclear whether extensive injuries were retrospectively defined to have resulted from an experiment to meet the criteria of the compensation scheme offered by the Federal Republic of Germany in various forms since 1951, or whether experimentation had taken place in a hitherto unknown location. The project discounted claims of abuse when no experiment or research was involved, or when victims having misunderstood compensation schemes for experiments being about ‘experiences’. It is hoped that further research will provide confirmation of experiments in disputed locations like the concen tration camps of Stutthof and Theresienstadt. While Yugoslav victims were abused for experiments in German concentration camps, claims for experiments in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Norway have not so far been confirmed. The grading of victims’ claims into the verified and as yet unverified enable the project to establish verifiable minimum numbers, while indicating the possibility of higher numbers being confirmed by further research.

Project findings

The project is able to present results on: how many victims were killed in the course of the experiment, how many died from the consequences of the experiment or were killed as potential evidence of Nazi criminality, and how many survived? The project has covered experiments, as the most notorious experiments taken to the point of death and supported by the SS in concen tration camps, as well as dispersed experiments in a variety of clinical contexts, particularly on psychiatric patients. Some sets of experiments and locations, not least those sponsored by German pharmaceutical companies remain shadowy, and require more detailed research possibly on the basis of further disclosure of documents held in company archives. The extent of involvement of German pharmaceutical companies like that of IG-Farben (using the branded product names of ‘Bayer’, ‘Hoechst’ and ‘Behringwerke’) remains contentious. The company supplied Helmuth Vetter with samples for experiments at Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Similarly problematic is the extent that Schering-Kahlbaum supported Clauberg’s uses of X-ray contrast fluids and a substance to seal the fallopian tubes at Auschwitz. Initially, Clauberg asked for deliveries to his clinic at Königshütte (so making the experiments appear as taking place in a consensual clinical context), but later on to Auschwitz. The extent that the company’s senior staff knew that their employee and Clauberg’s pharmaceutical assistant Johannes Goebel worked at Auschwitz is contentious.

The occurrence of unethical research provides insight into the structure of Nazi medical re search. The project traced how Nazi coercive research began in the context of eugenic research in the mid-1930s. After numbers of experiments dipped in 1940 due to military call-up of med ical researchers, the research rapidly intensified both in terms of numbers of experiments and victims, and in terms of severity for victims. This can be seen from 1942 with the notorious and often fatal experiments on low pressure, exposure to freezing temperatures, and infectious diseases when research could be taken to the point of death. Pharmacological experiments on therapies for tetanus, typhus and typhoid were spurred by the realisation that Allied military medical research on infectious diseases was outstripping German military medical expertise. From November 1942 racial priorities came increasingly to the fore, as exemplified by Schumann’s X-ray sterilisation experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.

Victims were a highly international group. The infographic 1 shows numbers of nationalities, using nationality as in 1938. The table indicates the distribution of nationalities. The largest national group, that of Polish victims, includes both Roman Catholics and Jews. There were high numbers of German and Austrian victims, in part as a result of the experiments and dissections that accompanied the killing of psychiatric patients. While there were other large groups, there are also smaller national groups, as Swiss, British and Irish, all highly remarkable in how their citizens became caught up in the experimentation. We find victims include a Swiss conscientious objector used for malaria experiments at Dachau, and British commandos captured in Norway used for amphetamine and high performance experiments on the shoe track at Sachsenhausen, and sub sequently executed.

Statistics on gender indicate a proportion of male to female of approximately 2:1 2 One possible reason is the high number of military experiments as related to infectious diseases. Another is that more men than women were held in concentration camps, so that there was a higher male availability in the predominately male camps. In Ravensbrück the situation was reversed with the large female camp and a small male compound.

While for most nationalities male victims were the majority, in the case of certain national groups, female victims were in the majority. This is the case for victim groups from the Neth erlands (in the case of sterilisation at Auschwitz), and Greece (for the Jewish skeleton col lection). Children were often victims of experiments in psychiatric clinics. Later in the war, Roma and Jewish children were targeted for research by Mengele in Auschwitz.

Ethnicity and religion have been recorded 3 , as for the definitively confirmed experiment vic tims. Here, one is thrown back on the categories imposed by the Nazis. Thus a victim of the Jewish skeleton collection for the anatomy department at Strasbourg was baptised Protestant. Generally, the Nazis used the generic and stigmatising term of ‘Zigeuner’ or gypsy rather than the self-identifying terms of ‘Sinti’ and ‘Roma’.

In addition to the experiment victims are Roma and Sinti victims of large scale anthropological investigations of Ritter, Justin, and Ehrhardt, amounting to at least a further 21,498 persons. If however one takes the year 1943 we find a higher proportion of Jewish victims, in part because of the intensification of experiments on Jews (particularly on women and children) at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. This would again indicate that there was an intensification of racial research 4

Victim number indicates how from 1942 onwards there was an overall intensification of research 5 The life history approach allows appraisal of both experiments and victim numbers over time. The period 1933–39 shows sporadic experimentation in the context of racial hygiene. Mixed race ado lescents were sterilised and evaluated by anthropologists. The concerns of racial hygiene with mental illness explain why psychiatrists and neurologists conducted experiments in psychiatric institutions. The psychiatrist Georg Schaltenbrand pointed out that his neurological research subjects were transferred to other institutions, many as we now know to be killed. This inter rupted his research on the transmissibility of multiple sclerosis. The numbers of brains and body parts increased. From 1942 onwards there was an overall intensification of research.

The chart 6 shows when experiments started, but not the distribution of victims over time.

The largest series of experiments were for infectious diseases. Malaria research at Dachau be tween 1942 and 1945 had 1091 confirmed victims, and after infection different combinations of drugs were tested. These experiments by Schilling began in 1942 and remarkably Schilling tried to continue the research after the liberation of the camp.

He pleaded at his trial to be allowed to continue the research, albeit on volunteers. The highest numbers were in 1943. The momentum continued even though the war was clearly lost. Other large groups included the twins researched on by Mengele, and to date 618 individuals are known.

The overall findings provide an accurate basis for analysis of experiments to date. First, nearly a quarter of confirmed victims were either killed to obtain their organs for research, or died as a result of experiments taking the research subject to the point of death (notoriously, the experiments on freezing and low pressure at Dachau). The euthanasia killings and executions were sources of bodies for research, and the extent that this happened and research conducted before and after the end of the war is still being documented. Of the fully documented victims died 781 died before the end of the war as a result of the experiments: research subjects were weakened by the strain of the experiment such as a deliberate infection or severe cold, or they were de liberately killed because it was feared that they would testify against the perpetrators 7

While, most subjects survived, amounting to 24,010 persons, many had severe physical disabili ties with life-long consequences.

Conclusion

The analysis presented here shows that several types of unethical medical research occurred un der National Socialism. Not only were large numbers of victims affected, but also overall, numbers of surviving victims were far higher than anticipated. The survivors were often seriously dis abled and handicapped for the remainder of their lives. The experiments gained in numbers with the war and the implementation of the Holocaust, and were sustained at a high level of intensity despite imminent defeat.

One issue arising is that body parts of deceased victims were retained by medical research and teaching institutes, notably for anatomy and brain research. While there was meant to be full disclosure of specimens deriving from euthanasia victims and executed persons by 1990, specimens continue to be identified. The complex data is to be further augmented and refined, the history of specimens retained for research during and after WW2 is being documented, and the narratives of survivors analysed in order to understand more fully the consequences of coerced research. This research provides a basis in historical evidence for discussions of the ethics of coerced medical research.

Roma and Sinti

1935

Berlin Ludwig Assner Ludwig Assner, a German politician and member of the Bavarian State Parliament, sent a poiso ned letter to Hitler from France. An acquain tance of Assner warned Hitler and the letter was intercepted.

Hotel Kaiserhof (Berlin) Unknown Hitler and several members of his staff fell ill after dining at the revered Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin. Poisoning was suspected, but no arrests were made. Hitler himself seemed least affected by the alleged poisoning, pos sibly due to his vegetarian diet.

Berlin Paul Josef Stuermer Dr. Paul Joseph Stuermer led a resistance group composed of several officers, university pro fessors, businessmen, and government workers. The group assisted in several assassination attempts including Beppo Römer's attempt.

Berlin Marwitz group

Several officials in the German Foreign Office attempted to instigate an army coup against Hitler; they distributed a letter asserting that "The oath of allegiance to Hitler has lost its meaning since he is ready to sacrifice Ger many", and that "now was the time to act."

Berlin Beppo Römer Freikorps member Beppo Römer vowed to assassi nate Hitler as revenge for the Night of the Long Knives but was turned over to the Gestapo before any concrete plan could be made. Römer was imprisoned at Dachau until 1939.

Berlin Josef Thomas Mental patient Josef Thomas, who traveled from Elberfeld to Berlin to shoot Hitler and air force comman der Hermann Göring, was arrested by the Gestapo after he con fessed his intent.

Helmut Hirsch, a German Jew and a member of the Strasserist Black Front, was tasked with planting two suitcases filled with explosives at the Nazi party headquarters in Nuremberg. The plot was revealed to the Gestapo by a double agent and Hirsch was executed by decapitation.

ATTEMPTED ASSASINATION ON ADOLF HITLER

Berlin Hans Oster,Helmuth Groscurth Generalmajor Hans Oster and other high-ranking conserva tives in the Wehrmacht formed a plan to overthrow Hitler if he declared war on Czechoslovakia. Forces controlled by the plotters would storm the Reich Chancellery, arrest or assassinate Hitler, take control of the government, and restore the exiled Wilhelm II as Emperor. The plan was abandoned after Britain and France agreed to German annexation of Sudetenland in the Munich Agreement, neu tralizing the immediate risk of war. Many of the conspi rators later took part in the 1944 20 July Plot.

How many times we came close to an end?

by Joseph Bennington-Castro

Hitler become Chancellor Hitler become Führer

Nuremberg Helmut Hirsch

Berlin Unknown man in SS uniform

An unidentified man in SS uniform reportedly tried to kill Hitler during a rally at the Berlin SportPalast.

Hitler commits Suicide

Munich Johann Georg Elser German carpenter Georg Elser placed a time-bomb at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, where Hitler was due to give his annual speech in commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler left earlier than expected and the bomb detonated, killing eight and injuring sixty-two others. Following the attempt, Elser was held as a prisoner for over five years until he was executed at the Dachau concentration camp less than a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

Warsaw Micha Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, Service for Poland's Victory General Micha? Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski and other members of the Polish Army attempted to detonate hidden explosives during Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw. 500 kg of TNT were concealed in a ditch, ready to be detonated by Polish sappers. However, at the last moment, the parade was diverted and the saboteurs missed their target.

Berlin Erich Kordt German diplomat and resistance fighter Erich Kordt hatched an assassi nation plot along with officer Hasso von Etzdorf to plant explosives, but the plan was abandoned after the security restrictions following Georg Elser's attempt to kill Hitler made the acquisition and conceal ment of the necessary explosives too dangerous.

Munich Maurice Bavaud Swiss theology student Maurice Bavaud posed as a reporter and plan ned to shoot Hitler from the reviewing stand as he passed through the parade. His view of Hitler was blocked by the unwitting crowd and he was forced to abandon the plan. He then attempted to follow Hitler but failed. On his way back to Paris he was discovered by a train conductor and turned over to the Gestapo. Bavaud was executed by guillotine at Berlin's Plötzensee Prison on the morning of 14 May 1941.

Walki, Ukraine Hubert Lanz, Hans Speidel, Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz General der Gebirgstruppe Hubert Lanz and Gene rals Hans Speidel, Hyacinth Graf Strachwitz, and Paul Loehning planned to arrest or kill Hitler during his visit to Army Detachment Kempf in Ukraine. Strachwitz was to surround Hitler and his escorts with his tanks. Lanz stated that he would have then arrested Hitler, and in the event of resistance, Strachwitz's tanks would have killed the entire group. Hitler cancelled the visit and the plan was dropped. Lanz told of this plot after the war. However Strachwitz's cousin, Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1943, said Strachwitz had expressed the belief to him several times that killing Hitler would have constituted murder. That is, Strachwitz was too much a Prussian offi cer to consider assassinating Hitler, which sug gests that the plot never existed.

Flight to Smolensk Henning von Tresckow,Fabian von Schlabrendorff

On the return flight from a front visit, Hitler visited the headquarters of the Army Group Center in Smolensk. During the visit there were several attempts on his life: Under the direction of Major Georg von Boeselager, several officers were to intercept and assassinate Hitler in a grove on his way from the airport to the headquarters. Hitler was guarded by an armed SS escort; the plan was then dropped.

During lunchtime, Tresckow, Boeselager, and others planned to get up at a sign and fire pistols at Hitler. The commander-in-chief of the Army Group, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, knew about the plan but decided not to intervene. However, the plan was abandoned when it became clear that Hitler would not be present. Kluge forbade the attack, citing his fear of a possible civil war erupting between the SS and the army.

In a last-ditch attempt, Fabian von Schlabrendorff gave a time bomb camouflaged as a package of two liqueur bottles to an officer in Hitler's entourage, as a supposed gift to a friend in Germany. The bomb was supposed to explode on the return flight over Poland. The package was placed in the hold of the aircraft, where it iced up, causing the detonator to fail. Realizing the failure, Schlabren dorff immediately flew to Germany and recovered the package before it was discovered.

Wolf's Lair Claus von Stauffenberg Also known as 20 July plot. Claus von Stauffen berg and other conspirators attempted to assas sinate Adolf Hitler inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters in East Prussia. The name Operation Valkyrie—originally referring to part of the conspiracy—has become associated with the entire event. The apparent aim of the attempt was to wrest political control of Ger many from the Nazi Party and to make peace with the Western Allies. The details of the conspi rators' peace initiatives remain unknown.The failure of the assassination attempt and the intended military coup d'état that was to follow led the Gestapo to arrest more than 7,000 people, 4,980 of whom were executed.

Berghof Eberhard von Breitenbuch Covert German resistance member Busch and his aides were summoned to brief Hitler at the Berghof in Bavaria on 11 March. In discussion with Tresckow, Breitenbuch declined to make a suicide bomb attempt attack. Inste ad he would try to shoot Hitler in the head with a 7.65mm Browning pistol concealed in his trouser pocket. Busch and Breitenbuch travelled on a Condor aircraft to Bavaria, and were allowed into the Ber ghof. But SS guards had been ordered - earlier that day - not to permit aides into the conference room with Hitler, preventing Breitenbuch's attempt.

Wolf's Lair Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin Ewald von Kleist attempted a scheme similar to Von dem Bussche's. However, the uniform inspection was once again postponed, and eventually cancelled by Hitler.

Encouraged by Claus Stauffenberg, Major Axel von dem Bussche agreed to carry out a suicide bombing in order to kill Hitler. Bussche, who was over two meters tall, blonde and blue-eyed, exemplified the Nazi "Nordic ideal" and was thus chosen to per sonally model the Army's new winter uniform in front of Hitler. In his backpack, Bussche concealed a landmine, which he planned to detonate while embracing Hitler. However, the viewing was canceled after the rail car containing the new uniforms was destroyed in an Allied air raid on Berlin.

After becoming close friends with leading Army Group Center conspirator Colonel (later Major-General) Henning von Tresckow, Generalmajor Gersdorff agreed to join the conspi racy to kill Hitler in order to save Germany. After Tresckow's elaborate plan to assassi nate Hitler on 13 March 1943 failed, Gersdorff declared himself ready to participate in an assassination attempt that would entail his own death. On 21 March 1943, Hitler visited the Zeughaus Berlin, the old armory on Unter den Linden, to inspect captured Soviet weapons. A group of top Nazi and leading military officials - among them Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz - were present as well. As an expert, Gersdorff was to guide Hitler on a tour of the exhibition. Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets. His plan was to throw himself around Hitler in a death embrace. A detailed plan for a coup d'état had been worked out and was ready to go but, contrary to expectations, Hitler raced through the museum in less than ten minutes. After Hitler had left the building, Ger sdorff was able to defuse the devices in a public bathroom "at the last second." After the attempt, he was transferred back to the Eastern Front, where he managed to evade suspicion.

Berlin Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff

Wolf's Lair Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst

In some cases it took four or five decades to bring them to justice.

By Christopher Klein

After Allied forces defeated Germany in World War II, Europe became a difficult place to be associated with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. Thousands of Nazi officers, high-ranking party members and collaborators—including many notorious war crimi nals—escaped across the Atlantic, finding refuge in South Ame rica, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

Argentina, for one, was already home to hundreds of thousands of German immigrants and had maintained close ties to Germany during the war. After 1945, Argentine President Juan Perón, himself drawn to fascist ideologies, enlisted intelligence of ficers and diplomats to help establish “rat lines,” or escape routes via Spanish and Italian ports, for many in the Third Reich. Also giving aid: the Vatican in Rome, which in seeking to help Catholic war refugees also facilitated fleeing Na zis—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

As thousands of Nazis and their collaborators poured into the continent, a sympathetic and sophisticated network developed, easing the transition for those who came after. While there is no evidence that Hitler himself escaped his doomsday bunker and crossed the ocean, such a network could have helped make it possible.

Here’s a list of some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals who made their way to South America.

Walter Rauff

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: An SS colonel, Rauff was instrumental in the construction and implementa tion of the mobile gas chambers responsible for killing an estimated 100,000 people during World War II. According to the United Kingdom’s MI5 intelligence agency, Rauff oversaw the modifica tions of trucks that diverted their exhaust fumes into airtight chambers in the back of vehicles capable of carrying as many as 60 people. The trucks were driven to burial sites, and along the way victims would be poisoned and/or asphyxiated from the carbon monoxide. After persecuting Jews in Vichy France-controlled Tunisia during 1942 and 1943, Rauff oversaw Gestapo operations in northwest Italy. There, as in Tunisia, Rauff gained a “reputation for utter ruthlessness,” infamous for the indiscriminate execution of both Jews and local partisans.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: Allied troops arrested Rauff at the end of the war. He escaped from an American POW camp and hid in Italian convents After serving as a military adviser to the president of Syria in 1948, he fled back to Italy and escaped to Ecuador in 1949 before settling in Chile where he lived under his own name.

HOW HE ELUDED JUSTICE: Never captured, Rauff worked as a manager of a king crab cannery and actu ally spied for West Germany between 1958 and 1962. His whereabouts became known after he sent a letter requesting that his German naval pension be sent to his new address in Chile. He was arrested in 1962 in Chile but freed by the country’s supreme court the following year. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet repeatedly resisted calls from West Germany for Rauff’s extradition. The Nazi died in Chile in 1984. German and Chilean mourners at his funeral gave Nazi salutes and chanted “Heil Hitler.”

Josef Mengele

Adolf Eichmann

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: The “world’s most wanted Nazi,” Eichmann was the architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews from Europe. The notorious SS lieutenant colonel masterminded the Nazi network of death camps that resulted in the murder of approxi mately 6 million Jews. Eichmann orchestrated the identification, assembly and transporta tion of European Jews to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other death camps in German-occupied Poland.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: After World War II ended, Eichmann went into hiding in Austria With the aid of a Franciscan monk in Genoa, Italy, he obtained an Argentine visa and signed an application for a falsified Red Cross pass port. In 1950 he boarded a steamship to Buenos Aires under the alias Ricardo Klement. Eich mann lived with his wife and four children in a middle-class Buenos Aires suburb and worked in a Mercedes-Benz automotive plant.

HOW HE WAS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE: Israeli Mossad agents captured Eichmann in a daring operation on May 11, 1960, then snuck him out of the country by doping and disguising him as an El Al flight crew member. In Israel, Eichmann stood trial as a war criminal responsible for deporting Jews to death and concentration camps. He was found guilty after a four-month trial in Jerusalem and received the only death sentence ever issued by an Israeli court. He was hanged on May 31, 1962.

HOW HE ELUDED JUSTICE: West Germany had sent an extradition request to Argentina, which dragged its feet, claiming a review was necessary because the doctor’s crimes had been “political.” Nazi hunters pursued him for decades, but Mengele ultimately drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1979, felled by a stroke. Because he had operated under an assumed name in Brazil, his death wasn’t verified until his remains were forensically tested in 1985.

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: Second only to Eichmann as a target of Nazi hunters, the doctor nicknamed the “Angel of Death” conducted macabre experiments among the prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp. An SS officer, Mengele was sent at the start of World War II to the eastern front to repel the Soviets and received an Iron Cross for his bravery and service. After being wounded and declared unfit for active duty, he was assigned to the Auschwitz death camp. There, he used the prisoners—particularly twins, pregnant women and the disabled—as human guinea pigs. Mengele even tortured and killed children with his medical experiments.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: After World War II, Mengele spent three-plus years in hiding in Germa ny. In 1949, with the help of a Catholic clergy member, the “Angel of Death” fled via Italy to Argentina where he owned a mechanical equipment shop and remarried under his own name in Uruguay in 1958. The doctor lived in various Buenos Aires suburbs, but after hearing of Eichmann’s cap ture, went underground, first in Paraguay, then in Brazil

Brought to Justice

Eluded Justice

WHO ESCAPED TO SOUTH AMERICA

Franz Stangl

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: Nicknamed the “White Death” for his proclivity to wear a white uniform and carry a whip, the Austrian-born Stangl worked on the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program under which the Nazis killed those with mental and physical disabilities. He later served as the com mandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps in German-occupied Poland. More than 100,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered during his tenure at Sobibor before he moved to Treblin ka, where he was directly responsible for the Nazis’ second-deadliest camp where 900,000 were killed.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: After the end of the war, Stangl was captured by the Americans but escaped to Italy from an Austrian prison camp in 1947. Assisted by the Nazi-sympathizing Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, Stangl traveled to Syria on a Red Cross passport before sailing to Brazil in 1951.

Josef Schwammberger

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: An Austrian Nazi, Schwammberger was an SS commandant in charge of three labor camps in the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Brandishing a horsewhip and a German Shepherd trained to attack people, he arrived in 1942 at the Rozwadów forced-labor camp, where prison ers died by the hundreds, many shot by Schwammberger himself. In 1943, he organized the mass execution of 500 Jewish prisoners at the Przemyśl camp. He personally executed 35 people at Przemyśl, shooting them in the back of the neck, and dispatched Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. In Mielec in 1944, he cleansed the city of Jews. “His path was lit tered with corpses,” said the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: Arrested in Austria in 1945, Schwammberger escaped to Italy in 1948 and months later arrived in Argentina, where he lived openly under his own name and obtained citizenship.

HOW HE WAS CAPTURED: Sought by West Germany for extradition in 1973, Schwammberger went into hiding but was eventually arrested by Argentine officials in 1987 after an informant responded to the German government’s $300,000 reward. He returned to West Germany in 1990 to stand trial. Witnesses at the trial said they had seen Schwammberger throw prisoners onto bon fires, kill Jews kneeling beside mass graves and slam children’s heads against walls “be cause he didn’t want to waste a bullet on them.” In 1992, he was found guilty of seven counts of murder and 32 cases of accessory to murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Schwammberger died in prison in 2004 at the age of 92.

Erich Priebke

was

but

of 2,000 Roman

and

with the

to

as the

the

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: Priebke escaped from a British prisoner of war camp on New Year’s Eve in 1946 by cutting through barbed wire while his guards were drunk. With the help of Bishop Alois Hudal, Priebke fled to Argentina on a falsified Red Cross passport in 1948. He settled in the idyllic mountain town of San Carlos de Bariloche in the Patagonia region, where he operated at a Viennese deli and worked at a German school, living under his own name.

HOW HE WAS CAPTURED: In 1994, Priebke’s past was revealed to the world after an ambush interview by ABC newsman Sam Donaldson. As a result of the uproar following the interview, Priebke was extradited to Italy where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served under house arrest. Priebke died in 2013 at the age of 100. His funeral resulted in a clash between fascist and anti-fascist protestors, and he was buried in a secret location after Argentina refused to have him interred on its soil.

Gerhard Bohne

Claiming to be a “mercy killer,” Bohne was instead among the leaders who carried out a systemic extermination in order to purify the Aryan race and avoid state expenditures on those with mental and physical disabilities. All told, the program killed some 200,000 Ger mans with incurable diseases, mental illnesses and other handicaps. The victims were led to gas chambers in the institutions and then cre mated. The program served as a trial run for the mass extermination camps later operated by the SS. Bohne was thrown out of the Nazi Party after submitting a report accusing his agency of fraud and corruption.

HIS PATH TO SOUTH AMERICA: Bohne fled to Argen tina in 1949 disguised as a “technician” for the military under the country’s president, Juan Perón. He later admitted that Perón’s helpers gave him “money and identify papers.”

HOW HE WAS CAPTURED: After a coup deposed Perón, Bohne returned to Germany and was indicted by a court in Frankfurt in 1963. Released on bail, Bohne once again fled to Argentina from where he was finally extradited three years later as the first Nazi criminal surrendered by Argentina. Declared unfit to stand trial, Bohne survived another 15 years before his death in 1981.

HOW HE WAS CAPTURED: He was employed by Volkswagen in São Paulo under his own name when he was arrested in 1967 after being tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor and well-known Nazi hunter. Extradited to West Germany, Stangl was tried and found guilty of the mass murder of 900,000 people. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he died of heart failure in 1971.

WHAT HE’S INFAMOUS FOR: A lawyer and SS officer, Bohne headed the Third Reich’s Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes and was responsible for the administrative logistics of Hitler’s Aktion T-4 euthanasia program.

Insanity

The

The

Committed

The

The

The

The

Acquitted

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Hjalmar Schacht

The Doctors' Trial Kurt Blome Adolf Pokorny Hans-Wolfgang Romberg [de] Paul Rostock Siegfried Ruff Konrad Schäfer Georg August Weltz

The Judges' Trial Paul Barnickel Hermann Cuhorst Günther Nebelung Hans Petersen

The Pohl Trial Horst Klein Rudolf Scheide Josef Vogt

The Flick Trial Odilo Burkart Konrad Kaletsch Hermann Terberger

The IG Farben Trial

Fritz Gajewski Heinrich Gattineau Erich von der Heyde Heinrich Hörlein August von Knieriem Hans Kühne Carl Lautenschläger Wilhelm Rudolf Mann Christian Schneider Carl Wurster

The Hostages Trial Hermann Foertsch Kurt von Geitner

The RuSHA trial Inge Viermetz

The Krupp Trial Karl Heinrich Pfirsch

The Ministries Trial Otto von Erdmannsdorff Otto Meissner

The High Command Trial Otto Schniewind Hugo Sperrle

years

The IG Farben Trial Max Ilgner

years

The IG Farben Trial Hermann Schmitz

years

The Judges' Trial Josef Altstötter

The Flick Trial Otto Steinbrinck (died in prison in 1949)

The Ministries Trial Ernst Wilhelm Bohle Emil Puhl

The High Command Trial Karl-Adolf Hollidt (released in 1949)

6 years

The IG Farben Trial Heinrich Bütefisch

Krauch

The Krupp Trial Heinrich Leo Korschan

Wilhelm Heinrich Lehmann

The Ministries Trial Walter Schellenberg

7 years

The Judges' Trial Curt Rothenberger

The Flick Trial Friedrich Flick (released by John J. McCloy after 3 years)

The IG Farben Trial Fritz ter Meer

The Krupp Trial Ewald Oskar Ludwig Löser

The Ministries Trial Karl Rasche Richard Walther Darré (released in 1950)

Otto Dietrich (released in 1950) Ernst von Weizsäcker (released in 1950 by John J. McCloy) Ernst Woermann (released in 1951) Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland (released in 1950)

The High Command Trial Rudolf Lehmann

8 years

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Franz von Papen (Acquitted. Tried, convicted and sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment by a separate West German denazification court. Released on appeal in 1949)

The Pohl Trial Leo Volk (initially sentenced to 10 years)

The IG Farben Trial Otto Ambros Walter Dürrfeld

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Lothar Fendler (initially senten ced to 10 years)

The High Command Trial Otto Wöhler (released in 1951)

9 years

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Hans Fritzsche (Acquitted. Tried, convicted and sentenced to 9 years' imprisonment by a separate West German denazification court. Released September 1950)

The Pohl Trial Franz Eirenschmalz (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

The Krupp Trial Karl Adolf Ferdinand Eberhardt Max Otto Ihn

committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controver sial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The Road to the Nuremberg Trials

The death sentences imposed in October 1946 were carried out by Master Sergeant John C. Woods (1903-50), who told a reporter from Time magazine that he was proud of his work.

“The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it . . . 10 men in 103 minutes. That’s fast work.”

In December 1942, the Allied leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union “issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jewry and resolv ing to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), the Soviet leader, initially proposed the execution of 50,000 to 100,000 German staff officers. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) discussed the possibility of summary execution (execution without a trial) of high-ranking Nazis, but was persuaded by American leaders that a criminal trial would be more effective. Among other advantages, criminal proceedings would require documentation of the crimes charged against the defendants and prevent later accusations that the defendants had been condemned without evidence.

There were many legal and procedural difficulties to overcome in setting up the Nuremberg trials. First, there was no precedent for an international trial of war criminals. There were earlier instances of prosecution for war crimes, such as the execution of Confederate army officer Hen ry Wirz (1823-65) for his maltreatment of Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War

(1861-65); and the courts-martial held by Turkey in 1919-20 to punish those responsible for the Armenian genocide of 1915-16. However, these were trials conducted according to the laws of a single nation rather than, as in the case of the Nuremberg trials, a group of four powers (France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S.) with different legal traditions and practices.

The Allies eventually established the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg trials with the Lon don Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), issued on August 8, 1945. Among other things, the charter defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace (including planning, preparing, starting or waging wars of aggression or wars in violation of international agree ments), war crimes (including violations of customs or laws of war, including improper treatment of civilians and prisoners of war) and crimes against humanity (including murder, enslavement or deportation of civilians or persecution on political, religious or racial grounds). It was determined that civilian officials as well as military officers could be accused of war crimes.

The city of Nuremberg (also known as Nurnberg) in the German state of Bavaria was selected as the location for the trials because its Palace of Justice was relatively undamaged by the war and included a large prison area. Additionally, Nuremberg had been the site of annual Nazi propa ganda rallies; holding the postwar trials there marked the symbolic end of Hitler’s government, the Third Reich.

The Major War Criminals’ Trial: 1945-46

The best-known of the Nuremberg trials was the Trial of Major War Criminals, held from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946. The format of the trial was a mix of legal traditions: There were prosecutors and defense attorneys according to British and American law, but the decisions and sentences were imposed by a tribunal (panel of judges) rather than a single judge and a jury. The chief American prosecutor was Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Each of the four Allied powers supplied two judges–a main judge and an alternate.

Twenty-four individuals were indicted, along with six Nazi organizations determined to be crimi nal (such as the “Gestapo,” or secret state police). One of the indicted men was deemed medically

THE

TRIALS

Death Sentence

years

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Karl Dönitz

The Doctors' Trial Hermann Becker-Freyseng (commuted, initially sentenced to 20 years)

Wilhelm Beiglböck (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 15 years)

Herta Oberheuser (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 20 years)

The Judges' Trial Wilhelm von Ammon Günther Joel Ernst Lautz Wolfgang Mettgenberg

The Pohl Trial Hans Heinrich Baier (released in 1951)

Hans Hohberg (released in 1951)

Hans Lörner (released in 1951)

Hermann Pook (released in 1951)

Erwin Tschentscher (released in 1951)

The Hostages Trial Hellmuth Felmy (commuted, initial ly sentenced to 15 years)

Ernst von Leyser (released on medical grounds in 1951)

Lothar Rendulic (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 20 years)

The RuSHA trial Fritz Schwalm

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Heinz Jost (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment)

Gustav Adolf Nosske (commuted, initially sentenced to life impri sonment)

Heinz Schubert (commuted, initial ly sentenced to death)

Felix Rühl (released in 1951)

The Krupp Trial

Eduard Houdremont Friedrich Wilhelm Janssen

The Ministries Trial Wilhelm Keppler (released in 1951) Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk (released in 1951)

NUREMBERG

12 years

The Hostages Trial Hubert Lanz (released on in 1951)

The Krupp Trial Friedrich von Bülow Alfried Krupp (plus forfeiture of property. Was released by John J. McCloy 1951, and had his property returned to him)

Erich Müller

The High Command Trial Georg von Küchler (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 20 years, released in 1953 on medical grounds)

Hans von Salmuth (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 20 years)

15 years

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Konstantin von Neurath (released 1954 on grounds of ill health).

The Doctors' Trial Fritz Fischer (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment)

Helmut Poppendick (commuted to time served in 1951)

Oskar Schröder (commuted, initial ly sentenced to life imprisonment)

The Milch Trial Erhard Milch (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment, released in 1954)

The Pohl Trial Heinz Karl Fanslau (commuted, initially sentenced to 25 years)

August Frank (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment,) Georg Lörner (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Hans Bobermin (commuted, initially sentenced to 20 years, released in 1951)

The RuSHA trial Heinz Brückner Rudolf Creutz Herbert Hübner

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Walter Hänsch (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Willy Seibert (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Erwin Schulz (commuted, initially sentenced to 20 years)

Franz Six (commuted, initially sentenced to 20 years)

The Ministries Trial Hans Kehrl [de] (released in 1951) Paul Körner (released in 1951) Paul Pleiger (released in 1951)

The High Command Trial Hermann Hoth (released in 1954)

Georg-Hans Reinhardt (released in 1952)

17 years

The Hostages Trial Ernst Dehner (released in 1951)

20 years

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Baldur von Schirach Albert Speer

The Doctors' Trial Gerhard Rose (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment)

Karl Genzken (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment)

Siegfried Handloser (commuted, initially sentenced to life impri sonment)

The Pohl Trial Max Kiefer (commuted, initially sentenced to life imprisonment, released in 1951)

Karl Sommer (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Karl Mummenthey (commuted, ini tially sentenced to life imprison ment)

The Hostages Trial Wilhelm Speidel (commuted, ini tially sentenced to 20 years, released on in 1951)

The RuSHA trial Werner Lorenz

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Eugen Steimle (commuted, initially sentenced to death) Waldemar von Radetzky (released in 1951)

The Ministries Trial Hans Heinrich Lammers (released in 1951)

Edmund Veesenmayer (released in 1951)

The High Command Trial Karl von Roques (died in prison in 1949)

25 years

The RuSHA trial Richard Hildenbrandt Otto Hofmann

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Walter Blume (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

The Ministries Trial Gottlob Berger (released in 1951)

Life Imprisonment

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Walther Funk (released in 1957 due to poor health.)

Rudolf Hess (committed suicide in prison in 1987.)

Erich Raeder (released 1955 on grounds of ill health).

The Judges' Trial Herbert Klemm Rudolf Oeschey Oswald Rothaug Franz Schlegelberger

The Hostages Trial Walter Kuntze (released on medical grounds in 1953) Wilhelm List (released on medical grounds in 1952)

The RuSHA trial Ulrich Greifelt

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Ernst Biberstein

Waldemar Klingelhöfer (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Heinrich Strasfluffel (escaped)

Adolf Ott (commuted, initially sentenced to death)

Martin Sandberger (commuted, ini tially sentenced to death)

The High Command Trial Hermann Reinecke (released in 1954) Walter Warlimont (released in 1954)

The Major War Criminals’ Trial Martin Bormann (sentenced in absentia to death by hanging. Later proven he committed suicide to avoid capture at the end of World War II in Europe, and remains discovered in 1972 were conclusively proven to be Bormann by forensic tests on the skull in 1998. Nonetheless, Simon Wiesen thal, Hugh Thomas and Reinhard Gehlen refused to accept this. Gehlen further argued Bormann was the secret Russian double agent 'Sasha'.)

Hans Frank (by hanging)

Wilhelm Frick (by hanging)

Hermann Göring (by hanging but committed suicide by ingesting cyanide 2 hours before the senten ce was to be carried out)

Alfred Jodl (by hanging, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres called the verdict a mistake in 1947. In 1953, the denazification courts reversed the decision and found Jodl not guilty. Within months, the decision of the denazification court was itself overturned. His property, confiscated in 1946, was returned to his widow.)

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (by hanging)

Wilhelm Keitel (by hanging)

Joachim von Ribbentrop (by han ging)

Alfred Rosenberg (by hanging) Fritz Sauckel (by hanging)

Arthur Seyss-Inquart (by hanging) Julius Streicher (by hanging)

The Doctor’s Trial

Viktor Brack Karl Brandt Rudolf Brandt Karl Gebhardt Waldemar Hoven Joachim Mrugowsky Wolfram Sievers

The Pohl Trial Oswald Pohl

The Einsatzgruppen Trial Paul Blobel Werner Braune Erich Naumann Otto Ohlendorf Edward Strauch (died in a hospital while suffering from an epileptic attack)

25 years

unfit to stand trial, while a second man killed himself before the trial began. Hitler and two of his top associates, Heinrich Himmler (1900-45) and Joseph Goebbels (1897-45), had each com mitted suicide in the spring of 1945 before they could be brought to trial. The defendants were allowed to choose their own lawyers, and the most common defense strategy was that the crimes defined in the London Charter were examples of ex post facto law; that is, they were laws that criminalized actions committed before the laws were drafted. Another defense was that the trial was a form of victor’s justice–the Allies were applying a harsh standard to crimes committed by Germans and leniency to crimes committed by their own soldiers.

As the accused men and judges spoke four different languages, the trial saw the introduction of a technological innovation taken for granted today: instantaneous translation IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from international telephone exchanges to provide on-thespot translations through headphones in English, French, German and Russian.

In the end, the international tribunal found all but three of the defendants guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life behind bars. Ten of the condemned were executed by hanging on October 16, 1946.

Hermann Göring (1893-1946), Hitler’s designated successor and head of the “Luftwaffe” (German air force), committed suicide the night before his execution with a cyanide capsule he had hidden in a jar of skin medication.

Subsequent Trials: 1946-49

Following the Trial of Major War Criminals, there were 12 additional trials held at Nuremberg. These proceedings, lasting from December 1946 to April 1949, are grouped together as the Subse quent Nuremberg Proceedings. They differed from the first trial in that they were conducted before U.S. military tribunals rather than the international tribunal that decided the fate of the major Nazi leaders. The reason for the change was that growing differences among the four Allied powers had made other joint trials impossible. The subsequent trials were held in the same location at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.

These proceedings included the Doctors Trial (December 9, 1946-August 20, 1947), in which 23 defendants were accused of crimes against humanity, including medical experiments on prisoners of war. In the Judges Trial (March 5-December 4, 1947), 16 lawyers and judges were charged with furthering the Nazi plan for racial purity by implementing the eugenics laws of the Third Re ich. Other subsequent trials dealt with German industrialists accused of using slave labor and plundering occupied countries; high-ranking army officers accused of atrocities against prisoners of war; and SS officers accused of violence against concentration-camp inmates. Of the 185 people indicted in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, 12 defendants received death sentences, 8 others were given life in prison and an additional 77 people received prison terms of varying lengths, according to the USHMM. Authorities later reduced a number of the sentences.

Aftermath

The Nuremberg trials were controversial even among those who wanted the major criminals pun ished. Harlan Stone (1872-1946), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time, described the proceedings as a “sanctimonious fraud” and a “high-grade lynching party.” William O. Douglas (1898-1980), then an associate U.S. Supreme Court justice, said the Allies “substituted power for principle” at Nuremberg.

Nonetheless, most observers considered the trials a step forward for the establishment of inter national law. The findings at Nuremberg led directly to the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), as well as the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1949). In addition, the International Military Tribunal supplied a useful precedent for the trials of Japanese war criminals in Tokyo (1946-48); the 1961 trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann (1906-62); and the establishment of tribunals for war crimes commit ted in the former Yugoslavia (1993) and in Rwanda (1994).

Death Sentence Life Imprisonment

CRUELTY EXPOSE

I DECIDED TO REALIZE AN ISSUE ABOUT THIRD REICH BECAUSE TOO MANY TIMES THERE’S TALKING REGARDING THIS SUBJECT, MAKING CONSIDERATIONS HANGED ON UNVERIFIED SOURCES AND RUMORS. THIS UNDERMINES THE PERCEPTION OF TRUTH THAT WE HAVE ABOUT THIS EVENTS. LUCKILLY FOR US THERE ARE MANY VERIFIED ASSOCIATIONS, MUSEUMS AND GROUPS THAT ARCHIVED IMAGES, TESTIMONIES AND DATA. THEY MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO REALIZE THIS ISSUE IN THE WAY WE THOUGHT IT. ANOTHER FUNDAMENTAL PUSH WAS BROUGHT BY THE NEED TO EXPOSE CRUELTY IN A RAW, TRANSPARENT AND SCIENTIFIC WAY. MAKE YOUR YOURSELF READY TO ENDURE THE READ OF THIS PAGES, BECAUSE NO ONE IS BUT EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS READINGS ANYWAY.

DRAW YOUR CONSIDERATIONS SIRIO AURELI

ARTICLES SOURCES

THIRD REICH ORGANIZATION CHART

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-third-reich-power-structure https://www.britannica.com/topic/German-Chain-of-Command-in-Western-Europe-June-1944-1673116

BOOKS BANNED BY THE NAZIS

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-analysis-books-banned-by-the-nazis-c9d3cf0cfab3

EUTHANASIA PROGRAM AND AKTION T4

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program

https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/place-of-remembrance-and-information-for-the-vic tims-of-the-national-socialist-euthanasia-murders/ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program?series=18

DEATH MARCHES

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/death-marches

VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holo caust-and-nazi-persecution#number-of-deaths-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_Nazism

THE VICTIMS OF UNETHICAL HUMAN EXPERIMENTS AND COERCED RESEARCH

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holo caust-and-nazi-persecution#number-of-deaths-1

ATTEMPTED ASSASINATION ON ADOLF HITLER

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler

THE 7 MOST NOTORIOUS NAZIS WHO ESCAPED IN SOUTH AMERICA

https://www.history.com/news/the-7-most-notorious-nazis-who-escaped-to-south-america

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Axis_personnel_indicted_for_war_crimes