Tag: Majdanek

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An (extra)Ordinary Holocaust Story of Survival

I’d like to welcome Dr. Marianne (née Seidler) Golding as our guest blogger this week. Rather than me rattling on and on, I will ask Dr. Golding to introduce herself.

“I am a French and International Studies professor at Southern Oregon University. I am the daughter of Édouard Seidler. I started to research my father’s past in the summer of 2019, using letters, photographs, and various documents such as refugee cards and police reports. Édouard, his mother, and sister, fled their native Brno (Czechoslovakia) in 1939, at which point they became refugees in France and for the latter part of the war, my father and his sister, Lisette, lived in Switzerland. After the war, Édouard returned to France where he lived until his death in 2010.

“As I started to research my father’s journey, I was very fortunate to discover Bernard S. Wilson’s novel on the internment camps in the south of France, as well as the events of the Retirada. I knew nothing of this exodus from Spain to France, even though my maternal grandfather (Arthur Madden) had fought with the International Brigades and died in the last battle of the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to Bernard, I found out a wealth of information that both spiked my interest in that historical period and helped me find out more about my family. Bernard also introduced me to Dr. Ron Friend, one of the many children saved from the internment camp of Rivesaltes by Irish heroine, Mary Elmes.” (Click here to read the blog, Miss Mary: The Irish Oskar Schindler.) Read More An (extra)Ordinary Holocaust Story of Survival

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Hitler’s Enablers – Part Two – The Camps

Earlier this year, I wrote the blog, Hitler’s Enablers – Part One – Wannsee Conference. Click here to read the blog. The blog primarily dealt with the first and second level of enablers ⏤ senior Nazi leaders setting policy and leaving the formation of details and final implementation to the second layer. An “enabler” is someone who enables another to achieve an end.

Today, we will examine the third level of enablers. These were the men and women who were responsible for the administration and ultimately, ensuring the end result met senior Nazi leaders’ expectations. In other words, these were the people who carried out the day-to-day activities that ultimately resulted in the murder of millions of men, women, and children. Beginning with arrests and ending with the wholesale exterminations in the gas chambers, Hitler would not have been able to carry out his perverse vision without the assistance of hundreds of thousands of third level enablers.

Execution of Stutthof concentration camp overseers at Biskupia Górka. From left to right: Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Ewa Paradies, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff, and Gerda Steinhoff. Further in the background is the guard SS-Oberscharführer Johann Pauls and several Polish kapos. Photo by Polish authorities (4 July 1946). PD-Polish Public Domain.
Execution of Stutthof concentration camp overseers at Biskupia Górka. From left to right: Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Ewa Paradies, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff, and Gerda Steinhoff. Further in the background is the guard SS-Oberscharführer Johann Pauls and several Polish kapos. Photo by Polish authorities (4 July 1946). PD-Polish Public Domain.

As we will see, most of these people were sadistic thugs who had no compassion for other human beings. Many of the defendants could not comprehend why they were on trial after the war. The common defense position taken by Nazi war criminals was that they were only following orders ⏤ all fingers pointed to Adolf Hitler ⏤ and when that didn’t work, they boiled it down to “Victor’s Justice.” Read More Hitler’s Enablers – Part Two – The Camps