The Trial of Amon Goeth

Part 2

Images from the Vilnius [Vilna] Ghetto

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

1904 Vilna 638 X 379 45 KB	A barbed wire fence in the grove surrounding the Ponary mass extermination site near Vilnius (Vilna). 474 X 310 65 KB	A bunker at the Ponary mass extermination site, which housed the Jewish sonderkommando men. 393 X 581 73 KB	A Jewish woman being investigated by a Gestapo man during an Aktion in the Vilnius ghetto. 450 X 600 79 KB
A page with part of the -fighting guidelines- of the FPO Jewish underground in Vilnius 429 X 583 104 KB	A panel from an exhibition in the Jewish museum in Vilnius showing execution of Jews 800 X 607 572 KB	A pit at the Ponary mass extermination site near Vilnius (Vilna), containing shreds of clothing and the remains of the murdered victims themselves. 800 X 488 134 KB	A pit at the Ponary mass extermination site, in which the remains of victims can be seen. 792 X 507 171 KB
A scene from a theatrical version of the - Eternal Jew - staged in the Vilna ghetto 448 X 295 48 KB	A wounded Jewish fighter, with a yellow badge on his bandages, in a hospital in the Vilna ghetto. 800 X 543 115 KB	An alley in the Vilna ghetto 371 X 529 40 KB	An alley near the synagogue in Vilnius 341 X 456 34 KB

See the full gallery here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/vilniusgal/index.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010

Moshe Bahir   

 Testimony about Sobibor at the Eichmann Trial 1961

(Selected Extracts)

 [photos added to enhance the text]

Attorney General: I call Mr Moshe Bahir

Presiding Judge: What is your full name?  

Witness: Moshe Bahir – my name was originally Shkalek

Question: You were born in the town of Plock in Poland?

Answer: Yes

Question: You were there until 1941?

Answer: Yes

Question: And there you were deported from Plock?

Answer: Correct

Question: Where to?

Answer: To the Zhodova camp

Question: And from there?

Answer: We were there for four days, from there we were deported to Czestochowa

Question: You were there for several months?

Answer: Yes

Presiding Judge: How old are you now?

Answer: I am now thirty-three your honour

Attorney General: You were transferred to Zamosc, and two weeks later to a nearby village called Komarow?

Answer: Yes

Question: You were there until 16 March 1942?

Answer: Either the 16^th or 17^th

Question: What happened to you on that day?

Answer: It seems to me that it was 17 March. We were taken to the large market place in Komarow. They selected all the men who were employed at places of work that were of value to the Germans. Amongst them was my father who worked at the airport, twelve kilometres from Komarow.

Question: And you too?

Answer: I was not working

Question: But you were also selected?

Answer: I was in the market place, together with my mother and brother. My father was taken away from the market place. I was left there with my mother and brother and other persons who were older than I.

I could easily have escaped, because we were not so strictly guarded. My father was also standing there, since he had a card indicating that he was an airport worker. He asked me to run away. I told him I wanted to go with my mother. We did not know where we were being sent to. We left the next day for Zamosc and, on the 18 March, we went from Zamosc to Sobibor.

Question: How long did the journey last from Zamosc to Sobibor?

Answer: I reached Sobibor on 20 March 1942, in the afternoon

Question: How many people, approximately, were there on that train?

Answer: I think there were about two thousand five hundred people

Question: What did things look like when you got off the train?

Answer: I remember that before we went in, the first five railway carriages were brought into the camp ahead of us. I was in the second section of the transport. When the first five carriages were brought into the camp, I saw that the people inside the carriages were beginning to say the confessional prayer.

According to Jewish tradition, a person who is critically ill should be urged to confess his sins. If he is unable to compose his own confession, he may recite the customary formula. I did not know what this meant. I also did not know the meaning of the term “the death camp Sobibor.”

I must say that the majority did not know it, my mother also was not sure. But it was only then that I became aware of, or I understood, what was the meaning..

The moment my mother took out her last slice of bread, which she was preserving for the time when my brother or I might faint from hunger, and began to share it out to other children, I said to myself – despite the fact that I was a boy of fourteen and a half – apparently there is no longer any need for her to keep a slice of bread for her own children. This made me understand that we would no longer need to eat. About half an hour later, the remaining carriages, including the one I was in, were brought into the camp.

Question: Now, please tell us, were the doors opened from the outside?

Answer: All the doors of the carriages were opened, German SS men, in green uniforms, were standing there, as well as Ukrainians in black uniforms. While I was still on the train, I heard the word “Aufmachen” (Open –up) and all the carriages were opened up simultaneously. There was terrible shouting. They began taking us to Camp 1.

Question: All of you together?

Answer: The second transport – that is to say, the second section of the transport.

Question: What happened to the women and the children from the train?

Answer: When we entered Camp 1, the women and children were separated to the right and the men to the left. I went along with my mother and brother. My mother held my hand. My mother held my hand from the moment we were about to leave, since the women and children went ahead of the men towards the gas chambers.

At the point when I was already at the exit point of Camp 1, together with the women, Oberscharfuhrer Gustav Wagner held me back, he halted me and said, “Du bist ein Mann,” (you are a man) and pushed me towards the men.

They waited for half an hour, fifty of these men were chosen for work, including myself. I should like to point out that there were not many men in this transport – most of them were women and children.

Question: Have you seen your mother and brother since then?

Answer: I have never seen them since. My brother was younger than I was he was twelve and a half.

Attorney General: And they walked towards the gas chambers in Camp 3?

Answer: First of all to Camp 2, where the women took off their clothes, and from there towards Camp 3

Question: What kind of work were you given at Sobibor, Mr Bahir?

Answer: The first job of work I had to do was to clear a hut of pots and all kinds of eating utensils belonging to victims who had preceded us, since there was no place to sleep. There were a number of small huts for artisans. They were from the first transport, from which people had been selected for work. I was in the second transport, from which they kept back men for regular work.

Presiding Judge: You say that they emptied a hut of eating utensils?

Answer: Yes, your Honour, the hut was full of eating utensils, and around the hut there was a pile, three times as large, of eating utensils only, pots which the people had brought to the camp at Sobibor before my arrival.

Attorney General: And you had to clear them away?

Answer: Yes, and after that we constructed bunks. I also worked, at first in transferring personal belongings from Camp 2 to the train.

Question: What personal belongings were there in Camp 2?

Answer: There was a very high heap. I do not remember its length or dimensions, but it was a very large one. We worked for a month in removing it from Camp 2 to the carriages.

Question: What did this pile contain?

Answer: Only personal belongings of the people who preceded us

Presiding Judge: Clothing?

Answer: I am talking only about clothing. Apart from the large pile at Camp 2, which stretched as far as the Lazarett – close to the Lazarett there were also three huts full of clothes, near the railway station, at a place which was subsequently evacuated and occupied by the Ukrainians.

Question: What was it that you referred to as the Lazarett?

Answer: It was a pit, not far from the camp – five hundred metres away from the camp and from where we were working. When we were running two hundred metres with the bundles, there was a pit, and when someone was injured or had his sexual organs bitten by the dog Barry, Unterscharfuhrer Paul Groth would say to him: “What happened to you, my poor man? You can’t carry on like that. Who did that to you? Come with me to the Lazarett.”

And he went with him, a few minutes later we would hear a shot.

He would accompany tens of workers in this way every day. I am referring to men who were selected for work, for they did not choose men for work every day. They selected them when they needed them for work, if on one day, fifty men were selected for work, the following day they killed eleven men of our group.

This was done by Paul Groth, who led them all to the Lazarett.

Attorney General: Were those who arrived on transports also transferred to the Lazarett?  Those who arrived on the transports – men, women and children – were they also taken to the Lazarett?

Answer: At a later stage, not at the beginning. At a later stage, there were small carts that came right up to the hut, and into these they used to throw the sick people and the aged, together with those who were dead. On the way, it often happened that the dead bodies lay on top of the old persons, and the old ones on the sick. These were sent directly to the Lazarett and not to Camp 3.

Question: To the gas chambers?

Answer: They did not go to the gas chambers, but to the Lazarett

Question: So you were in Sobibor from 20 March 1942, until when?

Answer: Until 14 October 1943, the day of the revolt

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/bahirtestimony.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010

Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

         Witness to the Exterminations at Belzec 

During the First World War I was an air force officer and was demobilised as a first lieutenant in the reserve. In 1936 I successfully completed reserve training as a sanitation officer in the army and was promoted to Oberstabsarzt in 1939.

From 1930 up to this time (1939) I held a chair in Hygiene and Bacteriology at the University of Marburg and was at the same time director of the Institute of Hygiene in Marburg. This was a normal professorship I retained this professorship up until the end of the war.

At the end of 1939 I was called upon by the Waffen- SS to work for them as a consultant hygienist. At that time the Waffen-SS having expanded considerably as a result of the war, needed medical experts to work for them in an advisory capacity.

On a visit to Berlin at the end of 1939 I got in touch with the then Corps Doctor of Waffen-SS, Dr Dermietzel, who asked me to serve as medical advisor with a rank of SS- Sturmbannfuhrer. I already knew Dr Dermietzel from my time as SS- Oberabschnittsarzt in Oberabschnitt Fulda – Werra.

In April 1940 I was then called up by the Waffen-SS and given a posting as consultant hygienist. My assignments mostly took place when there were no lectures. My work entailed inspecting, checking and improving the sanitary facilities at all the different places where the Waffen-SS was stationed and to combat epidemics.

For this reason I visited the city of Lublin and the surrounding area in 1942. I had already been in Poland since 1940 in my capacity as hygienist. I was however, always at each place for just a short time, after which I would return to the university in Marburg.

According to the available documentation, I was in the city of Lublin for the first time in August 1942 , it was here that I met SS-Gruppenfuhrer Globocnik for the first time. At the time there were plans to build a large concentration camp on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, capable of holding about 150,000 people. I visited the site to advise on the sanitary installations which were being built, provisions of drinking water and sewage drainage.

I did not have any contact with the occupants of the concentration camp or the worker columns. I remained only a short time in Lublin as my assignment in connection with the concentration camp was finished.

I naturally had other assignments in the area around Lublin which were also related to sanitary measures. After I had finished this work I returned to Marburg to the university. My instructions always came from Berlin, from the Sanitation Office of the Waffen-SS. I also spent some time in Berlin in order to be on call for short term assignments. My own permanent place of residence was and always remained Marburg.

When I am asked about executions of Jews I must confirm that on 19 August 1942 I witnessed an execution of Jews at Belzec extermination camp, I would like to describe how I came to be there.

During my conversations with SS-Brigadefuhrer Globocnik, he told me about the large spinning-mills that he had set up in Belzec. He also mentioned that work at this camp would considerably outstrip German production. When I asked him where the spinning materials came from, he told me proudly that they had been taken from the Jews.

At this point he also mentioned the extermination actions against the Jews, who for the most part were killed at the camp at Belzec. Around the same time Globocnik had asked a certain SS-Obersturmfuhrer Gerstein, while he was in Lublin, how these large mills could best be disinfected.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/belzec/pfannenstiel.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010

Jacob Edelstein

POLISH FORT-NIGHTLY REVIEW

London, Thursday, July 1st 1943 Issue No. 71

"What happened in the Radom Ghetto "

Protocol B

The Ghetto

At first life was tolerable enough for the Jews of Radom. From time to time people were seized in the street and carried off to work, and Jewish men's beards were cut off. These things were accepted. The people got accustomed to such a state of affairs. The shops were open, and were patronized, the Jews did not do badly. My brother-in-law, had a large shop and spent all his time there, just as in pre-war days.

Truly, from time to time German soldiers came and took articles without paying for them but such things were only details. The Jews thought that they would be able to get through on this basis.

But after some months their situation began to worsen. The Gestapo men began to take over, and the Jews at once felt their iron fist. The order was issued that every Jew must wear a yellow patch, and the Star of David must be painted outside every shop.

During those difficult times many Poles helped the Jews by carrying things for them. German families' from the Reich were quartered in the empty homes, and some buildings were occupied by German offices. The Germans set up a Jewish Council of Elders in Radom, consisting of 24 persons. The Council did not, develop any extensive activities until the ghetto was organized. Its chief task was to find new quarters for the evacuated Jews.

As usual, there were many malcontents, who accused the council of favoritism. I cannot say whether the complaints had any justification. It also had to provide new. premises for shopkeepers turned out of their shops. Several shopkeepers had  to be accommodated in one shop, and each man had one counter, so that when you went into a shop you got  the impression that you were in a market hall, with commodities of all kinds all around you.

The order for the organization of the ghetto in Radom was issued in April, 1941. The Jews were given fourteen days in which to transfer to the ghetto area. But the German patrols stood in the streets and took away everything they had a mind to.  The ghetto was not surrounded by a wall.

Guards consisting of a German gendarme and a Polish policeman standing at the entrances to the ghetto streets. Later the Polish policeman was replaced by a Jewish one. Notice boards were set up, with the inscription: \

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/polishforthnigtreviewslaughterB.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010

Einsatzgruppen A

Mass murder of Jews in Latvia

Jews have occupied the region of the Baltic countries since the fourteenth century. The primary concentration of the Jewish population was in the cities, Daugavpils, Vilnius and Riga in particular.

The Latvian census taken in 1935 identified 93,479 Jews living in throughout the country, of these, it is estimated that about 70,000 perished in the Holocaust, the vast majority at the hands of Einsatzgruppen death squads in December 1941. The totality and speed with which the mass murder of Jews in Latvia was achieved meant that most families were completely destroyed with no one left to mourn or even inquire about the dead.

On June 22, 1941 the Germans began Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. Because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Baltic countries were considered a part of Russia. Immediately following the invasion, Himmler was appointed to take measures to strengthen German ethnicity in the occupied territories and to create lebensraum, or living space for German citizens. To this end, Himmler created special task forces within the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, and placed them under the command of Reinhard Heydrich.

On September, 21, 1939, Heydrich instructed those under his command to observe a distinction between a final solution which would take some time and intermediary steps necessary for reaching this end, which can be applied more or less at once. 

In the Baltic region, the Holocaust was organized and supervised by a special Operational Unit of the Nazi Security Service Sicherheitsdienst commanded by Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker. This unit arrived with the advance troops of the occupying army. From November 1941 onward,  the command was assumed by SS and Police General Friedrich Jeckeln, the Supreme Commander of the SS and Police in Northern Russia and Ostland.

Jews in Latvia became Nazi victims within days of Nazi occupation. As in Lithuania, Latvian Jews fell into the hands of the German Einsatzgruppe A, aided by a group of Latvian citizens known as the Arajs Kommando who willingly assisted in the mass genocide of Latvian Jews.

The killing of the Jews occurred in two phases.

The first phase was between July and October 1941, where the rural population was liquidated. The second phase was the extermination of the Jews in the cities from November to December 1941. Of the approximately 66,000 Jews in Latvia at the time of the Nazi invasion, there were as many as 59,000 that were killed in 1941. The remaining Jews were sent to ghettos to be used as slave labor.

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/lativia.html

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010

“A Guided Tour of the Sydney Jewish Museum”

 by David Benedikt

First offered September 3, 1999, periodically revised since.

[photos added to enhance the text]

First of all, the word itself – anti-Semitism – is a total misnomer.  It’s simply a polite way of saying what it actually means: Jew hatred, anti-Semitism has racial overtones: ‘Semite’ – Arabs are also Semites, so the phrase ‘antisemitism’ obviously doesn’t apply to anyone else except the Jews.  It is an agreed modern term that was coined to give a pseudo intellectual title to an ugly word which is the descriptive word ‘Jew hatred’. 

The consequence of the church having repeated over practically two thousand years from generation to generation the accusation that the Jews were involved with the death of Jesus was this estrangement of the Jews from the people among whom they have lived since the dispersion.  This constant repetition eventually resulted in this ‘otherness’ not because of a difference in religious belief but because of this accusation that was maintained by the churches all along.

It was only in 1963 – that was the first time that we had a pope, John XXIII, who had the courage to issue an official Vatican document exonerating the Jews once and for all of that accusation.  The consequences of this estrangement, that ‘otherness’ felt towards Jews, is the level of anti-Semitism, the level of dislike, that the Nazis found prevailing at the time when they took power in 1933.  The basis for what eventually started to happen after the Nazi take-over in Germany is this prevailing dislike.  Dislike eventually leads to fear, fear eventually results in hatred.  Hatred results in violence.  Unfortunately, we humans react that way. 

The difference between the prevailing dislike of Jews and the Nazi structure imposed on the German-speaking Europeans since the take-over of the Nazis in ’33 is distinct.  Nazidom, the Nazi ideology is that they intend to plan for the achievement of the cultivation of a super race, a race of super men, a German, Aryan master  race which would form an exclusive strata of humanity.  This was to be arrived at the way you breed horses in a stud.  Race horses are bred by eliminating those generations of horses, as you breed them, which are not capable of being trained as race horses until you arrive at a superior number of horses which lend themselves to being trained as race horses. 

This mad idea was to be applied to the generation of German-speaking Europeans until they had achieved this superiority.  Not only would the result be that they would all be six foot tall, blue-eyed and blond but they would have such exclusive qualities after that breeding process, after the exclusion of the inferior races, that this in itself would entitle them to rule the world for a thousand years.

Just beneath that strata of superior, master race individuals there would be those whom they called in German ‘Werktiere’ labouring individuals, animals of burden, so to say.  They would be left alive.  They would be inferior racially speaking but would be entitled to do the menial work for the master race.  These would be the second layer of the slightly flawed ones and the bottom layer would be the ‘disposable individuals’ headed by the Jews and the Gypsies, the homosexuals and their own, pukka, German, mentally and physically handicapped.  Suffice to say at this stage (as we come back to it later) mass murder by the Nazi structure was applied first to their own German, mentally and physically handicapped. 

You must think in those degenerate terms of a superiority to be achieved for which you could not include flawed individuals.  I don’t have to remind you that in a civilized society it is the responsibility of the community and the State and it is to be taken deadly seriously, that we make sure that the handicapped enjoyed life to the fullest possible extent, but this is in a normal society.  When we speak of Nazi Germany we are not speaking of a normal society.

How did they achieve acceptance for such an ideology?  The methodology was simple: everyone was put into a uniform which everyone had to wear.  Everyone was made to attend mass meetings and at those mass meetings, from those balconies, that ideology is pumped into the population and we find a strange situation.  Every neighbor is watching his neighbor, making sure that he too is conforming and attending those mass meetings. 

Pressure is exerted from the top for this to take place.  Over a period of time we find a general acceptance because mass murder cannot be practiced unless there is a silent, passive acceptance of this murderous ideology.  This is the method.  It is left over a period of time to find passive acceptance and to sink in.  So from 1933 to 1935 this process is taking place in Germany and in Austria who joined them with great enthusiasm in March 1938.  Round about 1935, in a place called Nuremberg, a city in Germany, the racial laws are promulgated.  The racial laws are there to help distinguish between one individual and another to start the process of separation, of pushing out Jews form the general community.  That was the initial stage of this process.

To give you a very condensed and abbreviated idea of the content of the racial laws, if you had a grandmother or grandfather who was traceably Jewish, it was enough for you, two generations later, to become an object of persecution.  These were roughly the German racial laws introduced in 1935.  Signs appeared all over Germany asking people who had anything to do with Jews not to associate with them, to kick them out of the general community, to isolate them simply because the accusation was that they were the misfortune of the German people.  Again time was allowed for this to sink in, for this to become somehow passively acceptable until we come to the first definite date of the holocaust, the first outbreak of organized violence against Jews on the night from the 9^th to the 10^th November 1938 which was called the ‘night of broken glass’ or in German, ‘Kristallnacht’. 

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/guidedtour.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010