Return to “The Final Solution” | Facts Tattooing Buszko, writing in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, explains why some prisoners were tattooed, while others were not: Prisoners were registered and received numbers tattooed on their left arm upon leaving the quarantine in Birkenau for forced labor in Auschwitz or in one of the subcamps. The…
Return to Witnesses of the Holocaust Kristallnacht Perspective “Among the emigrants was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland when it was part of the Imperial Reich and had moved to Hanover, where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27 Grynszpan and his family were rousted out…
Return to “The Final Solution” | Facts The “Killing Centers” “Before the Nazis developed the killing centers and extermination camps, they used the Einsatzgruppen to kill the Jews and other undesirables. But those massacres showed that there were glaring problems inherent in the extermination of masses of people, among them were the need of speed,…
Return to Witnesses The SS Einsatzgruppen – “Action Groups” “Concurrent with the start-up of the euthanasia exterminations, Hitler authorized Himmler to establish a Race and Resettlement Office under the aegis of the SS. It was the Race and Resettlement Office that was to be responsible for the `racial’ purification of the Reich and the establishment…
Return to “The Final Solution” | Facts The Ovens at Auschwitz Auschwitz lay thirty miles west of Cracow, Poland’s fifth largest city, and was on the direct railroad line to German Upper Silesia. Before the German attack in September 1939, Auschwitz had been a Polish army camp. In May 1940, Rudolf Franz Hoess the adjutant…