Mass murder in Bedzin 9 September 1939

Jewish men and their German guards in the ruins of the Great Synagogue of Bedzin, set on fire by German soldiers in September 1939. Credit: Yad Vashem

Credit: Yad Vashem A few days after invading Poland, German soldiers locked a group of Jewish people inside the Great Synagogue in the town of Bedzin. The soldiers poured petrol onto the building, and then set the synagogue and the surrounding homes on fire.

Those who tried to escape the flames were shot. Up to a hundred people were murdered that day. Most of their bodies were so badly burnt that they were unrecognizable.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Ossi Stojka

Credit: USHMM

Ossi Stojka was born in Austria in 1936, the youngest of six children. Ossi’s family were Roma (‘Gypsies’) who earned their living buying and selling horses. During the winter the Stojkas lived in the Austrian capital of Vienna. In the summer they travelled around the Austrian countryside in their wooden caravan.

When Ossi was two years old, Hitler’s Germany took control of Austria. Ossi’s family and other Roma were ordered to stay on a camp ground in Vienna, to stop them travelling from place to place. The Stojka family were forced to turn their caravan into a small wooden house.

After war broke out in 1939, Nazi persecution of Roma people got even worse. Eventually, Ossi and his family were deported to the ‘Gypsy Camp’ at Auschwitz- Birkenau. They were poorly fed and conditions in the camp were filthy and overcrowded. Many people caught diseases that spread quickly throughout the camp.

In 1944, Ossi became seriously ill with typhus but he was not given the medical help that he needed. Shortly afterwards, Ossi died in the Nazi camp. He was just seven years old.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on The town of Lidice

SS Officers walk through the rubble of Lidice. Credit: thehistoryplace.com

In the early summer of 1942, Czech resistance fighters shot and killed Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of the German forces that had invaded their country. In revenge the Nazis attacked the small Czech village of Lidice.

More than 170 men and teenage boys from Lidice were shot. The women of the village were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Every trace of the village was destroyed.

Ninety Czech children were taken to a concentration camp. Those who looked more ‘Aryan’ were then sent to orphanages to be brought up as Germans. The rest of the children were sent to the Nazi death camp of Chelmno, in German-occupied Poland. There they were murdered with exhaust fumes from trucks that had been turned into ‘gas vans’.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Edith Stein

Credit: Corbis Corporation

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. She grew up in a large Jewish family in the German city of Breslau. When she was a young adult, Edith stopped believing in God altogether. But later she became a Christian and, eventually, a Catholic nun.

Although Edith Stein left the Jewish religion and became a Christian, the Nazis still saw her as part of a Jewish ‘race’. The Nazis wrongly believed that human beings were divided into superior and inferior races. were seen not only as the worst human ‘race’, but also as the German people’s most dangerous and deadly enemy.

In 1942, the Christian Edith Stein was deported to Auschwitz- Birkenau as a Jew, and was murdered in a .

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Credit: Vatican website

Sister Teresa Benedicta was a Christian nun who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. She was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1998.

The Vatican declared that Sister Teresa died a Catholic martyr: murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau with 300 other Jewish-born Catholics because Dutch churches had protested against the Nazi regime. The Vatican declared that Sister Theresa died for her beliefs and for her love of Christ.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Selma Zwienicki

Credit: USHMM

On the night of the 9 November 1938, Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked in towns and cities across and Austria.

Almost 100 Jewish people were murdered on this one night of terror. Shop windows were smashed and synagogue buildings were burned. More than 20,000 Jewish men were rounded up that night and forced into concentration camps.

In the town of Bremen, Nazi storm troopers broke into the home of Selma Zwienicki, demanding to know where they could find her husband. When Selma refused to tell them where her husband was, the Nazis shot and murdered her.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Josef Tarantov

Credit: State Historical Museum, Russia

Josef Tarantov was born to a Jewish family in Simferopol, a town in the Crimea. Josef was studying to be a doctor. In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded his country and Josef joined the Soviet Army to fight them.

Josef was captured by the German army and died in 1944 as a prisoner of war.

More than 5 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans and their allies during the Second World War. Some 3.3 million of these prisoners of war were killed.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Credit: State Historical Museum, Russia

Father Piotr Sosnowski

Credit: Institute of National Memory

Polish priest, Father Piotr Sosnowski, moments before his murder by German Security Police, near the city of Tuchola, 27 October 1939.

Credit: Institute of National Memory

Late in 1939, Polish women are led into the Palmiry forest, near Warsaw, and murdered by their German guards.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Mordecai Anielewicz

Credit: Yad Vashem

Mordecai Anielewicz led Jewish fighters who fought back against the Nazis in the uprising of April 1943.

This was the first armed uprising against the Nazis in any town in occupied Europe. It was an act that startled the world and inspired others, Jews and non-Jews, to take up arms against the Nazis.

On 8 May 1943, Mordecai Anielewicz was among a group of about 100 resistance fighters trapped inside an underground hideout. They committed suicide rather than surrendering to the Nazis.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Janusz Korczak

Janusz Korczak (centre), in happier times with some of his pupils before the war. Credit: Ghetto Fighters Museum

Janusz Korczak was a Jewish doctor, teacher and children’s author. Before the war he had a weekly radio programme, giving advice to millions of Polish listeners on how to look after children. Korczak set up two orphanages in the city of Warsaw – one for Jews, the other for Christians – which the children themselves were involved in running.

He started a national newspaper, written by and for young people. Korczak was also the first to write about the ‘Rights of the Child’. In 1940, the Nazis forced Janusz Korczak and the children in his Jewish orphanage to move into the Warsaw ghetto. There Korczak did all he could to shelter his children from the horrors of overcrowding, death and disease that existed all around them.

Despite offers from non-Jewish friends to save him, Korczak refused to leave the children in his care. On a hot summer’s day in August 1942, Janusz Korczak, his staff and some 200 Jewish children were marched from the Warsaw ghetto orphanage to the train that would carry them to the death camp of Treblinka. All were murdered in the gas chambers.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Helene Gotthold

Credit: USHMM

The woman in this family photo, smiling with her children on a summer’s day in 1936, is a German nurse called Helene Gotthold.

One year later after this picture was taken, Helene – then pregnant – was arrested by the Nazis because she was a Jehovah’s Witness. She was beaten so savagely that she had a miscarriage and was then put in prison for 18 months.

In February 1944, Helene was arrested again and imprisoned for a second time. Six months later, the Nazis’ People's Court found Helene and five other Jehovah’s Witnesses guilty for holding illegal Bible meetings and ‘undermining the nation's morale’. For these ‘crimes’ they were all sentenced to death.

Helene was beheaded on a guillotine on 8 December 1944.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Helene Lebel

Credit: USHMM Helene Lebel was a young Catholic woman who lived in the Austrian city of Vienna. When she was 19 years old, Helene began to show the first signs of signs of mental illness. As her condition worsened she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. In 1936 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and went to a psychiatric hospital.

By the time that Nazi Germany joined with Austria two years later, Helene's condition had improved and her parents were told that she would soon be moved to a hospital in a nearby town.

Instead Helene was sent to a former prison in Brandenburg, Germany. There she was undressed, given a physical examination, and told that she would take a shower. But the room that Helene was led to was actually a gas chamber. Helene was one of 9,772 disabled people secretly murdered that year in the Brandenburg ‘euthanasia’ centre.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Settela Steinbach

Still from film: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld und Geluid Credit: Yad Vashem

On 19 May 1944, nine year old Settela Steinbach takes one last look out of a cattle wagon moments before the door is slid shut, bolted and locked, trapping Settela on a train that will take her from the to Auschwitz.

Three days later, Settela – a young Gypsy girl – arrived at the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother. Settela survived in the camp for two and a half months, when she was murdered in a gas chamber with the destruction of the Gypsy camp at the beginning of August 1944.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on The Wolstenholme family

Credit: Sheffield Libraries and Archives

On the night of 13 December 1940, the Wolstenholme family’s home at 38 St Mary’s Road, Sheffield, was bombed by German planes in what was to become known as the Sheffield Blitz.

Harold Wolstenholme, his wife Olive, their teenage daughter Dorothy, two year old Peter, 12 year old Norman, and baby Hazel, just 18 months old, were all killed in the fires that blazed across Sheffield.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Ernst Röhm

Credit: Yad Vashem

Ernst Röhm was a close friend of Hitler’s, fighting with him from the earliest days of the Nazi movement.

Röhm took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, when Hitler first tried to seize power by force but was arrested and imprisoned.

In the 1920s, Röhm built up the Nazis’ private army, the SA or Storm Troopers, who used great violence against the Communists and other opponents of the Nazis.

After Hitler gained power, however, the power of the SA became a problem for Hitler: many ordinary people disliked their violence and lawlessness and the army was worried that the SA posed a threat to their position. As many SA men began to complain that Hitler was not going far enough or fast enough in making Germany a Nazi state, Hitler acted ruthlessly against his own private army.

The SS – Hitler’s personal protection guard – arrested some 200 SA leaders on the night of 30 June 1934. Many of them, including Ernst Röhm, were murdered.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Walther Rathenau

Credit: Public Domain

Walther Rathenau was a well known German Jewish businessman and politician.

He served in the German War Ministry during the First World War and, following Germany’s defeat in 1918, he was appointed Minister of Reconstruction in Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1921.

In 1922 Rathenau became German Foreign Minister.

Hated by Germany’s antisemites, Walther Rathenau was murdered by the far right in June 1922, a violent murder that shocked the country.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Manfred Lewin

Credit: USHMM

This is a signed portrait of Manfred Lewin. During the Nazi period, Manfred lived in very poor conditions with his parents and four brothers and sisters in a cramped apartment in Berlin.

Manfred took part in many Jewish youth groups, and through these activities he met a young man called Gad Beck. Manfred and Gad fell deeply in love and became lovers but were separated when Manfred and his family were arrested.

In November 1942, Manfred was deported with other members of his family to Auschwitz, where he was killed. He was 20 years old.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Robert Ölbermann

Credit: USHMM

Robert Ölbermann was a German imprisoned by the Nazis in 1936 because he was gay. Later Robert was sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he was made to wear a pink triangle on his uniform to mark him out as a homosexual prisoner.

Gay men were hated by many of the other prisoners in the concentration camps, and were often kept in separate barracks. They were treated particularly brutally by the guards. In 1941, Robert Ölbermann died in Dachau concentration camp, aged 44 years old.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on

The Pitel family

Credit: Yad Yashem

This photograph shows 26 members of the Pitel family. It was taken in Parczew, Poland, in 1938, shortly before Yosef Pitel left home to live in Palestine. Yosef is the young man furthest on the right. Before Yosef left, the Pitel family got together for this last family photograph.

The photo shows Yosef Pitel’s parents, Chaim and Ester, with their ten children, three daughters-in-law, one son-in-law and eight grandchildren. Also pictured are Chaim’s 95 year-old father, Leibish Pitel, and Ester’s 70 year-old mother, Sarah Eidelman.

Yosef was the only person in this photograph to survive . The others perished in the Warsaw ghetto or were gassed in the death camp of Treblinka.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Xaver Franz Stützinger

Credit: USHMM

Xaver Franz Stützinger, was an active member of Germany’s Communist Party. Arrested by the Nazis as part of their crushing of political opposition, Stützinger was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.

Although tortured by the SS, Stützinger refused to give them the names of his fellow Communists. He died in Dachau in May 1935.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Roger Bushell

Roger Bushell (left) pictured in a prisoner of war camp with a German guard (centre) and fellow prisoner Paddy Byrne. Credit: Vad Yashem

Roger Bushell was a young man of extraordinary talents: educated at Cambridge University he became a talented lawyer but was also a gifted rugby player and such an excellent skier that a black run at St Moritz, in Switzerland, was named after him.

Bushell flew Spitfires during the war but was shot down and made a prisoner of war in May 1940. He escaped twice but each time was recaptured and was warned that, if he tried to escape again, he would be shot. Ignoring these threats, Roger Bushell became leader of the Escape Committee at Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp and masterminded what became known as the Great Escape – a dar ing plan for a mass escape of as many prisoners as possible, through a long tunnel dug under the wire. On the night of the escape, 24 March 1944, 76 men got through the tunnel before it was discovered. The Nazis launched a huge manhunt and recaptured 73 of the escapees. Fifty of these, including Roger Bushell were then murdered.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Mendel Grossman

Mendel Grossman in his photographic laboratory inside the Lodz ghetto. Credit: Vad Yashem Mendel Grossman worked as a photographer in the Lodz ghetto, taking pictures of the goods produced for the Germans in the ghetto workshops. Secretly, he also recorded life and death in the ghetto.

With his camera hidden in the lining of his coat pocket, Mendel would go out into the streets of the Lodz ghetto, photographing the Jewish people in their suffering and death under the Nazis. He cut holes in his coat pockets to allow him to operate the Credit: Yad Vahsem camera, opening the coat a little to point his lens at his subjects.

In 1944, as the Soviet army advanced, Mendel packed many of his photographic negatives in a wooden crate that he then hid behind a wall beneath a window sill in his apartment, concealing this valuable evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.

Mendel Grossman continued to photograph inside the Lodz ghetto up to its liquidation in September 1944. As the Soviet Army approached, he was deported first to a sub camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, and then – at the end of April 1945, shortly before liberation – he was forced with thousands of other camp inmates to walk many miles, deeper into German territory. Huge numbers died of exhaustion, starvation and shooting as the killing continued into the very last days of the war. Mendel Grossman, still carrying his hidden camera, collapsed and died on this death march. He was 32 years old.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on

Else and Barney Greenman

Credit: Jewish Museum London This family picture shows Leon Greenman, his wife Else, and their little boy Barney in the garden of friends in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. This photo was taken in the summer of 1942. A few months later, in October, the Greenmans – together with Else’s grandmother and many other Jewish people – were rounded up by Dutch police and taken to Westerbork camp, for deportation to ‘the East’. Leon tried to use his English nationality to save the family from deportation. However, Leon had given his identity papers to a friend for safekeeping and this friend – fearful that he would be caught with ‘Jewish documents’ – had burned them, so Leon could not prove his English identity. So, in January 1943, Leon, Else and Barney, together with Else’s grandmother, were among 700 Jewish people forced aboard a train heading for Auschwitz. During their three-day journey East, Leon told Else to marry again if he did not survive the war, but to be careful to choose a husband who would be kind to Barney. Else also told Leon that she wanted him to be happy and that he, too, should marry again if she did not survive, but to choose a wife who would be kind to their son. Neither understood that little Barney was one of the most vulnerable people on the train. Who, after all, would hurt a two-year-old child? When they arrived at Auschwitz, Leon was separated from his wife and child, not knowing – as he kissed them goodbye – that he would never see them again. Leon was chosen for work in the camp. Else and Barney Greenman were led straight to the gas chambers, where they were murdered.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -e duca ti on Joseph Muscha Müller

Credit: USHMM

Joseph was born in Bitterfeld, Germany, a year before Hitler came to power, to Gypsy parents. When he was 18 months old, Joseph was fostered by a family living in Halle, a city some 20 miles from Bitterfeld. Most of the 26,000 Gypsies living in Germany were citizens of the country, but they were often discriminated against by other Germans and their situation became much worse after the Nazis took power. At school, Joseph was often blamed for any of his class’s bad behaviour and was beaten by his teacher. He was also bullied by his classmates, while members of the Hitler youth movement called Joseph a ‘bastard’ and directed racist insults at him. When he was 12 years old, Joseph was taken from his classroom by two strangers who said he had appendicitis and needed immediate surgery. Joseph refused to go but was beaten and taken to a surgery by force where he was given an operation that would prevent him from ever fathering children. After he had recovered from the operation, Joseph was to be sent to the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp. However, his foster father managed to smuggle Joseph out of the hospital before this could happen and took him into hiding. Joseph survived the rest of the war by hiding for five months in a garden shed.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust -education

Robert T. Odeman

Credit: USHMM

Robert T. Odeman was a German actor and musician. A classical pianist, Robert gave concerts throughout Europe until an injury to his hand ended his concert career and he turned to stage acting.

In 1937, after Robert’s boyfriend was pressured by the Gestapo into saying that Robert was homosexual, he was arrested and sentenced to more than two years in prison. Robert was released from prison in 1940 but was banned from certain jobs, was not allowed to perform in public, and was watched closely by the police.

In 1942, Robert was arrested again and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was fortunate to be given an office job. As the Allied armies advanced on Hitler’s Germany and the Nazi forces retreated, inmates of the concentration camps were forced to march deeper into Nazi territory. It was while on one of these forced marches that Robert, then aged 40, managed to escape with two other gay prisoners.

After the war, Robert returned to Berlin, where he worked as a writer and composer. He died in 1985.

ucl.ac.uk/holocaust-education