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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 625 |
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Nazi doctors took unconscionable advantage of the human guinea pigs at their disposal. This woman, a concentration-camp survivor, was the victim of horrific "experimental" operations upon her breasts. Possibly, the doctors were testing a new treatment for cancer or were interested in various aspects of the woman's reproductive system.
Photo: Dokumentationsarchiv des Osterreichischen Widerstandes/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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The chief rabbi of Rome, Dr. David Prato (left), discusses the problems of displaced European Jews in Italy with the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herman Herzog, and a representative of the European headquarters of the American Joint Distribution Committee, Arthur Greenleigh. Although only 40 percent of the displaced persons who migrated to the U.S. after the war were Jews, Americans assumed that Jews comprised the vast majority and, in general, opposed this immigration. But once it became clear that most Jewish displaced persons wanted to go to Israel, American opinion began to favor Jewish emigration from Europe. A blunt analysis of this situation was made by postwar British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin: The Americans were enthusiastic about opening Palestine to the Jews because they didn't want to have many of them in New York.
Photo: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, had attempted to sell Jews to save his own neck during the final months of the war. At the end of the war he was among the most-wanted war criminals in Occupied Germany. He attempted to avoid arrest by shaving his mustache, donning an eyepatch and a Wehrmacht uniform, and traveling under the pseudonym Heinrich Hitzinger. Nonetheless, he was arrested on May 23, 1945, only to commit suicide almost immediately by biting down on a small glass vial of cyanide he had secreted in his mouth.
Photo: AP/Wide World
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May 10, 1945: SS General Richard Glücks, head of the Reich concentration camp inspectorate, is found dead at the Flensburg naval hospital. The cause of death--suicide or murder--is unclear.
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May 10, 1945: German forces in Czechoslovakia surrender.
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May 10, 1945: Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling is arrested; See October 24, 1945.
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May 11, 1945: Josef Terboven, the Reich commissioner for Norway who deported many Norwegian Jews to Germany, commits suicide with dynamite.
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May 19, 1945: Philip Bouhler, Hitler's assistant and supervisor (1939-1941) of "mercy killings" of the hopelessly ill and insane, commits suicide with his wife as American troops attempt to arrest him.
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May 20-27, 1945: Four Polish Jews who return to their hometown of Dzialoszyce are murdered by Poles.
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May 21, 1945: Many liberated survivors continue to live at the Dachau concentration camp.
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May 21, 1945: Odilo Globocnik, SS-Gruppenführer and founder of the death camps at Belzec, Majdanek, and Sobibór, commits suicide shortly after being taken prisoner by the British.
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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 625 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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