By Keyword:   Chapter PROLOGUE 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 EPILOGUE Or, Page Number: Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.		1943: Death and Resistance  pg. 503    This December 1943 photograph shows Bosnian SS volunteers, called Handoza. These troopers are standing at attention, looking professional--if not as intimidating as their German counterparts. The uniform of each is adorned with the swastika, German eagle, and SS Totenkopf (Death's Head). Photo: Bundesarchiv Edward R. Murrow was a distinguished American war correspondent with CBS radio who reported on Germany's extermination policy against Jews. Murrow had already brought reliable and dramatic eyewitness reports to America of German events: the prewar occupation of Austria, the Munich Conference, the German takeover of Czechoslovakia, and the wartime Battle of Britain. His courageous reporting was an exception to the American media's often cynical reaction to Holocaust reports. Photo: University of Southern California The Nazi propaganda effort stretched beyond the shores of Europe to America. Allegedly broadcasting from Iowa, the Nazi radio station "Station Debunk" urged pacificism and condemned the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. To build public support for the American war effort, well-known writers and broadcasters joined forces against Axis propaganda. Rex Stout (pictured), best known as the author of the Nero Wolfe detective stories, hosted the CBS radio program The Secret Weapon and served as spokesman for The Voice of Freedom. Photo: AP / Wide World Photo / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive The Ninth Fort was a prison and killing site in Kovno, Lithuania, where at least 9000 Jews were murdered by Germans and Lithuanians in October 1941. This young Jewish man, Abe Diskont, was one of 64 prisoners who escaped from the Ninth Fort on Christmas Eve, 1943. He later joined partisans and died in battle against the Germans in 1944. Photo: Eliezer Zilberis / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive  December 24, 1943: Of 64 Jews who escape the Ninth Fort near Kovno, Lithuania, 32 are quickly recaptured, five are shot down, and eight more are captured near the Kovno Ghetto. Nineteen enter the ghetto, but one, Rabbi Gabriel Shusterman, dies of frostbite.  December 24, 1943: At Borki, Poland, 60 Jews working on an exhumation squad attempt to escape through a tunnel, but few of them are successful.  December 25, 1943: Trucks carrying naked Jewish women make regular trips to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Any woman who leaps from a truck is immediately shot down.  Late 1943: SS chief Heinrich Himmler orders that the extermination camp at Belzec be razed, as has been done at the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. At all three camps, the land is to be plowed under and settled by Ukrainians.   1943: Death and Resistance  pg. 503  The Holocaust Chronicle © 2009 Publications International, Ltd.