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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1944: Desperate Acts |
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pg. 563 |
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The concentration camp at Klooga, Estonia, located in the northern part of the country, was established in 1943. On September 19, 1944, as Soviet forces approached the camp, the Nazis fell back on what was becoming a standard response to imminent liberation: hurried, calculated murder. Inmates were taken in groups into nearby woods and executed. About 2400 of the camp's Jewish inmates and approximately 100 Soviet prisoners of war were killed this way. Among the victims were this pregnant woman and her unborn child.
Photo: National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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When the Red Army liberated the camp on September 28, only 85 inmates were found alive, including the four Russians pictured here.
Photo: Yad Vashem
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An energetic Nazi organizer in the Saar-Palatinate since 1925, Josef Bürckel rose through the ranks to become Gauleiter (Nazi Party leader) for the region. Following the Anschluss (Annexation) of Austria in 1938, Bürckel became Gauleiter of Vienna and Reichstatthalter (governor) of Austria. He worked diligently to further unification with Germany, including promoting anti-Jewish decrees and seizing Jewish property. He died, probably by his own hand, on September 28, 1944.
Photo: Suddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst
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October 1944: At the Stutthof, Germany, concentration camp, executions of Jewish prisoners begin. Initial killings are carried out by assembling inmates with their backs to an infirmary wall with the stated purpose of medical examinations. Slits in the wall behind the heads of each inmate allow a pistol shot to be fired into their brains from the adjoining room.
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October 1944: Some 150 twins, most of them children, remain in Dr. Mengele's medical block at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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October 4, 1944: All women and children on a train traveling from Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, to Auschwitz are gassed upon arrival.
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October 6, 1944: The Red Army enters Hungary.
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October 6-7, 1944: Sonderkommando Jews from Poland, Hungary, and Greece, who are forced to transport gassed corpses to crematoria at Auschwitz, attack SS guards with hammers, stones, picks, crowbars, and axes. They also blow up one of the four crematoria with explosives smuggled into the camp from a nearby munitions factory. Russian POWs throw an SS man alive into a crematorium furnace. The SS fights back with machine guns, hand grenades, and dogs. 250 Jews are shot outside the camp wire. An additional 12 who escape will later be found and executed; See October 9, 1944.
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| 1944: Desperate Acts |
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pg. 563 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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