A firing squad of the Einsatzgruppen, the German’s mobile killing squads of the East whose preferred methods of eradication were typically shootings, shooting Soviet Jewish women in an open pit near Dubossary, Transnistraia, in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The Einsatzgruppen was the Reich’s first answer to the question of how to permanently handle the untermensch in the East and were the first to handle mass killings of Jews. They were responsible for killing 1,000,000 people and the massacres of Babi Yar and Rumbula.

(Source: iwm.org.uk)

October 04, 2012, 1:35am / 24

With Tattoos, Young Israelis Bear Holocaust Scars of Relatives

JERUSALEM — When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.

Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.

“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”

Mr. Diamant’s descendants are among a handful of children and grandchildren of Auschwitz survivors here who have taken the step of memorializing the darkest days of history on their own bodies. With the number of survivors here dropping to about 200,000 from 400,000 a decade ago, institutions and individuals are grappling with how best to remember the Holocaust — so integral to Israel’s founding and identity — after those who lived it are gone.

October 02, 2012, 5:35pm / 32

German SS Dr. Sigmund Rascher (center) and Professor Ernst Holzlöhner (left) conduct a cold water immersion experiment with a Dachau prisoner wearing an experimental exposure suit planned for Luftwaffe use.

Rascher was known for his high altitude experiments, freezing experiments (one such of these seen here), and his blood coagulation experiments, all of which he tested on inmates of the Reich concentration camp system.

Despite these ghastly experiments, Rascher wasn’t tried at Nuremberg with the Nazi scientists—he was executed in Dachau shortly before its liberation by American forces after being accused (and assumed guilty) by his superiors of financial fraud, scientific fraud, and the murder of one of his assistants. And because his wife was party to his scientific fraud (and the fact that she tried to kidnap a child) Mrs. Rascher was hanged somewhere in the Dachau camp area.

September 27, 2012, 3:57pm / 19

Two Jewish children waiting for deportation from Palestine, December 1946

September 27, 2012, 12:56pm / 139

Irma Grese, the “Mass Murderess” of Bergen-Belsen, during the Belsen Trial.

As the Allies argued in their case—don’t let her appearance deceive you, Irma Grese was a woman with a streak of cruelty wider than the state of Texas.

According to inmate testimony, Grese was fond of whipping inmates and was said to never have been without her boots, whip, or pistol at anytime. Witnesses say that Grese was inclined not only to go for the weak and sickly inmates, but purposely targeted inmates that she believed had “retained vestiges of their former beauty”. Fond of physical and emotional torture, Grese hand selected those for the gas chamber while at Bergen-Belsen as the women warden, and was said to have delighted in shooting prisoners in cold blood.

Her trial took 53 days, and when the verdict was read she was found guilty.

Irma Grese was executed on 13 December 1946 at 22 years of age, making her the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the 20th century.

September 27, 2012, 1:39am / 117