I have met a few Germans, young and old.
A protestant German cousin, now dead, when I was her guest sometime in 1963, switched off the television in front of me when a performance by Yehudi Menuhin was announced, saying, "I will not have Jews in my house." She was angry, too, that a Jew had bought the house opposite hers. Her vitriolic anti-Jewishness was non-stop.
The German Ambassador, at a Conservative Party German Euro Evening function in London, when someone remarked that we had too many chairs round the table, merrily quipped,
"Line them up against the wall! After all this is a German evening."
Sensitive fellow. There was at least one Jew, and a Polish refugee present.
A young German male, aged about 30 and working as an executive in a Polish company, told me seven years ago, "The word 'Slav' is derived from 'slave', because Slavs are the natural slaves of the teutonic races." I corrected him, in charity, pointing out that 'Slav" is derived from a Slavonic word cognate with 'sławny' - 'famous'. He did not seem impressed.
It is worth Googling Erika Steinbach, about whom more later.
In what was once Communist Germany, neo-nazism is now reportedly rife, and non-Germans who work there need to be careful at night.
These pictures, I think, speak for themselves. I shall perhaps add more later, in a further post with some explanatory text, when I feel able. It is worth pointing out that they were taken by German soldiers.
As for those depicted, dead or about to die, some of whose Polish contemporaries, a mere 15 years older than I, are my friends, I daily offer prayers. Perhaps you will, too, not only for Poles, but for all those who, in some of our lifetimes or earlier, were torn unprepared from their daily lives and murdered.
German soldiers on 1st September 1939 in Gdańsk, happily demolishing a Polish barrier.
German soldiers and the Polish farmers they have murdered. R.I.P.
Polish civilian hostages, selected at random, women included, boarding a bus at gunpoint, to be driven away to be murdered in the forest. Perhaps they are disembarking. They may have been shopping, waiting for a bus, at Mass, at a wedding. They were arrested, driven to the forest, and shot, (R.I.P.) 100 for every German killed.
Murder of Polish Hostages R.I.P.
The master-race: 'selbstschutz' leaders in Bydgoszcz
Murder of Zoya_Kosmodemyanskaya R.I.P.
Two teenage Jews, brother and sister are hanged in Lithuania. R.I.P.
Murder of Masha Bruskina R.I.P.
Hanging of Soviet Partisans R.I.P.
Street execution of Poles in Łodż R.I.P.
Polish teachers being led to execution at Dolina Śmierci (the Valley of Death) R.I.P.
Found on Wikipedia, the photographs are, I believe, in the public domain.
The gas chamber at Sztutuowo, disguised as showers, so the condemned would not make a fuss.
The following is well documented
Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in
Poland. Excerpts from: German Crimes in Poland. Howard Fertig, New York,
1982.
II. Crimes at the Radium Institute Hospital
Record No. 45 / II
Between ten and eleven o’clock on the
morning of August 5, 1944, numerous military formations were seen approaching
from the direction of the houses of Wawelska Street. Soon afterwards about a
hundred soldiers in German uniforms, belonging to Vlassov’s detachment (ROA),
rushed into the building of the Radium Institute, shouting and shooting at
random.
That gang of drunken soldiers, having first secured the
exits, began searching and plundering. There were at the time about 90 patients
and 80 members of the staff with their families in the building. They were
robbed by the soldiers of all their jewels, watches, and money and even of such
trifles as fountain-pens, automatic lighters, or pocket mirrors. The fact that
the institution was a hospital, which was explained to the soldiers and was in
any case obvious owing to the presence of the patients and the staff in their
white coats, left the soldiers indifferent.
After having been robbed, the whole staff were driven by
threat of machine-gun-fire into the hospital garden, where the stage was set
for an execution.
Amid insulting and threatening shouts and shots fired in
all directions, the victims were lined up in rows of three and forbidden to
look round; and then an order was given to set up machine guns in their rear.
The husband of one of the patients, who slightly
transgressed against the above-mentioned order, was killed on the spot by a
revolver shot.
The whole party were then led in this order from the
hospital garden across the Mokotow field and along streets in which lay dead
bodies with skulls split open, to a camp at 'Zieleniak'. There they were kept
for four days and nights in the open air, without food or water. Time and again
women were assaulted, dragged out and violated by the drunken soldiers. Some of
the Staff of the Institute were then transported via Pruszkow to Germany.
Others succeeded in escaping from the transport and stayed in the vicinity of
Warsaw.
We must here mention the fact that when the Hospital Staff
were taken straight from their work, dressed very lightly, mostly in their
white coats, they were not allowed to take anything with them, and if anybody
happened to be carrying a parcel oar a small suitcase, it was immediately taken
from him.
About 90 patients confined to bed remained in the hospital,
and 9 members of the staff had hidden in the chimney flues, and thus avoided
expulsion.
That same day the plundering and demolishing of the
buildings was begun. Doors were broken down, stores, cupboards, safes and
suitcases were broken open, and glass was smashed. All the mattresses, pillows,
blankets, and linen were ripped up and thrown about in the corridors and wards
of the hospital. The ether and spirits were drunk and the store-rooms emptied.
More valuable things (clothing, linen, dresses, or silver)
were stolen or thrown out of the windows and destroyed. Female patients were
assaulted and violated.
On the next day, August 6, 1944, the barbarity of the
drunken soldiers reached its climax. Some of the seriously sick and wounded,
lying on the ground floor (about 15 in number), were killed with revolver
shots, after which their mattresses were set on fire under their dead bodies.
As not all the shots hit their mark, and those that did were not always fatal,
some women who were too weak and ill to move were burnt alive. Only one of
them, although badly burned and very weak, dragged herself out of bed and
crawling on all fours escaped immediate death.
While these atrocities were going on, petrol was poured on
the floors and the Institute was set on fire, all the exits having first been
covered by machine-guns. In spite of this three women (an X-ray assistant, a
nurse and a patient) managed to slip out of the building. Two of them were
caught, and after having been violated many times by the soldiers were brutally
murdered. Their common grave has been found in the hospital garden, where they
were buried by those who were forced to dig trenches.
The remaining patients, on the upper floors, over 70 in
number, and seven members of the staff who had managed to hide themselves,
remained in the burning building, making desperate efforts to find some place
where they could hold out against the suffocating smoke and burning heat of the
fire. That day the unfortunate victims saved their lives for the moment, thanks
to the fact that the Institute was burning comparatively slowly, owing to the
absence of any great quantity of inflammable material and to the existence of
fire-proof parquet floors. But later all the patients and one nurse were
killed.
No less terrible were the scenes which took place in the
science building of the Institute. It is true that the inmates were taken to
the 'Zieleniak' camp, but the building was set on fire and the people from the
adjacent building (belonging to the Navy) were brought there. The women and
children were separated from the men, who were driven into the burning building
under the threat of machine-gun-fire. In this way eleven men perished in the
presence of their families.
After committing these revolting atrocities, the soldiers
left the Institute for a while. The 70 patients and the 7 members of the staff
still remained in the building. The nurses stealthily cooked hot food for the
patients at night and looked after them. Between August 6 and 9 Vlassov’s men
returned from time to time to the hospital, and took away girls of 13 or 14,
whom they violated and then killed in the garden. They repeatedly carried out
executions in the grounds of the Institute, after driving their victims to the
spot from the city, and sometimes they set fire to the building again.
Meanwhile the German soldiers also came with cans and
carried away all the valuable objects from the hospital, such as X-ray
apparatus, laboratory outfits, or furniture.
When begged by members of the staff still remaining in the
building to transfer them to a safer place, they answered that they could not
do so.
On August 19, Vlassov’s men came back again and the final
destruction of the Hospital began. The few members of the staff were ordered to
leave the Institute and to take out all the patients. Among the latter were
three women very seriously ill, who could not even walk. One of them was
carried out into the garden by a woman member of the staff, who however, did
not succeed in saving the other two, for a soldier rushed up and shot them, and
then poured petrol over their bodies, which he set on fire. One of them was the
woman mentioned above, who on August 8 had crawled from her burning bed and so
saved her life — but only for a fortnight.
When everybody had left, the building was set on fire: 2
members of the staff had not obeyed the order and were still hiding in a
chimney.
When the soldiers noticed in the procession a very sick
woman, staggering and helped along by the others (it was the one who had been
carried out by a member of the staff), they ordered her to be laid down near
the wall of 19, Wawelska Street, where one of them shot her, and then set fire
to the body.
In the 'Zieleniak' camp only 4 members of the Staff
survived. The remainder, about 70 patients and one nurse, were drawn up three
deep, and marched into the Health Centre Building, where an officer was waiting
for them and shot them through the head. Their dead bodies, — indeed probably
some were still alive — were piled up in the execution room, sprinkled with
petrol, and set on fire. In this way, all the patients at the Radium Institute
were massacred.
Of the 9 members of the staff who remained in the building
after August 5, 1944, two nurses were murdered (one of them after having been
violated many times), one woman employee escaped from the burning building and
was saved, four were taken to the "Zieleniak', and two stayed hidden in
the chimney flues for a couple of months. They left as late as October 1944. In
this report of indescribable German atrocities, the following two points should
be stressed: 1) that the inmates of the Radium Institute had not by their
behaviour given any cause whatever for reprisals, 2) that the terrible crimes
perpetrated by Vlassov’s men were carried out by order of the German
authorities to whom they were subordinated, and who knew of their barbarity.
That the action was planned and premeditated by the German
commanding is proved also by the following circumstances: 1) that Vlassov’s men
were purposely given drink before marching on the city, 2) that one of the
murderers stated on August 5 in the Institute: "The building won’t be
burnt to-day, for we haven’t any orders yet", and 3) that the German Chief
of Hospital and Ambulance Services in the Warsaw sector, Captain Borman,
declared to a doctor, who begged him to intervene in the matter of the Radium
Institute: "It is of no importance if several old women with cancer perish
— the most important thing is to win the war."
