A German historian has stumbled upon a series of sad photographs secretly taken of Jewish families expelled from their homes by the Nazi regime during the early stages of the Holocaust.
13 photos taken over 80 years ago Revealing one of the most sinister points in historyhow henchmen of the Third Reich forced Jewish families and community members in the Silesian city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) to gather outside a restaurant near the train station for deportation. It shows.
Surrounded by armed members of the Gestapo (a secret police force that ruthlessly investigated and exterminated enemies of the state during the Nazi Party’s rule), defenseless civilians with piles of luggage had no idea what awaited them. Ta.
“They look very calm. It’s clear they didn’t know they were about to be killed,” said Steffen Heydrich, a historian who recognized the photo. observer last month.
“This was pretty early in the history of deportation, so they obviously didn’t expect it.”
Almost all of the people in the photo were taken by SS leaders during a shooting spree in Lithuania in November 1941, and were only a few years old after being commanded by Heinrich Himmler’s mobile murder squad, the Einsatzgruppen, during the Holocaust. He is believed to have been killed a day later, while the others are believed to have been killed. It is believed that he was later killed in Poland in April 1942. document show.
On November 21, 1941, more than 1,000 Breslau residents were captured by Gestapo members, inhumanly stuffed onto trains for four days, and deported to Kaunas Fortress No. 9 in Kovno, Lithuania.
Once they arrive, members of Einsatzgruppe A will be ordered to kill the exiles, following orders relayed to them by Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect and one of the overseers of the Final Solution. .
The murder would be carried out by a subgroup of the mobile murder force Einsatzkommando 3 under the command of Karl Jaeger.
the Estimation Between 45,000 and 50,000 Jews were killed in the fort.
On April 9, 1942, nearly 1,000 Jews were rounded up outside the same restaurant and then deported by train to Izbika. Izbika is a ghetto in eastern Poland with a death rate similar to the infamous Warsaw ghetto.
According to the Observer, two people on board the transport vessel survived.
Heydrich discovered the photographs in an archive in Dresden, Germany, while working with fellow researchers to catalog a large archive.
“When I first held these photos in my hands, it was a shocking moment,” Heydrich told the magazine.
“It was obvious that they were the sites of deportations. I Googled the name of the restaurant to confirm the location. The other photos were mostly in very poor condition and showed Jewish life in the DDR. It was a depiction of. [the former East Germany]or Jewish life in Dresden before the Shoah [Holocaust]So it was unexpected to find scenes of deportation there. ”
The historian, along with other researchers at the Free University of Berlin, hopes that a series of published photographs will help surviving friends and young relatives recognize some of those who were taken from their lives and killed by the Nazis. I hope that it will become.
Alina Bothe, the university’s project director, believes the photos were secretly taken by an architect named Albert Hadda through a wall or car window while in exile.
“The accidental and sensational discovery of the archives has brought a new perspective to the deportation of the persecuted Jews in Breslau,” she told Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month.
Hadda, herself a Jew, was deported to a forced labor camp in 1944, but fled to Breslau, where she hid until liberation by the Soviet Union.
After the war, Hadda lived in Frankfurt and worked for Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, before moving to Israel.
More than 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, one-third of the world’s Jewish population.
It is estimated that more than 2 million of those killed were carried out by members of the Third Reich Einsatzgruppe. This is commonly referred to as the “bullet holocaust” before and during the creation of the death camps.
Approximately 1.3 million Jews living under Nazi rule or in Germany’s allies survived to see the end of the war.
The image was shared last month by the international research project #LastSeen, which released the photo as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. on the website as a stark reminder of the terror orchestrated by the Nazi regime.
If you recognize a person from the photo, we encourage you to contact the project via email on the website.
