Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Bergen-Belsen, or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to hold Jews from other concentration camps.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
Herta Bothe was a German concentration camp guard during World War II. She was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and was subsequently released early from prison on 22 December 1951.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew: שארית הפליטה, romanized: Sh'erit ha-Pletah, meaning surviving remnant, and is a term from the Book of Ezra and 1 Chronicles is a Hebrew term for the more than 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons camps after the end of the Holocaust and Second World War, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
A kapo was one of prisoner functionaries, a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Reverend Leslie Henry Hardman MBE HCF was an Orthodox Rabbi and the first Jewish British Army chaplain to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, an experience "that made him a public figure, both within his community and outside it".
Josef Perl was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated twenty years of his life to educating people about the Holocaust. He was born in Czechoslovakia and later lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England. He received more than 30,000 letters from schoolchildren to whom he spoke about his experiences.
International concentration camp committees are organizations composed of former inmates of the various Nazi concentration camps, formed at various times, primarily after the Second World War. Although most survivors have since died and those who are still alive are generally octogenarians, the committees are still active.
Ernst Heinrich Schmidt was a German physician and member of the SS, who practised Nazi medicine in a variety of German concentration camps during World War II. He was tried in 1947 and 1975 for complicity in war crimes, but was acquitted both times.
Berthe Meijer was a Dutch Holocaust survivor and author. In her memoir of her time imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she wrote of knowing Anne Frank, which was corroborated by other camp survivors. She was also a culinary journalist and published a cookbook.
Erich Zoddel was a prisoner functionary at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 1941, Zoddel was sentenced to a year in prison for theft before being transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942. He worked as a forced laborer in the Heinkel factory in Oranienburg until October 1943. In November 1943, after a brief stay at Buchenwald concentration camp, he was taken to Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. On 27 March 1944, Zoddel and 1,000 other prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora arrived at Bergen-Belsen. By January 1945, Zoddel had risen in the ranks to a camp division. On 18 April 1945, after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British army, Zoddel shot a female detainee named Maria Konatkwicz.
Herman Sachnowitz was a Norwegian merchant. He was one of the few Norwegian Jews who survived deportation to a concentration camp.
Jens-Christian Wagner is a German historian who specializes in the Nazi era and the politics of memory. Wagner has published multiple academic books about Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and its subcamps. He was the director of Mittelbau-Dora memorial from 2001, was the chairman of Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, and became the overseer of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in 2020.
Albert Kuntz was a German goldsmith, soldier, communist and concentration camp victim. A soldier in the First World War, Kuntz rose to become an elected representative of the Communist Party of Germany in the Prussian Landtag. In 1933 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to a succession of prisons and concentration camps. He died in January 1945 at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where he had been organizing the sabotage of the V-2 rocket production line. Following his death, he was revered as an anti-fascist hero in East Germany.
Nazi Concentration Camps, also known as Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, is a 1945 American film that documents the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces during World War II. It was produced by the United States from footage captured by military photographers serving in the Allied armies as they advanced into Germany. The film was presented as evidence of Nazi war crimes in the Nuremberg trials in 1945, and the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961.
Ben Stern was a Polish Holocaust survivor, activist, and author.
