Robin O'Neil

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Robin O'Neil
OccupationHistorian, author
Notable worksThe Rabka Four (2011)
Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide (2009)

Robin O'Neil is a Holocaust researcher and author. After a career as the British major crimes' investigator who worked on criminal investigations for Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police Service, and London Home Counties Police, he obtained his Masters and Doctorate with the Hebrew and Jewish Department at University College London. He now specialises in researching Nazi war crimes and the destruction of the European Jewish communities (1933–1945). [1]

Contents

Biography

Robin O'Neil has pursued his work to the Baltic States and former USSR. He has launched a number of investigations into the perpetrators of the Holocaust, particularly those active in Lithuania and occupied Poland during World War II. He has conducted research regarding the Schutzstaffel (SS) and extermination camp commandants of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. [2]

O'Neil has performed extensive source research into the Oskar Schindler story. A historical consultant to several TV documentaries and radio broadcasts in the UK and abroad, he is an honoured guest of Schindler's home town, Svitavy, Czech Republic, and is a regular lecturer at universities in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Eastern Europe. In his spare time he conducts research into the House of Habsburg and Shakespeare's England. In 2013, after prolonged research, O'Neil completed his work on a new book about the Gustav Mahler family under the Third Reich. [1] [3]

The Rabka Four

O'Neil's work The Rabka Four - Instruments of Genocide and Grand Larceny. A Warning from History was first published completely online in 2011 by the Yizkor Book Project. [4] It was made available by O'Neil to JewishGen for the purpose of fulfilling their mission of disseminating knowledge about the Holocaust. [5] The monograph is devoted to the history of the German SS training facility at Rabka in occupied Poland where, "under the cloak of war – personal vendetta, corruption, robbery and murder [became] endemic among the SS" functionaries. O'Neil reveals how the euphemistic language spoken within the Nazi State allowed for the sanitization of genocide and the creation of the complete illusion of 'plain speak' in phrases such as 'treatment', 'processing', and 'resettlement' which enabled the SS to turn mass murder into a "bureaucratic paper chase". [6] [7]

Publications

E-book publications

Other work

Related Research Articles

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Belzec extermination camp German extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II

Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution" which in total entailed the murder of about 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.

Operation Reinhard Code name for the creation of German extermination camps in Poland in World War II

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Hermann Höfle

Hermann Julius Höfle, also Hans (or) Hermann Hoefle (, was an Austrian-born SS commander and Holocaust perpetrator during the Nazi era. He was deputy to Odilo Globočnik in the Aktion Reinhard program, serving as his main deportation and extermination expert. Arrested in 1961 in connection with these crimes, Höfle committed suicide by hanging in prison before he was tried.

Christian Wirth

Christian Wirth was a German SS officer and leading Holocaust perpetrator who was one of the primary architects of the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard. His nicknames included Christian the Cruel, Stuka, and The Wild Christian due to the extremity of his behaviour among the SS and Trawniki guards and to the camp inmates and victims.

Gerstein Report Nazi writings on the Holocaust by Kurt Gerstein, 1945

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Rabka-Zdrój Place in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland

Rabka-Zdrój is a spa town in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland. It is located between Kraków and Zakopane in a valley on the northern slopes of the Gorce Mountains, where the rivers Poniczanka and Słonka join the river Raba. It has about 13,000 inhabitants. There is a substantial population of Gorals in the town.

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Hans Krueger

Hans Krueger was a German captain of the Gestapo in occupied Poland during World War II, involved in organizing the string of massacres after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa behind the Curzon Line. His murderous rampage in the General Government territory against the ethnic Poles and the Polish Jews began with the massacre of Lviv professors in July 1941, which was followed by the Czarny Las massacre near Stanisławów in August 1941, as well as the notorious Bloody Sunday massacre of 10,000–12,000 Jews: men, women and children in October 1941, leading to the liquidation of the Stanisławów Ghetto a year later. Krueger was known as the right man for the job due to his Nazi fanaticism which earned him the seat of a city commandant in 1941 but also his brutality exhibited through hands-on participation in the killings.

Heinrich Barbl

Heinrich Barbl was an Austrian-born SS-Rottenführer. He participated in the T-4 euthanasia program in Nazi Germany and, after the invasion of Poland, in Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust.

Poniatowa concentration camp in the town of Poniatowa in occupied Poland, 36 kilometres (22 mi) west of Lublin, was established by the SS in the latter half of 1941, initially to hold Soviet prisoners of war following Operation Barbarossa. By mid-1942, about 20,000 Soviet POWs had perished there from hunger, disease and executions. The camp was known at that time as the Stalag 359 Poniatowa. Afterwards, the Stammlager was redesigned and expanded as a concentration camp to provide slave labour supporting the German war effort, with workshops run by the SS Ostindustrie (Osti) on the grounds of the prewar Polish telecommunications equipment factory founded in the late 1930s. Poniatowa became part of the Majdanek concentration camp system of subcamps in the early autumn of 1943. The wholesale massacre of its mostly Jewish workforce took place during the Aktion Erntefest, thus concluding the Operation Reinhard in General Government.

Szlama Ber Winer

Szlama Ber Winer, nom de guerreYakov (Ya'akov) Grojanowski, was a Polish Jew from Izbica Kujawska, who escaped from the Chełmno extermination camp during the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. Szlamek is sometimes incorrectly referred to as Szlamek Bajler in literature by the surname of his nephew, Abram Bajler, from Zamość (see postcard). Szlama Ber Winer escaped from the Waldlager work commando at Chełmno, and described in writing the atrocities he witnessed at that extermination camp, not long before his own subsequent murder at the age of 30, in the gas chambers of Bełżec. His deposition is commonly known as the Grojanowski Report.

Rudolf Reder Holocaust survivor

Rudolf Reder a.k.a. Roman Robak was one of only two Holocaust survivors of the Bełżec extermination camp who testified about his experience after the war. He submitted a deposition to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in January 1946 in Kraków. In terms of the number of Polish Jews who perished in its gas chambers, Bełżec had the third highest death toll among the six Nazi death camps located in occupied Poland, estimated between 500,000 and 600,000 men, women and children. Only Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka had a higher victim count.

Stanisławów Ghetto

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<i>Többens and Schultz</i> Nazi Germany textile company

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Yizkor books

Yizkor books are memorial books commemorating a Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust. The books are published by former residents or landsmanshaft societies as remembrances of homes, people and ways of life lost during World War II. Yizkor books usually focus on a town but may include sections on neighboring smaller communities.

Richard Korherr

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Nowy Sącz Ghetto

The Nowy Sącz Ghetto known in German as Ghetto von Neu-Sandez and in Yiddish as צאנז or נײ-סאנץ was a World War II ghetto set up by Nazi Germany for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of Polish Jews in the city of Nowy Sącz pronounced [ˈnɔvɨ ˈsɔnt͡ʂ] during the occupation of Poland (1939–45).

Sambor Ghetto

Sambor Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established in March 1942 by the SS in Sambir, Western Ukraine. In the interwar period, the town (Sambor) was part of the Second Polish Republic. In 1941, the Germans captured the town at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. According to the Polish census of 1931, Jews constituted nearly 29 percent of the town's inhabitants, most of whom were murdered during the Holocaust. Sambor (Sambir) is not to be confused with the much smaller Old Sambor located close by, although their Jewish history is inextricably linked together.

References

  1. 1 2 Steve Farrar (1 September 2000), "A detective who retraced steps on the road to hell". Times Higher Education. TES Global. Retrieved 13 May 2015.
  2. L.A. (14 June 2009). "Biography of the Author". A Reassessment: Resettlement Transports to Belzec, March–December 1942 by Robin O'Neil. JewishGen, the Yizkor Book Project. Retrieved 13 May 2015.
  3. Robin O’Neil (2013). "The Mahler Family: In the Rise & Fall of the Third Reich" (PDF). p. 728 of 828 in PDF. ISBN   978-1-909874-73-2.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Lance Ackerfeld. "Yizkor Book Update". Rabka Four - Instruments of Genocide and Grand Larceny by Robin O'Neil. The Yizkor Book Project.
  5. Lance Ackerfeld, Yizkor Book Project Manager (25 July 2012). "The Rabka Four. Instruments of Genocide and Grand Larceny (Poland)". Robin O'Neil has kindly donated this original book to JewishGen for online presentation.
  6. Robin O'Neil. Note on Language. The Rabka Four. London: Spiderwize. p. xxv.
  7. Note from the publisher (2013). "Books by Robin O'Neil". The Rabka Four: A Warning from History - Robin O'Neil. Diadembooks.