Robin O'Neil | |
---|---|
Occupation | Historian, author |
Notable works | The 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]
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]
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]
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps (Todeslager), or killing centers (Tötungszentren), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps also used extermination through labour in order to kill their prisoners.
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 or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps.
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 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.
The Gerstein Report was written in 1945 by Kurt Gerstein, Obersturmführer of the Waffen-SS, who served as Head of Technical Disinfection Services of the SS in World War II, and in that capacity supplied the hydrogen cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B from Degesch to Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, and conducted the negotiations with the owners. On 18 August 1942, along with Rolf Günther and Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Gerstein witnessed the gassing of some 3,000 Jews in the extermination camp of Belzec in occupied Poland. The report features his eyewitness testimony. It was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.
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.
Operation Reinhard in Kraków, often referred to by its original codename in German as Aktion Krakau, was a major 1942 German Nazi operation against the Jews of Kraków, Poland. It was headed by SS and Police Leader Julian Scherner from the Waffen-SS. The roundup was part of the countrywide Aktion Reinhard, the mass murder of Polish Jews in the so-called General Government under the command of SS und Polizeiführer Odilo Globočnik.
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 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, 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 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 was a Nazi ghetto established in 1941 by the SS in Stanislavov in Western Ukraine. Before 1939, the town was part of the Second Polish Republic. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany incorporated the town into District of Galicia, as the fifth district of the semi-colonial General Government.
Többens and Schultz was a Nazi German textile manufacturing conglomerate making German uniforms, socks and garments in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, during the occupation of Poland in World War II. It was owned and operated by two major war profiteers: Fritz Emil Schultz from Danzig, and a convicted war criminal, Walter C. Többens.
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.
Dr. Richard Korherr was a professional statistician in Nazi Germany, and chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the SS during World War II. Korherr eventually held the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer.
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 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.
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