December 12, 1942:
- "Jewish prisoners at a labor camp in Lutsk, Ukraine, armed with knives, bricks, iron bars, acid, and several revolvers and sawed-off shotguns, revolt against Germans and Ukrainians.
The uprising is crushed. "
- Kurt Gerstein
"Kurt Gerstein remains an enigma.
A devout Christian with backgrounds in medicine and engineering, he joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
Three years later he was dismissed for anti-Nazi activity and sentenced to a concentration camp.
"After the murder of his sister-in-law during the "euthanasia" program, Gerstein wanted to learn the truth about such killings.
He joined the Waffen-SS in 1941 and studied the effects of Zyklon B. Gerstein became head of the Technical Disinfection Department within the Institute of Hygiene.
"However, when he was ordered to transport killing agent Zyklon B to camps, he witnessed the mass killings of Jews by carbon monoxide at Belzec.
Horrified, Gerstein resolved to tell the world, approaching diplomats, church leaders, and even the papal nuncio in Berlin--but with little success.
"Arrested by the French at the end of the war, Gerstein was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal.
He died mysteriously, probably a suicide but perhaps at the hands of SS officers who feared his testimony."
"The Germans extended their antisemitic policies to the parts of North Africa under their control.
These Tunisian Jews march off to engage in forced labor.
Relatively few North African Jews perished in the Holocaust, however, because the Allies conquered the region before the Nazis had the opportunity to begin a systematic program of extermination."
"Considering their subjects only as research tools, not humans, Nazi medical experimenters put no ethical limits on their activities.
As with the prisoner whose leg is pictured here, some inmates were injected with pus and toxic substances in order to generate infections on which various experimental medicines could be tested.
Nazi researchers also amputated healthy limbs for transplant to soldiers who had been severely wounded.
Few prisoners survived the experiments, either dying immediately or becoming so weakened and ill that they were soon consigned to the gas chambers."
"Proudly posing in the regalia of an SS officer, Max Koegel found his career within the Nazi bureaucracy.
Like many German soldiers after World War I, he had difficulty adjusting to civilian life.
In 1926 Koegel served time in prison for bankruptcy and fraud, and in 1929 his frustrations led him to join the SS.
He served on the staff of the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and progressed from there through a variety of camp positions, including posts as the commandant of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and, beginning in 1942, the Majdanek death camp."