September 30, 1943:
- September 29: "More than 320 Jews and Soviet POWs on work detail at the Babi Yar, Ukraine, mass-murder site attempt a mass escape.
Nearly all are shot down almost immediately, but about 14 find hiding places; See November 6, 1943. - September 30: "The Krupp arms factory at Mariupol, Ukraine, is dismantled and relocated west to Fünfteichen, Silesia, Poland, where it is staffed by Jewish slave laborers.
- September 1943-April 1944: "Jewish slave laborers exhume at least 68,000 corpses of murdered Jews and Soviet POWs at the Ponary, Lithuania, killing ground, near Vilna; See April 15, 1944."
"The Jewish Agency, established by the League of Nations in the 1920s, published material on the "Massacre of a People" in the Jewish Frontier in October 1943.
The Jewish Agency brought orphans to Palestine, advocated bombing railways leading to Auschwitz, and urged the Allies to save Jews from concentration camps."
October 1, 1943:
- Autumn 1943: "Technicians representing Topf and Sons, the German manufacturer/installer of crematoria furnaces at Auschwitz- Birkenau, study the combustibility of corpses mated to various grades of coke.
- "British and American bombing of Germany, most notably the heavily industrialized Ruhr region, increases in intensity.
- "Jews in Wlodawa, Poland, attack the Turno Estate, a onetime Jewish farm that has since fallen into German hands.
The Jews set the buildings on the estate ablaze.
A Jew named Yankel, who has lived in a hole in the floor of the estate's barn for about a year, dies just hours after being taken to safety by the attacking Jews. - October 1943: "The Jewish ghetto at Chernovtsy, Romania, is liquidated.
- "SS chief Heinrich Himmler delivers a speech at a "Final Solution" conference.
- "Just before their murders, several Jewish women use their bare hands to attack SS troops at Auschwitz. "
"A Swiss volunteer named Abbe Gross (left) reaches through a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gurs transit camp to share a cigarette with a prisoner.
Located in the Pyrenées region of France, Gurs was a makeshift detention center that held thousands of Jews before they were deported to Auschwitz.
Flimsy shelters, dirt roads that turned to mud when it rained, and starvation rations made for extremely unpleasant conditions for those imprisoned at Gurs."
- Sexual Abuse in Camps
"Sexual abuse in the camps took many forms. Barbaric medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors robbed men and women of their sexual organs.
At Auschwitz, women spared from the gas chambers upon arrival were forced to parade their nakedness in the showers before leering SS guards, who delighted in poking their breasts.
"Within the camps, rumors abounded that attractive young women were forced into brothels.
At Buchenwald, some political prisoners, known for their ethical and religious principles, were compelled by the SS to visit the camp brothel, populated by non-Jewish "volunteers" from the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Irma Grese, the sadistic SS supervisor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was rumored to have had homosexual relations with prisoners whom she then sent to the gas chambers.
To save their lives, starving women at Birkenau sometimes bartered sex for food from male prisoners.
"While Nazi racial ideology prohibited relations between Jews and "Aryans," there were some instances of rape.
The Nazis, though, were not the only ones who committed sexual abuse.
Buchenwald survivors report that Polish and Russian boys, some as young as 12, were forced into homosexual acts by sexually rapacious prisoners.
Victims of sexual abuse have largely kept silent, leaving this aspect of camp life shrouded in ambiguity."