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May 30, 1944:

May 27: "Two Jews, Arnost Rosin of Czechoslovakia and Czeslaw Mordowicz of Poland, escape from Auschwitz.
May 28: "In a repeat of an incident of May 25, Jews being led to the gas chamber at Auschwitz run for nearby woods but are shot down.
May 29: "Several thousand Jews from Baja, Hungary, arrive at the German frontier after a 3-1/2-day rail journey; 55 are dead and about 200 are insane.
Late May: "At the Auschwitz rail junction, German soldiers who encounter a sealed deportation train carrying Hungarian Jews to the Birkenau death camp defy threats of SS guards and give water and food to pleading prisoners.
"An SS man who has fallen in love with a Jewish girl manages for months to shunt her away from the gas chambers, but when the romance is discovered both are executed."

"Two children clutch their father's hand while their mother, balancing on crutches, struggles to keep up during the deportation of Jews from the Sighet (Hungary) Ghetto.
From May 16 to 22, 1944, most of the nearly 8,600 Jews who had been crowded into the town's ghetto were deported to Auschwitz.
Among those sent from Sighet to Auschwitz was 14-year-old Elie Wiesel, who would later write of his experiences in Night."

"The little Hungarian town of Köszeg had only 80 Jews when a ghetto was created there on May 11, 1944.
The total population of the ghetto, which incorporated Jews from surrounding towns, was only 103.
This photograph shows the loading of the ghetto's population onto transport trains bound for Auschwitz.
Note the participation of troops from Hungary's Fascist organization, the Arrow Cross, in the deportation.
The organization's members, many of whom were poor and uneducated, participated vigorously in deportations."

Please excuse me for veering off-date. I hope some of you may be able to provide some insight on two artifacts I temporarily have in my possession. They really belong to a friend and neighbor who knows of my interest in the war and is kindly letting me examine them.

They are two photo albums that my friend acquired from a veteran in our town who liberated them from a hotel in Munich when his unit was there in 1945.

They are albums filled with Nazi propaganda photos from 1939 and 1940. In appearance they are well-made photo albums filled with 4" x 6" pictures, mounted on thick paper with onion skin dividers. I understand they were produced in limited quantity for selected recipients. Presumably the hotel where these were found is an example. The albums themselves are about 12 1/4" x 17" in size and quite thick. After looking through part of the 1939 album I estimate they each hold in excess 250 photos. I will post photos of the outer cover, the title page and a sample of photos below. Not remembering much of my high school German I am unable to decipher much of the text but there are two names on the title page, Ernst Braeckow and Prof. Heinrich Hoffman.

So, are any of you familiar with these albums? I should think they have historical value. They would be a great contribution to this project when it is time for WWII + 80 Years, but I don't want to start scanning pictures or otherwise putting the albums at risk before we know more about what my friend has.