Skip to contentGerman concentration Camps, Treblinka AuschwitzMenuHomeWhy this site?Historical BackgroundVignettesAftermathStories of the ShoahCompiled byContactSearch for:A compilation of Nazi crimes by witnesses, victims, historians and perpetrators taken from hundreds of sources.(Scroll down to begin.)​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“The ghettos were dissolved in 1943 at the latest.  Of course, many died before it came to that, including my grandparents who were both 80 years old.  After being unloaded in Lublin, all of them were forced to run.  Naturally there was no way my 80-year-old grandmother could keep up and they beat her until she couldn’t get up anymore.  She was the first to die.  My grandfather died of natural causes the very next night.”VOICES FROM THE THIRD REICHSteinhoff, Pechel and ShowalterHas anyone ever confessed to you or to one of your fellow priests any atrocities they took part in during the extermination process?“No, I can’t think of anyone…though yes, there was one situation, though I’m not sure it’s exactly what you’re looking for. A man came to me shortly before he died. In his confession he told me that in all the years since it had happened, the brown eyes of a six-year-old girl had given him no peace. He had been in the Wehrmacht, he was serving in Warsaw at the time of the uprising in the ghetto. They had been ordered to clear out the bunkers, and one morning a six-year-old girl came running towards him out of one of these bunkers, her arms outstretched. He still remembered the look in her eyes, terrified and full of trust at the same time. Then his NCO ordered him to bayonet her, which he did. He killed her. But the look in her eyes haunted him for the rest of his life.”MY FATHER’S KEEPERStephan and Norbert Lebert“When on the way we stayed in a barn for the night, a large number of dead women lay in the barn. One woman screamed that she was freezing. This SS man ordered the woman to lie down on the corpses, saying, “Now you will be warm.” He beat the victim so long until she expired.”HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERSDaniel Jonah GoldhagenIn Daugavpils, the second-largest city in Latvia, southeast of Riga and approximately equidistant from Riga, Kaunas and Minsk, Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann of Einsatzkommando 3 directed massacres during August 1941that ended more than nine thousand lives…Among the murdered were four hundred children from a Daugavpils orphanage trucked to a military training ground and shot. At a dinner party later in the war, Viktors Arajs would explain why his experienced killers often threw children up into the air to shoot them: not because of a boyish exuberance, he said, but because the bullets often passed completely through the children’s bodies, so that shooting children on the floor or the street risked dangerous ricochets.MASTERS OF DEATHRichard Rhodes“Do you know what it means – to kill Jews, men, women, and children as they stand in a semicircle around the