Major Crimes and True Crime

Fred Flatow was just ten years old when Nazis burned down his synagogue in Königsberg, Germany, during the violent riot known as Kristallnacht—the "Night of Broken Glass”—in November 1938. Kristallnacht was the culmination of anti-Jewish harassment and violence that followed Fred throughout his childhood. Just a few years before, Fred had been subjected to antisemitic bullying by his non-Jewish classmates at a German public school. The synagogue became a refuge for Fred after he transferred to a Jewish school there. After Kristallnacht, Fred squeezed through a hole in the fence next to the destroyed synagogue and visited the ruins.  “Why I went [back], I cannot recall,” Fred reflected. “It was maybe to say goodbye to the synagogue that had been such a home to us … . One day when I was in there, I found a small children's Torah.” In the summer of 1939, Fred’s father, Erich, had a close call: one of his employees framed and denounced him to Gestapo. The Gestapo officer gave Eric...

Irene Meyer was born in Paderborn, Germany, on July 31, 1925. She was Jewish, the daughter of Henriette and Julius Meyer. She had a little sister, Ellen.  In 1942, Irene and her family were deported to the Terezín camp in Czechoslovakia. They were held there for two years. On October 9, 1944, the family was sent to Auschwitz. Irene’s parents and little sister were sent directly to the gas chamber after they arrived in the camp.  Irene, however, was selected for forced labor in the camp. She was only in Auschwitz for a short time, and soon she was sent to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Once again, she was there for a short time. She was then sent to the Buchenwald camp, and from Buchenwald, she was sent to Bergen-Belsen.  Irene fell ill with typhus in Bergen-Belsen, but survived long enough to see the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945. Irene, an orphan at age nineteen, was completely alone after liberation. She was extremely weak from her time in the camps, and neve...

American tank commander George Gross encountered “an outburst of pure, almost hysterical relief” from an abandoned trainload of Jewish prisoners found near Farsleben, Germany, at the end of the war.  #OnThisDay in 1945, two US Army units came across a train carrying 2,500 Jewish prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Nazi officers guarding the train fled when they saw American vehicles, leaving the passengers locked inside the train.  As American soldiers opened the doors, Gross remembered the prisoners looked like “skeletons.” They had been starved in Bergen-Belsen for months and spent days in the train with inadequate food, water, and sanitation. SS officers were transporting the prisoners from Bergen-Belsen to the Theresienstadt ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia to prevent the prisoners from being liberated. The officers had orders to blow up the train if it could not reach its destination.  Upon encountering the train, one of George’s fellow soldiers cal...