Major Crimes and True Crime

Joseph and Lotte Isenberg were desperate to escape the Nazis when they agreed to become farmers in the Caribbean, leaving the comforts of Luxembourg behind. The Jewish couple found refuge in the Dominican Republic as a result of the Evian Conference, which began #OnThisDay in 1938. The Evian Conference hoped to address the growing refugee problem in Nazi-controlled Europe. However, of the 32 countries in attendance, only the Dominican Republic agreed to expand immigration quotas to accept more Jewish refugees. The country welcomed 645 Jewish refugees, but the offer had not solely been a humanitarian one. The dictator General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina wanted to improve his reputation following his government's massacre of Black Haitians in 1937 and to bring more white people to his country, whom he assumed would be wealthy.  Joseph and Lotte settled in Sosuá, where the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had established a Jewish agricultural settlement. While the sett...

Henia Lewin was just a toddler when her parents placed her in a suitcase and smuggled her out of the Kovno ghetto. After Nazi Germany invaded their hometown in summer 1941, Henia and her parents were forced into the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto in Lithuania. Meanwhile, German authorities and their Lithuanian collaborators began to carry out mass killings of Jews. Henia's parents faced a difficult choice—try to get Henia out or stay together. As regular mass killings continued, her parents made their decision—Henia was sedated and successfully smuggled out of the ghetto. Henia's mother saved many other children this way too. For the next two years, Henia lived with a Lithuanian family. After the war, she was reunited with her parents, who had escaped the ghetto and survived the Holocaust in hiding.  Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Henia Wisgardisky Lewin.  Continue reading

Samuel Willenberg set out to destroy the Treblinka killing center. But could he succeed?   Samuel and other Jewish prisoners seized what weapons they could find at Treblinka #OnThisDay in 1943. They attacked the guards and set buildings on fire, but their revolt didn't go as planned. In the confusion, hundreds of prisoners stormed the main gate.  Dodging gunfire, Samuel miraculously escaped. He was one of the very few survivors from Treblinka—925,000 Jews were killed there, most in the gas chambers. While Samuel didn't destroy Treblinka, he kept fighting the Nazis and shared his story with the world. He was the last known living survivor of the revolt when he died in 2016. Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Shmuel and Ada Willenberg.  Continue reading

The biographies of over 200 SS women serving at Auschwitz death camp and their 'after work parties' have been published online in an effort to show the world that it wasn't just men involved. Entitled 'Women working for the SS', the project from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum documents the women's lives from birth and how they ended up serving Adolf Hitler. One of the women was Maria Mandl, a senior SS guard in Auschwitz from October 1942 to October 1944 who was nicknamed 'The Beast' by prisoners Born in 1912 the daughter of a shoemaker, she first started work in a Nazi concentration camp in Lichtenburg  Germany  in 1938 before being transferred to the camp for women in Ravensbruk, also in Germany. In 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz where she became infamous for her sadism and sending 'an estimated half a million women and children to their deaths in the gas chambers.' In 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz where she became infamous for her sadism...

Edith Cavell died at dawn on 12 October 1915 at Tir National firing range, Brussels. Her statue, near Trafalgar Square, London, England, bears the words she spoke the night before her death; ‘Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’ There are few statues of non-royal women in the country and the fact that there is one of Edith, and in such a prominent position, demonstrates the impact her death had during wartime. Her sacrifice for others radiated the calibre of a woman who not only nursed allies and enemies alike but also helped around 200 allied soldiers escape war-torn Belgium.   Edith Cavell was born on 4 December 1865 and was a rector’s daughter from Swardeston, near Norwich, England. She had worked as a governess in Belgium before deciding to train as a nurse in London. She then worked in several English city hospitals before accepting the post of matron at Belgium’s first training hospital and nursing school. She was at the vanguard of ...

Faces of Evil: Female Concentration Camp Guards Up until 1942, guards at concentrations camps within Adolf Hitler’s Empire were primarily male. That all changed in 1942 when the first female guards were appointed to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Eventually, there were more than 3,500 female concentration camp guards, a small portion of the nearly 55,000 guards who served in the concentration camps in total. The women who filled these roles often had no relevant work experience and were often former teachers, hairdressers and other female positions of the time. At first, women signed up on their own, but that later changed.  As time passed, women were recruited from newspaper ads that asked them to show their spirit for Hitler’s empire. Guard tower and fences at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The SS were looking for single women who were between 21 and 45. Many might suspect that the women were more lenient with the prisoners, but that is not so. The female guards were just as corrupt as t...

The moment some of the Nazis' most notorious murderers were brought to justice: Photographs show 'Bitch of Belsen' and Auschwitz killer Franz Hossler at trial where they were sentenced to hang Photographs of notorious Nazi war criminals taken during their detainment at the end of the Second World War have surfaced in the belongings of a British Spitfire pilot. One of the people in the black-and-white photos is a smirking Franz Hossler - a commander at Auschwitz concentration camp before being made deputy commandant of Bergen-Belsen. The mass murderers were caught on camera along with dozens of other defendants at Celle Prison in Germany by Flight Lieutenant Keith Parfitt. Scroll down for video  Irme Grese Franz Hossler A group of unidentified prisoners are lined up against a wall during their detainment at Celle Prison, in Germany Pictured on the left is Herta Bothe, alongside two other female prisoners Grese was head of the women's section at the Bergen-Belsen concentr...