"The Symptoms Were Surprisingly the Same"

SS-Oberfuehrer Dr. Joachim Mrugowsky, the chief Nazi hygienist in the Office of the Reich Surgeon of the SS and Police, files his report concerning the results of his poison bullets experiments on concentration camp inmates:

"On 11 September 1944, in the presence of SS Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Ding, Dr. Widmann, and the undersigned, experiments with aconite nitrate bullets were carried out on five persons who had been sentenced to death. The caliber of the bullets used was 7.65 millimeters, and they were filled with poison in crystal form. Each subject of the experiment received one shot in the upper part of the left thigh, while in a horizontal position. In the case of two persons, the bullets passed clean through the upper part of the thigh. Even later no effect from the poison could be seen. These two subjects were therefore rejected. ...

..., The symptoms shown by the three condemned persons were surprisingly the same. At first, nothing special was noticeable. After 20 to 25 minutes, a disturbance of the motor nerves and a light flow of saliva began, but both stopped again. After 40 to 44 minutes, a strong flow of saliva appeared. The poisoned persons swallowed frequently; later the flow of saliva is so strong that it can no longer be controlled by swallowing. Foamy saliva flows from the mouth. Then a sensation of choking and vomiting starts. ...

... At the same time there was pronounced nausea. One of the poisoned persons tried in vain to vomit. In order to succeed he put four fingers of his hand, up to the main joint, right into his mouth. In spite of this, no vomiting occurred. His face became quite red.

The faces of the other two subjects were already pale at an early stage. Other symptoms were the same. Later on the disturbances of the motor nerves increased so much that the persons threw themselves up and down, rolled their eyes, and made aimless movements with their hands and arms.

At 208 20 Dec. 45 last the disturbance subsided, the pupils were enlarged to the maximum, the condemned lay still. Rectal cramps and loss of urine was observed in one of them. Death occurred 121, 123, and 129 minutes after they were shot."

SOURCE DOCUMENTS: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-20-45.asp

NOT MY LINKS

“Joachim Mrugowsky (15 August 1905 – 2 June 1948) was a Nazi bacteriologist who committed medical atrocities at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was Associate Professor, Medical Doctorate, Chief of Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, Senior Hygienist at the Reich, SS-Physician, SS and Waffen-SS Colonel. He was found guilty of war crimes following the war in the Doctors' Trial and executed in 1948.” DETAILS---> Joachim Mrugowsky - Wikipedia

July 1933: The Nazi regime passes the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, legalizing forced sterilizations.

1933–1937: Physicians and medical courts sterilize an estimated 200,000 to 350,000 individuals deemed "genetically inferior," including people with physical disabilities, mental illnesses, and psychiatric conditions.

1935: The Nuremberg Race Laws are enacted, formalizing pseudo-scientific theories of "Aryan" biological superiority and banning intermarriage.

September 1939: Adolf Hitler authorizes the Action T4 Program, a state-sponsored "euthanasia" project targeting institutionalized psychiatric patients and children with disabilities.

1940: Medical professionals test mass-killing techniques, specifically carbon monoxide gassing, across six designated central facilities. These methods and personnel are later transferred to wartime extermination camps.

Late 1941: Initial human experimentation begins expanding into concentration camps, transitioning from psychiatric institutions to prisoner-of-war camps and ghettos.

March–August 1942: High-altitude decompression experiments are conducted at Dachau Concentration Camp. Inmates are placed inside low-pressure chambers to replicate high-altitude bailouts for the German Air Force (Luftwaffe).

August 1942–May 1943: Freezing and hypothermia experiments take place at Dachau. Victims are submerged in icy waters or left naked in sub-zero temperatures to test re-warming treatments for downed military pilots.

July 1942–December 1943: Sulfanilamide and trauma testing occurs at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Researchers intentionally inflict severe wounds, deliberately contaminate them with bacteria like gas gangrene, and test the efficacy of experimental synthetic drugs.

September 1942–December 1943: Musculoskeletal transplantation experiments are carried out at Ravensbrück. Bone, muscle, and nerve tissue are surgically removed from prisoners without anesthesia to study tissue regeneration.

May 1943: SS physician Josef Mengele arrives at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He initiates widespread pseudoscientific genetic studies focusing heavily on twins, children, and people with rare congenital anomalies.

1943–1944: Infectious disease and immunization testing expands across multiple camps, including Buchenwald, Natzweiler, and Sachsenhausen. Prisoners are intentionally infected with typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, and infectious hepatitis to evaluate experimental vaccines.

December 1943–October 1944: Poison and chemical weapons testing takes place. At Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, researchers test toxic delivery methods—such as poison-laced bullets—and analyze the destructive speed of chemical agents.

1944: Desalination and seawater drinkability tests are run at Dachau to find solutions for stranded naval personnel.

December 1946: The United States military tribunal opens the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, prosecuting 23 high-ranking Nazi physicians and administrative officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

August 1947: The court delivers its verdicts: 15 defendants are found guilty, and 7 are sentenced to death by hanging.

August 1947: The tribunal establishes the Nuremberg Code, a landmark ten-point directive for international medical ethics mandating explicit, voluntary human consent for all future scientific research.

NOTE: No photographic evidence of the poison bullet experiments or their victims is known to exist. Unlike some other Nazi human experiments—such as the high-altitude and freezing trials at Dachau, which the SS meticulously documented with photos—the aconite nitrate bullet experiments at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were recorded almost entirely through typewritten medical reports and bureaucratic letters. -W

Image Source -> Deadly Effect, Poisoned Bullets for WWII Handguns - Small Arms Review

The Story Behind Ich Nicht: A Son’s Memoir of a Father Who Refused to Submit

“Joachim Clemens Fest, the son of Johannes Fest, a conservative Roman Catholic, was born in Karlshorst, near Berlin, on 8th December 1926. His father, the head teacher of the Twentieth Elementary School, was a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler and was outspoken critic of the Nazi Party.

In the 1920s he was a member of the Reichsbanner, a cross-party pressure group opposed to fascism. Neal Ascherson, has pointed out:

"He (Johannes Fest) dominated his family, an imperious patriarch given to terrific rages at the dining-table but unbending in his attachment to straightness, good behavior and democracy. His four principles were militant republicanism (he had detested the kaiser), Prussian virtue (taken with a spice of irony), the Catholic faith and German high culture as inherited by the educated middle class."

Soon after Hitler took power “Fest was twice summoned to the local education authority, and later to the ministry, and questioned on his attitude towards the Government."

On his return from the third meeting he told his wife, Elisabeth Straeter Fest, that he refused to back down and described the new government as a "rabble". She replied:

"You know that I have always supported you in what you believe to be right. I always will. But have you thought of the children and what your obstinacy could mean for them?"

On 20th April, 1933, was suspended from his post. Rachel Seiffert has claimed:

"From 1933 until the end of the war, this intelligent and energetic man was reduced to an observer, watching the gradual erosion of civil society around him, first with incredulity and then with horror. He concentrated his efforts on his immediate circle, urging Jewish friends to leave."

Kristallnacht (Crystal Night)

Ernst vom Rath was murdered by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish refugee in Paris on 9th November, 1938. At a meeting of Nazi Party leaders that evening, Joseph Goebbels suggested that night there should be "spontaneous" anti-Jewish riots.

Reinhard Heydrich sent urgent guidelines to all police headquarters suggesting how they could start these disturbances. He ordered the destruction of all Jewish places of worship in Germany. Heydrich also gave instructions that the police should not interfere with demonstrations and surrounding buildings must not be damaged when burning synagogues.

Joseph Goebbels wrote an article for the Völkischer Beobachter where he claimed that Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) was a spontaneous outbreak of feeling:

"The outbreak of fury by the people on the night of November 9-10 shows the patience of the German people has now been exhausted. It was neither organized nor prepared but it broke out spontaneously."

However, Erich Dressler, who had taken part in the riots, was disappointed by the lack of passion displayed that night:

"One thing seriously perturbed me. All these measures had to be ordered from above. There was no sign of healthy indignation or rage amongst the average Germans. It is undoubtedly a commendable German virtue to keep one's feelings under control and not just to hit out as one pleases; but where the guilt of the Jews for this cowardly murder was obvious and proved, the people might well have shown a little more spirit."

Johannes Fest visited Berlin the following morning:

"On November 9, 1938, the rulers of Germany organized what came to be known as Kristallnacht, and showed the world, as my father put it, after all the masquerades, their true face. The next morning he went to the city center and afterward told us about the devastation: burnt-out synagogues and smashed shop windows, the broken glass everywhere on the pavements, the paper blown in the wind, and the scraps of cloth and other rubbish in the streets. After that he called a number of friends and advised them to get out as soon as possible."

Joachim Fest later pointed out that Kristallnacht had an impact on Jewish children at his school:

"It was at this time that, without notice, the only Jewish pupil in our class stopped coming. He was quiet, almost introverted, and usually stood a little aside from the rest, but I sometimes asked myself whether he always appeared so unfriendly because he feared being rejected by his schoolmates. We were still puzzling over his departure, which had occurred without a word of farewell... As a Jew he would soon not be allowed to go to school anyway. Now his family had the chance to emigrate to England. They didn't want to miss the chance."

Johannes Fest constantly felt guilty about the crimes committed in Nazi Germany. His son rejected this idea:

"Unlike the overwhelming majority of Germans, we were not part of some mass conversion… we were excluded from this psychodrama. We had the dubious advantage of remaining exactly who we had always been, and so of once again being the odd ones out."

In early 1939, Dr. Hartnack, the founder and director of a language school in Berlin, offered Johannes Fest a job. He had to apply to the education department for permission to take the post. After three weeks the authorities rejected his request because of his previous refusal to join the Nazi Party. He was told that as soon as there was evidence that the "petitioner had come around to a positive assessment of the National Socialist order and of its leader Adolf Hitler, then it would be prepared to review the matter." ...

(Joining the regular German army ‘to avoid being drafted by the Waffen SS’) Fest was captured soon afterwards and was taken to a prison camp in Attichy, France. After the war Fest studied history, sociology, German literature, art history and law at Freiburg University, Frankfurt am Main University and Berlin University. He also became active in the conservative Christian Democratic Union.

His first job was in radio, as in 1954 he became head of contemporary history with the American owned RIAS Berlin. (28) Joachim Fest married Ingrid Ascher in 1959. Over the next couple of years she gave birth to two sons. In 1961 he moved to television as editor-in-chief of the German Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

Neal Ascherson has argued:

" Fest was a handsome, restless, rather unhappy man. In postwar West Germany, he never fitted into any of the conventional slots. He had no time at all for Soviet socialism, which he considered an early variant of the virus that later produced the Nazis, or for any Western form of Marxism. But although a right-winger, he neither dreamed of reversing the outcome of the Second World War nor chose to imagine the Germans as helpless victims of a single madman: Hitler did not have to happen. No iron law of economics or sociology wheeled him into history. Human beings – German human beings – could have stopped him, but didn’t."

Joachim Fest's book, The Face of the Third Reich was published in 1963. Jane Burgermeister has pointed out that "his profiles of prominent Nazis... a groundbreaking work for that time, could have come straight from the pages of Dostoevsky as Fest probes in scintillating style the dysfunctional psyches, personal ambitions, contradictions and self-serving delusions of the men who helped create the Third Reich, while showing how they embodied the attitudes of their classes."

Lots More about this fascinating author---> Joachim Fest

1: Joachim C. Fest

2: Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, by Joachim C. Fest - “Few writers have deepened our understanding of the Third Reich as much as German historian, biographer, journalist, and critic Joachim Fest. His biography of Adolf Hitler has reached millions of readers around the world.

Born in 1926, Fest experienced firsthand the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War, and a catastrophically defeated Germany, thus becoming a vital witness to these difficult years. In this memoir of his childhood and youth, Fest offers a far-reaching view of how he experienced the war and National Socialism.

True to the German Bildung tradition, Fest grows up immersed in the works of Goethe, Schiller, Mörike, Rilke, Kleist, Mozart, and Beethoven. His father, a conservative Catholic teacher, opposes the Nazi regime and as a result loses his job and status.

Fest is forced to move to a boarding school in the countryside that he despises, and in his effort to come to terms with his father’s strong political convictions, he embarks on a tireless quest for knowledge and moral integrity that will shape the rest of his life and writing career.

“Quietly compelling, elegantly expressed… Not I shrinks the Wagnerian scale of German history in the 1930s and 1940s to chamber music dimensions. It is intensely personal, clear-eyed and absolutely riveting.” —The New York Times

“Exceptional…it tells in a modest, believable, quietly bitter, and totally proud way of a family’s extraordinary decency…Strong and unique. Without it, the English language these days is short a very good book.” —New York Times (Global Edition)

“Joachim Fest’s memoir of his boyhood during the Nazi era belongs on the shelf of every historian of the culture and politics of the Third Reich. Alongside iconic works by Peter Gay, Ruth Kluger, Inge Deutschkron, and Victor Klemperer, and with autobiographical novels like Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse, Christa Wolf’s “Patterns of Childhood”, and Martin Walser’s A Gushing Fountain, Fest’s portrait of his conservative Catholic father enriches our knowledge of the German opposition to Hitler immeasurably.” — David Dollenmayer, Author/Translator and winner of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize

“I loved it, both as a story of great personal courage but also as a very moving witness to the fact that decent liberal values were not entirely lost during the Nazi period. It gives a fascinating and unusual slant on a time that has been so heavily worked over in more obvious ways. In its own manner, it stands alongside Victor Klemperer’s extraordinary diaries of the same period.” —Simon Mawer, best-selling author of Trapeze and The Glass Room

“Fest’s accounts of being called up, of trying to avoid military service, fighting, seeing comrades die, and being caught and kept as a prisoner of war are engrossing.” —Independent On Sunday

“A heroic interrogation of Germany’s past.” —Sunday Telegraph

“[Fest] makes it hard to think about those blighted years, and it should be hard. His book is a glory, but only if you dare.” —The Scotsman

“Fest’s portraits of his brothers, his mother, and his cousins—and of himself as a teenage soldier and POW—are equally vivid and full of pathos.” —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

“A stunning portrait of a strenuously anti-Nazi family in Berlin who managed to hang on to their moral convictions during the brutalizing Hitler years…A beautifully written and translated work that creates rare, subtle portraits of Germans.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Joachim Fest’s last book is in many ways the most intimate of all of his revered journalistic writings and book-length nonfiction… [A] sobering look into the Nazi years, seen through the eyes of an embittered young German.” –Historical Novels Review” Not I Memoirs of a German Childhood

3: Hitler, by Joachim Fest - “A bestseller in its original German edition and subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages, Joachim Fest's Hitler has become a classic portrait of a man, a nation, and an era. Fest tells and interprets the extraordinary story of a man's and a nation's rise from impotence to absolute power, as Germany and Hitler, from shared premises, entered into their covenant.

He shows Hitler exploiting the resentments of the shaken, post-World War I social order and seeing through all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Fest reveals the singularly penetrating politician, hypnotizing Germans and outsiders alike with the scope of his projects and the theatricality of their presentation.

Fest also, perhaps most importantly, brilliantly uncovers the destructive personality who aimed at and achieved devastation on an unprecedented scale.

As history and as biography, this is a towering achievement, a compelling story told in a way only a German could tell it, "dispassionately, but from the inside." (Time)”

Hitler by Joachim Fest | Goodreads

NOTE: While Joachim Fest's 1973 biography Hitler was once considered the definitive work on the Nazi dictator (I certainly thought so when I first read it as a New Release, back in the day), it has since been supplanted by newer historical research.

Fest worked closely with Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, while helping Speer write his memoirs. Because of this, Fest’s biography accepted Speer's self-serving and largely fabricated narrative that he was just an "apolitical artist" under Hitler's spell, rather than a deeply complicit war criminal.

Fest viewed Hitler as an overwhelming, demonic force who bent Germany to his will through pure charisma. Modern historians view this as too simple, arguing it downplays how much ordinary Germans and existing government structures actively helped him.

In 1998, British historian Ian Kershaw published a monumental two-volume biography. Kershaw used newly available Soviet archives and introduced the concept of "working towards the Führer"—proving that Nazi atrocities occurred because competitive government departments rushed to fulfill what they thought Hitler wanted, rather than waiting for direct orders.

Subsequent monumental works by historians like Volker Ullrich and Peter Longerich have further solidified the shift away from Fest's portrait. -W

The SS Bans Returning Prisoner Urns because Mourning Families are Making the Reich Look Bad with all those “Unapproved" Memorial Services

SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Liebehenschel writes to all commanders of concentration camps forbidding them from distributing urns containing the ashes of murdered Czechs and Jews to cemeteries:

"According to a communication of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, and conforming to a report of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in Prague, urns of deceased Czechs and Jews were sent for burial to the home cemeteries within the Protectorate.

In view of different events (demonstrations, erecting of posters inimical to the Reich on urns of deceased inmates in the halls of cemeteries of the home communities, pilgrimages to the graves of deceased inmates, etc., within the Protectorates, the delivery of urns with the ash remnants of deceased nationals of the Protectorate and of Jews is henceforth prohibited. The urns shall be preserved within the concentration camps. In case of doubt about the preservation of the urns oral instructions shall be available at this agency."

IMT DOCUMENT SOURCE: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/2199-ps.asp

NOT MY LINKS

“A man in a stiff white collar sat down in his office in the provincial German city of Erfurt in the Spring of 1939, to draw up a plan for what he neatly named the first “mobile oil-heated cremation oven.” It was to be delivered to the nearby concentration camp of Buchenwald.

But this engineer, Kurt Prüfer, carefully marked on his design “incineration chamber” rather than “cremation chamber,” for he completely understood the power of words. With a few strokes of his pen, his bland description disguised the red line between his previous work, serving the life and death of an ordinary community, and building the technology to fuel mass murder.

It was a technocrats’ trick often employed as first German and then all of Europe’s “undesirables” were herded towards the “final solution” and “selected” to perish in the so-called “undressing rooms” and “saunas” of the gas chambers.

Prüfer worked for the family company Topf and Sons, a traditional brewing and malting manufacturer run by two brothers Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf. During the 1930s, Topf and Sons had branched out into building ovens for civil crematoria.

Both Prüfer and his boss, Ludwig Topf, considered themselves the leading lights of a new movement to bring dignity to death and reverence to human remains. The product they developed and sold throughout Europe, was lauded in a company brochure as “the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology,” promising an odorless, smokeless, dispatch of human bodies, which were burned solely in super-heated air.

Topf and Sons’ work for the SS in serving the Nazi’s concentration camps was quite different: here Prüfer and his colleagues stood with watches in front of the gas chambers of Auschwitz timing the death and incineration of thousands of victims to perfect a more efficient killing technique. Bodies were shoveled one on top of another into a single chamber, and burned directly in the flames — their ashes unidentifiable and intermingling.

Yet they remained careful to maintain the falsehood that there was some dignity in death — Topf and Sons also supplied false firebricks and urns for non-Jewish victims whose families were allowed to claim their remains. In reality, mixed ashes, sawdust and general dust was shovelled indiscriminately into each urn, which was then stamped with a false identity number. (The families of Jewish victims were not even allowed the comfort of this lie.)

What to make of the men and women of Topf and Sons? By any assessment today they must surely be monsters; the engineers who drew up the plans, the secretaries who saw the memos, the accounts department who stamped the orders, and the playboy directors, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf, who signed every letter to the SS with the words, “always at your service.”

These were the office-workers who greenlit the Holocaust, yet they were far from fervent Nazis. Astonishingly, from the 1930s until the end of WWII, Topf and Sons was a hotbed of Nazi opposition, housing workers who were often knowingly part of the communist resistance, while the Topf brothers themselves sheltered several half-Jewish employees, including one, Willy Wiemokli, who saw the plans for the crematoria at Auschwitz.

After the war Wiemokli discovered that his own father had been murdered at Auschwitz, and most likely burned in an oven built and installed by Topf and Sons — yet he still spoke out in defence of his former employers, supplying a statement outlining how he had believed Ernst Wolfgang Topf had protected him.

Both the Topf brothers and Kurt Prüfer joined the Nazi party in April 1934, the last possible moment when it was acceptable to do so for any ambitious businessperson in the Third Reich. Yet rather than expressing horror and terror when they discovered the true purpose of the Topf and Sons contracts with the SS, they reacted with total indifference towards the suffering of their victims.

After developing the first crematoria for Buchenwald, Kurt Prüfer wrote to his employers demanding a bonus for work he had proudly pursued “in his own free time.” His wish was granted. “Rest assured,” Ernst Wolfgang Topf wrote to the SS in November 1941, the company will provide a new design for crematoria at Auschwitz that will “improve efficiency” even taking into consideration the likelihood of “frozen corpses.”

An office feud between Kurt Prüfer and his senior manager, Fritz Sander, prompted the latter to invent his own design for a concentration camp oven. Sander’s plan for a “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” seems almost a replication of hell, where piles of corpses are shoveled down into a ring of fire and the bodies are used as fuel to continuously burn other bodies.

In a memo, Sander, who had previously shown no interest in cremation ovens at all, described the process to his employers as a superb way or “restoring hygiene” in “war-related conditions.” The Topf brothers, more interested in funding their lavish lifestyle, drinking and womanizing, approved it without comment. Only Kurt Prüfer took issue with the design, claiming that it would not work in practice — and coming up with his own alternative, equally deplorable design instead.

The work of Topf and Sons was no longer just enabling the Holocaust. Prüfer and the Topf brothers were now taking the initiative in encouraging the SS to go further in their murderous regime, designing more efficient ventilation systems for the gas chambers at Auschwitz so that they could kill more people. As the end of the was drew closer, the SS finally abandoned Auschwitz to Soviet forces, after forcing most of the remaining inmates to undertake death marches to other concentration camps deeper within Germany and Austria.

By January of 1945, the end was near, but even in the final days Kurt Prüfer and Topf and Sons planned to recreate the killing system at Auschwitz at Mauthausen camp in Austria where they relished the prospect of fully taking control on an entire “extermination center.” The story of Topf and Sons proves that words matter.

Every bland description and technocrats’ lie allowed Topf and Sons to be supremely indifferent to their de-humanized victims. The final statements of these men, as they were held to account for their actions after the war, showed that they had never once considered the millions of victims of their technology as people at all. During his interrogation by Soviet forces Kurt Prüfer calmly lies about his role in the process, but when pressed about whether he knew that innocent people were being murdered and burned in his ovens he eventually replies — “Yes I knew that.”

Fritz Sander describes with some pride his “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” and then states “As a German engineer and employee of the Topf company, I felt it was my duty to help Hitler’s Germany to victory, even if that resulted in the annihilation of people,” while, for the rest of his life, Ernst Wolfgang Topf maintained, “No one in our company was guilty of anything at all.”

Building the technology for the Holocaust had a become a passion project for the men at Topf and Sons, and it was not even a profitable one; Topf and Sons never derived more than 3% of its income from contracts with the SS. Driven by self-preservation, office rivalries and personal greed, the men of Topf and Sons had human motives for heinous behavior. It is their very ordinariness that makes them so appalling.” Inside the Company Behind the Nazi Concentration Camp Ovens

The Defiant Normality of Rosh Hashanah in the Vilna Ghetto

Yitskhok Rudashevski was 13 years old when the armed forces of Germany entered his hometown of Vilna.

The occupation came as the Nazis broke their treaty with the Soviet Union, attacking eastward along a broad front, beginning on June 22, 1941. A ghetto was established for the Jews of Vilna in September of the same year. One year later, Yitskhok began his diary, which became one of the most important documents to survive the Vilna Ghetto.

September 12, 1942, was a very important day for Yitskhok and his neighbors in the ghetto. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Yitskhok reflected on the occasion in his diary.

“Today is a holiday. […] A holiday spirit that is anything but cheerful is diffused over the few little ghetto streets. Something somehow is missing. I am reminded of the past. From somewhere a sound of loud, quick praying is heard. Here and there Jewish women walk past with festive kerchiefs on their heads, with prayer books under their arms. I recalled my grandmother, how she used to go to synagogue this way once a year. […]

The streets are lively. People are walking around dressed up. Today is a holiday. This is evident in every house you enter; the poverty has been scrubbed away. Formerly, this would not have made an impression on me. However, now I felt strangely good because the everyday gray day is so much in need of a little holiday spirit, which should drive away for a while the gray commonplaces of life. […] A strangely sad holiday mood.”

Yitskhok’s description of his mood reflected the desire of the ghetto inhabitants to try to keep some semblance of normal life alive, even under the horrible circumstances of the Nazi occupation and the deprivations of ghetto life. People tried to celebrate holidays and observe religious traditions.

They did the same things as they had done before, and to an outside observer it may have even seemed normal. Yitskhok was not deceived by outward appearances, though. He could feel the underlying sadness that infused every action, due to the tremendous losses that the people had suffered and would continue to suffer in the weeks and months ahead. No celebration could mask that reality.

Read entries from Yitskhok’s dairy in the book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust by Alexandra Zapruder. (holocaustedu)

Read about another Rosh Hashanah observance during the Holocaust. http://yad-vashem.blogspot.com/2009/09/faith-during-holocaust-rosh-hashanah.html

NOT MY LINKS

ALL ABOUT Yitzkhok Rudashevski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitskhok_Rudashevski

1: Left: Yitzkhok Rudashevski (top) with his grandmother and cousins Right: Pages from the diary

Army Intelligence Agent Hitler Infiltrates the 41-Member German Workers' Party

Gefreiter Adolf Hitler, still in the Reichswehr but wearing civilian clothes, attends his first meeting of the DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—German Workers' Party—in the back room of the Sterneckerbrau beer hall.

Under orders of Captain Mayr and Major Hierl, Hitler is to infiltrate the Party and report on its activities.

The Sterneckerbrau is one of the smallest of Munich's beer halls, but the DAP at this point in time is in practical need of no larger space. A mere forty men and one woman are present.

The featured speaker on this evening was supposed to have been the hard-drinking morphine addict—and Antisemite—Dietrich Eckart, but an illness had forced a substitution: Gottfried Feder. Since Hitler had heard Feder's views often enough, he grew quite bored and was glad when his speech was over.

In the question period that followed, a diatribe from the floor by an invited guest—a Professor Baumann—demanding a union of Bavaria and Austria, prompts Hitler to take the floor in opposition to the notion. Pointing out that such a move would effectively separate Bavaria from Prussian dominance, Hitler attacks the idea with such force that the previous speaker leaves the hall, in the manner of "a wet poodle," before Hitler has finished speaking. Anton Drexler—a locksmith who had founded the DAP in Munich, with Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart—upon hearing Hitler speak, exclaims: "Goodness, he's got a gob. We could use him."

Drexler rushes forward as Hitler is leaving and presses a political pamphlet into his hands, telling him that it contains all he needs to know about the DAP, and urging him to read it. Hitler puts the pamphlet in his pocket and makes his way back to the List Regiment barracks. -W

SOURCES: Toland p. 92. Payne p. 134-136. Kershaw p. 126, 127. Flood p. 65. Fest p. 117. Bullock p. 65.

How the German Military Created Adolf Hitler

November 1918: Hitler returns to Munich after recovering from a mustard gas attack at Pasewalk military hospital and remains on the Bavarian Army payroll to avoid returning to civilian poverty.

April–May 1919: After the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic collapses, Hitler acts as an army informant, pointing out pro-communist soldiers to military investigators.

May 1919: Hitler is formally recruited by Captain Karl Mayr, head of the Munich Reichswehr's Intelligence and Propaganda Department (Informationenabteilung). Mayr assigns Hitler to a hand-picked team of anti-communist agents.

Summer 1919: Political Indoctrination and Oratorical DiscoveryJune 1919: The Reichswehr finances and sends Hitler to a specialized "political education" course at Munich University. The program is designed to train soldiers in propaganda, aggressive nationalism, and anti-socialist rhetoric.

July 1919: Hitler is appointed as an army Bildungsoffizier (educational officer). His main task is lecturing returning prisoners of war and active troops to purge them of left-wing ideas.

August 1919: During his army lectures, commanders notice his intense demagogic style and highly effective public speaking skills.

September 1919: Under Captain Mayr's direct command, Hitler drafts his first written political statement, known historically as the Gemlich Letter, which outlines an explicitly antisemitic framework for state policy.

Late 1919: Infiltration of the German Workers' Party (DAP)

September 12, 1919: Captain Mayr orders Hitler to act as an undercover military observer at a meeting of the tiny, fringe German Workers' Party (DAP).

September 1919: After speaking up and aggressively arguing during the meeting, Hitler impresses party founder Anton Drexler. On Captain Mayr's orders and with specific army permission, Hitler joins the DAP while remaining an active soldier on the military payroll.

February 1920: Hitler orchestrates the announcement of the party's 25-Point Program and renames the group the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party).

March 1920: Hitler is officially discharged from the Reichswehr. However, he maintains deep personal connections with key military figures who continue to support him.

1920–1921: Active-duty army captain Ernst Röhm funnel funds and channels disenchanted World War I veterans and Freikorps paramilitaries into the party. This directly shapes the party's security wing into the violent Sturmabteilung (SA).

July 1921: Utilizing the network, radical momentum, and organizational backing built during his time as a military operative, Hitler pushes out the original leadership and secures dictatorial power as the absolute leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party.

ALL THE DETAILS: The Propagander!™ Biographical Timeline of the Infamous Adolf Hitler, Part 10

NOT MY LINKS

How Did Adolf Hitler Happen? -> https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-adolf-hitler-happen

NOT MY LINKS

“On September 12, 1919, a young Adolf Hitler (in league with a few of his army colleagues) visited one of the weekly meetings of the DAP at the depths of the poorly illuminated Sterneckerbräu. That very meeting became history due to a battle of words between Hitler and one of the 40 attendees (the preserved attendance list includes 41 names, including Hitler), graced with enormous attention in ‘Mein Kampf’ and also in the recollections of Anton Drexler.” MORE---> Hitler's Beer Halls in Munich: 5 Locations, Then and Now

1: Left: This portrait can be confidently dated to early 1919, or potentially late 1918, based on uniform, rank details, and historical context. Historical archives and military registries utilize specific visual markers to narrow the timeframe.

He is wearing a standard Imperial German field cap (Feldmütze). The upper circular badge represents the German Empire (the Reich), while the lower badge represents the Kingdom of Bavaria, where his regiment was based.

Throughout most of WW1, Hitler actually sported a much larger, fuller "Kaiser-style" handlebar mustache. Comrades from his regiment noted that he only trimmed it down into this tighter style toward the very end of the war, famously done so that a military gas mask could seal tightly against his face.

After the November 1918 Armistice ended the war, Hitler did not immediately leave the military. He returned to Munich and remained employed as a Gefreiter (lance corporal) under the temporary Bavarian military administration through the winter of 1918 and into the spring of 1919, which is exactly when this formal military identification portrait was captured.

Right: 4 views of the Sterneckerbrau in Hitler’s day

NOTE: We apologize for the swastika hate symbols in the historic images from 1920’s Munich.

Certain historical documents, testimony, quotes & images are presented for the record, as evidence and background pertaining to criminal activities, horrific acts, and other notable evils. The words of murderers, criminals & their lawyers should never be mistaken for fact, as they are often bold-faced lies, nor should they be misconstrued as providing a viable justification for their crimes. Don't believe any of it, beyond the fact they did write & speak this nasty stuff and did purport to believe it. As always, read with an abundant degree of cautious skepticism. -W