Whaley 1

Kera Whaley

Mr. Neuburger

Composition 101

29 March 2011

Annotated Bibliography

Holocaust Research

Müller Fillip. "Nazi Genocide." 2011. Web. 04 Mar. 2011.

“After a while I heard the sound of piercing screams, banging against the door and also moaning
and wailing. People began to cough. Their coughing grew worse from minute to minute, a sign
that the gas had started to act. Then the clamor began to subside and to change to a many-voiced
dull rattle, drowned now and then by coughing. Ten minutes later all was quiet.”
I found this firsthand account very mesmerizing and saddened but more research is needed.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Web.

04 March 2011.

The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi
regime. It included three main camps, all of which deployed incarcerated prisoners at forced
labor. One of them also functioned for an extended period as a killing center. The camps were
located approximately 37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper
Silesia, an area that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939 after invading and conquering Poland. The
SS authorities established three main camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim: Auschwitz I in
May 1940; Auschwitz II (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau) in early 1942; and Auschwitz III (also
called Auschwitz-Monowitz) in October 1942.

I found this useful due to the fact I wasn’t aware there were three camps.

Koren, Yehuda. "Mengele and the Family of Dwarves." EBSCOhost.com. Feb. 2005. Web. 04

Mar. 2011. Web.

Entire Jewish communities, extended families of forty or fifty members were crammed in cattle
cars and transported to Nazi death camps. Almost nine out of ten people who arrived at
Auschwitz-Birkenau were sent directly to the gas chambers. The few that were spared provided
slave labor, and the work was not so much liberation as a brief, tortured interval before death. It
was rare that one person from an entire family survived.

I found this article helpful. It gives good statistics of the deaths at Auschwitz.
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Holocaust Survivor Eva Safferman Testimony. Perf. Eva Safferman. USCShoahFoundation. You

Tube, 30 Jan. 2009. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. Web.

Eva had watched a German soldier rip the beard off a Jewish man’s face and slam children’s
heads against walls. She also found out that her husband was one of the men who was ordered to
haul dead bodies away.

I found this slightly informative.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 06 Jan 2011. Web. Author Unknown. “Holocaust

Encyclopedia- Josef Mengele.”

Josef Mengele had a wide variety of other research interests, including a fascination with
heterochromia, a condition in which an individual’s two irises differ in coloration. Throughout
his stay in Auschwitz, Mengele collected the eyes of his murdered victims, in part to furnish
“research material” to colleague Karin Magnussen, a KWI researcher of eye pigmentation. He
himself also conducted several experiments in attempt to unlock the secret of artificially
changing eye color. Less famously, he zealously documented in camp inmates the progression of
the disease Noma, a type of gangrene which destroys the mucous of the mouth and other tissues.
I found this to be useful in my research of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“Death Marches-Holocaust” Wikipedia. 07 March 2011.

The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet
army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched
60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were
put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie The largest and best-
known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on
Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out
of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to
other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among
the marchers: “An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering. Pitch
darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who
could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure.
If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.
Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.”
This was empowering to read, and helps me with my research of what happened at Auschwitz-
Birkenau.

Holocaust Survivor Leopold Page Testimony. Perf. Leopold Page. USCShoahFoundation, You

Tube. 2009. 12 May 2009. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. Web.

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Leopold served under Oskar Shindler during the Holocaust in his factory. He was protected from
the Jews and was treated well. He never saw his family again, but he managed to survive. He
was offended when he was sent to Plaszow because he was a high ranking officer in the Polish
Army and was a teacher at a well known university.

I found this to be a good video.

Friedlander Saul. Harper Collins Publishers. 2007. Print. “The Years of Extermination.” 07

March 2011. Pg. 208

On August 2 or 3 the Reichsfuhrer sent the appropriate message to Franz Magill: “All Jews ages
14 years or older who are found in the area will be combed and will be shot to death. Any Jewish
women and children will be driven into marshes where they shall drown.”
In this short article it described the scrutiny and anti-setpimism the Jews went through on a daily
basis; more research is needed.

“Miklós Nyiszli” Wikimedia Foundation Inc.Wikipedia.. Web. 1 December 2010. 07 March

2011.

One day, after the gassing of a new shipment of prisoners, Nyiszli was summoned by prisoners
working in the gas chambers who had found a girl alive under a mass of bodies in a gas chamber.
Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners did their best to help and care for the girl but she was eventually
discovered by SS guards and shot.This incident was dramatized in the film The Grey
Zone.Nyiszli was appalled by the disregard for human life and lack of sympathy for human
suffering shown by the SS guards and officers; However, like all in the camp his actions were
dictated by his tormentors, thus he was forced to perform what for him were morally
questionable acts.During the roughly eight months he spent in Auschwitz, Nyiszli observed the
murder of tens-of-thousands of people, including the slaughter of whole sub-camps at a time.
These sub-camps held different ethnic, religious, national, and gender groups. For example there
was a Gypsy camp, several women’s camps, a Czech camp, and so on. Each sub-camp usually
housed between 5,000 and 10,000 prisoners, and some had even higher populations. Nyiszli was
often told of, or given prior notification of, which camps were to be exterminated next, as it
would signal that an increased workload was imminent.
I think this is very useful and it makes you think of life in a different perspective.

Bülow Louis. "Auschwitz, Nazi Death Camp." Jan. 2011. Web. 04 Mar. 2011.

So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict
incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. Patients were put
into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various
other traumas. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, Mengele
surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes. Death to the left, life to the right. Four hundred
thousand souls - babies, small children, young girls, mothers, fathers, and grandparents - are
said to have been casually waved to the left hand side with a flick of the cane clasped in a
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gloved hand. There were moments when Mengele came alive. There was excitement in his
eyes, a tender touch in his hands. This was the moment when Josef Mengele, the geneticist,
found a pair of twins. At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a number of twin studies, and these
twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. In the
case of the twins, he drew sketches of each twin, for comparison. Mengele was almost
fanatical about drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. Only a few survived…
I liked this article because it shows the true cruelty the children of the holocaust were put
through, as well as the parents.