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This medal has been minted in 1983 in
This is a very dramatic medal with the Death Camp in the background; the GAS CHAMBER is visible.
This VERY DRAMATIC medal has been designed by the French medallier Pierre-Fernand PROVOST.
Nazi Germany maintained
concentration camps (in German Konzentrationslager, or KZ)
throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration
camps set up in Germany were greatly
expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933,
and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime. The
term was borrowed from the British concentration
camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War.
av. The Concentration
Camp prisoner on the background of the Neu Strassfurt camp
rv. The commemorative inscription in French
diameter - 68 mm, (2¾ “)
weight – 148.20 gr, (5.24 oz)
metal - bronze, original patina
LINK;
http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/holocaust/0226_Neu_Stassfurt.html
This database
contains information on 168 male prisoners sent to the Neu Stassfurt labor camp.
In
1940, 168 male prisoners, mostly or all Jews, were sent from various parts of
Germany as forced laborers to Neu Stassfurt, 20 miles south of Magdeburg in
Saxony-Anhalt. The list consists of name, date of birth and
profession. Some names are crossed out, but it is not clear why,
while others contain handwritten notes which are difficult to read. The
ultimate fate of these persons is not known, though few, if any, of their names
appear in the German Government’s Gedenkbuch. Many are listed as
forced laborers in the International Tracing Service (ITS) collection, but
their ultimate fate, again, is not given.
This database
includes 168 forced laborers. The fields for this database are as
follows:
To assist
researchers to translate German occupations, please see JewishGen's InfoFile: http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/GermanOccs.htm.
The
information contained in this database was indexed from the files of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG14.034 M, reel
2. Freija Lindholm, a JewishGen volunteer, transcribed the list.
In
addition, thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website and database
expertise to make this database accessible. Special thanks to Warren
Blatt and Michael Tobias for their continued contributions to Jewish
genealogy. Particular thanks to Nolan Altman, coordinator of Holocaust
files.
The number of camps quadrupled between 1939 and 1942 to
300+, as slave-laborers from across
After September 1939, with the beginning of the Second
World War, concentration camps became places where millions of ordinary people
were enslaved as part of the war effort, often starved, tortured and killed.
During the War, new Nazi concentration camps for "undesirables"
spread throughout the continent. According to statistics by the German
Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and subcamps were run in countries
occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish
Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazis camps was closer to
15,000 in all of occupied Europe and that many of these camps were created for
a limited time before being demolished. Camps were being created near the
centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of
Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Roma. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps were
located in the area of General
Government in occupied
The two largest groups containing prisoners in the camps,
both numbering in the millions, were the Polish Jews and the Soviet prisoners of
war (POWs) held without trial or judicial process. Large numbers of
Roma (or
Gypsies), ethnic Poles, political
prisoners, homosexuals, people
with disabilities, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Catholic clergy, Eastern
European intellectuals and others (including common criminals, as declared by
the Nazis). In addition, a small number of Western Allied aviators
were sent to concentration camps as spies. Western Allied POWs who were Jews,
or whom the Nazis believed to be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW
camps; however, a small number were sent to concentration camps under antisemitic policies.
Sometimes the concentration camps were used to hold
important prisoners, such as the generals involved in the attempted
assassination of Hitler; U-boat Captain-turned-Lutheran pastor Martin
Niemöller; and Admiral Wilhelm
Canaris, who was interned at Flossenbürg on February 7, 1945,
until he was hanged on April 9, shortly before the war’s end.
In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying
overalls with colored badges according to their categorization: red triangles for
Communists and other political prisoners, green triangles for common criminals,
pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for Gypsies and asocials, and
yellow for Jews.
Many of the prisoners died in the concentration camps
through deliberate maltreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were
executed as unfit for labor. Prisoners were transported in inhumane conditions by rail
freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.
The prisoners were confined to the boxcars for days or even
weeks, with little or no food or water. Many died of dehydration in the
intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter. Concentration camps also
existed in
In the early spring of 1941, the SS – along with doctors
and officials of the T-4 Euthanasia Program –
introduced the Action 14f13 programme
meant for extermination of selected concentration camp prisoners. The
Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps categorized all files dealing with the
death of prisoners as 14f, and those of prisoners sent to the T-4 gas chambers as 14f13.
Under the language regulations of the SS, selected prisoners were designated
for "special treatment (German: Sonderbehandlung)
14f13". Prisoners were officially selected based on their medical
condition; namely, those permanently unfit for labor due to illness.
Unofficially, racial and eugenic criteria were used: Jews, the handicapped, and
those with criminal or antisocial records
were selected. For Jewish prisoners there was not even the pretense of a
medical examination: the arrest record was listed as a physician’s “diagnosis”.[20]:pp.147-148 In early
1943, as the need for labor increased and the gas chambers at Auschwitz became operational, Heinrich Himmler ordered
the end of Action 14f1.
After 1942, many small subcamps were set up near
factories to provide forced labour. IG Farben established a synthetic
rubber plant in 1942 at Monowitz concentration camp (Auschwitz III); other camps were
set up next to airplane factories, coal mines and rocket
propellant plants. Conditions were brutal and prisoners were often
sent to the gas chambers or killed if they did not work quickly enough.
After much consideration, the extermination of the Jewish
prisoners (the “Final Solution”) was
announced to high ranking officials at the Wannsee
Conference in 1942.
Towards the end of the war, the camps became sites for medical
experiments. Eugenics experiments,
freezing prisoners to determine how downed pilots were affected by exposure,
and experimental and lethal medicines were all tried at various camps. Female
prisoners were routinely raped and degraded in the camps.
The camps were liberated by the Allied and Soviet forces
between 1944 and 1945. The first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23,
1944. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on January 27, 1945;
Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11; Bergen-Belsen by the British on April 15; Dachau by the
Americans on April 29; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on the same day; Mauthausen by the Americans on May 5; and Theresienstadt by the Soviets on May 8. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bełżec were never
liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Colonel William W. Quinn of
the
In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost
all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand
alive—7,000 inmates were found in