|
THE DOOMED PRISONERS OF WWII
  |   |
World War II: The Invasion of Poland and the Winter War
View of an undamaged Polish city from the cockpit of a German medium bomber aircraft, likely a Heinkel He 111 P, in 1939.(Library of Congress) In 1939, the Polish army still maintained many cavalry squadrons, which had served them well as recently as the Polish-Soviet War in 1921. A myth emerged about the Polish cavalry leading desperate charges against the tanks of the invading Nazis, pitting horsemen against armored vehicles. While cavalry units did encounter armored divisions on occasion, their targets were ground infantry, and their charges were often effective. Nazi and Soviet propaganda helped fuel the myth of the noble-yet-backward Polish cavalry. This photo is of a Polish cavalry squadron on maneuvers somewhere in Poland, on April 29, 1939. (AP Photo) # Associated Press correspondent Alvin Steinkopf broadcasting from the Free City of Danzig -- at the time, a semi-autonomous city-state tied to Poland. Steinkopf was relating the tense situation in Danzig back to America, on July 11, 1939. Germany had been demanding the incorporation of Danzing into the Third Reich for months, and appeared to be preparing military action.(AP Photo) # Soviet premier Josef Stalin (second from right), smiles while Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (seated), signs the non-aggression pact with German Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (third from right), in Moscow, on August 23, 1939. The man at left is Soviet Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. The nonaggression pact included a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence in the event of a conflict. The pact now guaranteed that Hitler's troops would face no resistance from the Soviets if they invaded Poland, bringing the war one step closer to reality.(AP Photo/File) # Two days after Germany signed the non-aggression pact with the USSR, Great Britain entered into a military alliance with Poland, on August 25, 1939. This photo shows the scene one week later, on September 1, 1939, one of the first military operations of Germany's invasion of Poland, and the beginning of World War II. Here, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein is bombing a Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig. Simultaneously, the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), and ground troops (Heer) were attacking several other Polish targets. (AP Photo) # German soldiers comb the Westerplatte after it was surrendered to German units from the Schleswig-Holstein landing crew, on September 7, 1939. Fewer than 200 Polish soldiers defended the small peninsula, holding off the Germans for seven days.(AP Photo) # Aerial view of bombs exploding during a German bombing run over Poland in September of 1939 (LOC) # Two tanks of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division cross the Bzura River during the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The Battle of Bzura, the largest of the entire campaign, lasted more than a week, ending with the German forces capturing most of western Poland. (LOC/Klaus Weill) # Soldiers of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division, resting in a ditch alongside a road on the way to Pabianice, during the invasion of Poland in 1939. (LOC/Klaus Weill) # A ten-year-old Polish girl named Kazimiera Mika mourns over her sister's body. She was killed by German machine-gun fire while picking potatoes in a field outside Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939. (AP Photo/Julien Bryan) # German advance guards and scouts are shown in a Polish town that has been under fire during the Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1939. (AP Photo) # German infantry cautiously advance on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland on September 16, 1939. (AP Photo) # Several civilian prisoners of war, with arms raised, walk along a road during the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939.(LOC) # Britain's King George VI broadcasts to the British nation on the first evening of the war, on September 3, 1939, in London.(AP Photo) # A conflict which would end with the dropping of two nuclear bombs began with a proclamation read aloud by a town crier. Acting Town Crier and Saltbearer of the City of London, W.T. Boston, reads the war proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange, in London, on September 4, 1939. (AP Photo/Putnam) # A crowd reads newspaper headlines, "Bombs Rain On Warsaw" as they stand outside the U.S. State Department building where diplomats held a conference on war conditions in Europe, on September 1, 1939. (AP Photo) # On September 17, 1939, the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was hit by torpedoes from the German submarine U-29, and sank within 20 minutes. The Courageous, on an anti-submarine patrol off the coast of Ireland, was stalked for hours by U-29, which launched three torpedoes when it saw an opening. Two of the torpedoes struck the ship on the port side, sinking it with the loss of 518 of its 1,259 crew members. (AP Photo) # The scene of devastation seen on Ordynacka Street in Warsaw, Poland on March 6, 1940. The carcass of a dead horse lies in the street among enormous piles of debris. While Warsaw was under nearly constant bombardment during the invasion, on one day alone, September 25, 1939, about 1,150 bombing sorties were flown by German aircraft against Warsaw, dropping over 550 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the city. (AP Photo) # German troops marching into the city of Bromberg (the German name for the Polish city of Bydgoszcz) found several hundred German nationals dead from Polish sniper fire. The snipers were equipped with arms by the retreating Polish forces. Bodies are shown on a forest road, September 8, 1939. (AP Photo) # A damaged Polish armored train carrying tanks captured by the 14th SS-Leibstandard Adolf Hitler Division, near Blonie, during the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. (LOC/Klaus Weill) # German soldiers, taken prisoner by the Polish army during the Nazi invasion, are shown while they were held captive in Warsaw, on October 2, 1939. (AP Photo) # A young Polish boy returns to what was his home and squats among the ruins during a pause in the German air raids on Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939. German attacks lasted until Warsaw surrendered on September 28. One week later, the last of the Polish forces capitulated near Lublin, giving full control of Poland to Germany and the Soviet Union. (AP Photo/Julien Bryan) # Adolf Hitler salutes parading troops of the German Wehrmacht in Warsaw, Poland, on October 5, 1939 after the German invasion. Behind Hitler are, from left to right: Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, Lieutenant General Friedrich von Cochenhausen, Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt, and Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel. (AP Photo) # Earlier in 1939, Imperial Japanese army and naval units continued to attack and push forward into China and Mongolia. Here Japanese soldiers advance inland over the beach after landing at Swatow (Shantou), one of the remaining South China coast ports still under Chinese control at that time, on July 10, 1939. After a short engagement with the Chinese defenders the Japanese entered the city without encountering much further opposition. (AP Photo) # On the Mongolian border, Japanese tanks roll across the vast plains of the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe, near the Mongolian border, on July 21, 1939. Manchukuo troops were reinforced by the Japanese when the border warfare with Soviet forces flared up suddenly in this sector. (AP Photo) # A Japanese machine gun unit cautiously moves forward, past two Soviet armored cars abandoned in fighting along the Mongolian frontier in July of 1939. (AP Photo) # On November 30, 1939, after Soviet demands made to Finland went unmet -- they were asking the Finns to give them land concessions and to destroy fortifications along the border -- the USSR invaded Finland. Some 450,000 Soviet soldiers crossed the border, starting a brutal, frozen battle that would be called the Winter War. In this image, a member of a Finnish anti-aircraft detachment, wearing his white camouflage uniform, works with a range-finder on December 28, 1939, during a Russian aerial attack. (AP Photo) # A house burns furiously after being hit by a Soviet bomb during a Russian air raid on Turku, a port city in the southwest of Finland, on December 27, 1939. (AP Photo) # In a frozen, wooded battlefront "somewhere in Finland," Finnish troops scatter to take shelter as Soviet planes fly over on an air raid on January 19, 1940. (AP Photo) # Finnish soldiers, members of one of the ski battalions that fought against invading Russian troops, march with their reindeer on March 28, 1940. (Editor's note: this photo shows evidence of being retouched by hand, likely in an effort to boost sharpness and contrast) (AP Photo) # Spoils of war -- captured Soviet tanks and cars, along a road in a snow covered forest on January 17, 1940. Finnish troops had just overpowered an entire Soviet division. (LOC) # A Swedish volunteer, "somewhere in Northern Finland," protects himself from the sub-zero arctic cold with a mask over his face on February 20, 1940, while on duty against the Russian Invaders. (AP Photo) # Warning: The winter of 1939-1940 in Finland was exceptionally cold. In January, temperatures dropped below -40° in some places. Frostbite was a constant threat, and the corpses of soldiers killed in battle froze solid, often in eerie poses. This January 31, 1940 photo shows a frozen dead Russian soldier, his face, hands and clothing covered with a dusting of snow. After 105 days, the Finns and Russians signed a peace treaty, allowing Finland to retain sovereignty, while it ceded 11 percent of its territory to the Soviets.(LOC) # The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, in flames off Montevideo, Uruguay on December 19, 1939. The crew of the Admiral Graf Spee had just engaged in the Battle of the River Plate, after three Royal Navy cruisers hunted it down and attacked. The damage from the attack did not sink the German battleship, but sent it to a harbor in Montevideo for repairs. Unable to stay long enough for repairs, and unwilling to run a waiting blockade, the crew of the Admiral Graf Spee sailed a short distance out of port and scuttled the ship, seen here shortly before it sank. (AP Photo) # Restaurant operator Fred Horak of Somerville, Massachusetts, put this sign on the window of his lunch room, shown March 18, 1939. Horak was a native of Prague, Czechoslovakia. (AP Photo) # Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft being manufactured, likely in Buffalo, New York, ca 1939. (Editor's note, the AP caption for this photo was in error, previously stating these were Boeing bombers) (AP Photo) # While German forces were concentrated on Poland, anxiety was rising on the Western Front, with French troops welcoming British soldiers as they deployed along the border with Germany. Here, French troops pose in a cantonment in France on December 18, 1939. (AP Photo) # Vast masses of Parisians gathered at the Basilica Church of the sacred heart on the hill of Montmartre to attend a religious service and pray for peace. Part of the huge crowd gathered in front of the church in France on August 27, 1939. (AP Photo) # Members of the French Army man an acoustic locator device on January 4, 1940. The device was one of many experimental designs, built to pick up the sound of distant aircraft engines and give their distance and location. The introduction and adoption of radar technology rendered these devices obsolete very quickly. (AP Photo) # A party of newspaper men on the Western Front are shown atop one of the big forts somewhere in the Maginot Line, France, on October 19, 1939, with a French army guide pointing out to them the "no man's land" that separates the French and German troops. (AP Photo) # British troops cheerfully board their train for the first stage of their trip to the western front, somewhere in England, om September 20, 1939. (AP Photo/Putnam) # London's Westminster Bridge and the Houses of parliament, shrouded in darkness, after the great black-out began, on August 11, 1939. This blackout was the first trial conducted by the Home Office, in preparation for possible German air raids. (AP Photo) # This was the scene at Holborn Town Hall, in London, England, as officials and mothers tested the reactions of babies to a respirator designed to protect them against poison gas on March 3, 1939. Several babies, all under the age of two, were fitted with the "baby helmets." (AP Photo) # German Chancellor and dictator Adolf Hitler consults a geographical survey map with his general staff including Heinrich Himmler (left) and Martin Bormann (right) at an undisclosed location in 1939. (AFP/Getty Images) # On Friday, Oct. 30, 2008, a man looks at a photograph of Johann Georg Elser, mounted on a monument in Freiburg, Germany. Elser, a German citizen, attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a self-made bomb in the "Buergerbraukeller" beer hall in Munich on November 8, 1939. Hitler finished his speech early, escaping the timed explosion by just thirteen minutes. Eight people died, 63 were injured, and Elser was caught and imprisoned. Shortly before the end of World War II, he was executed in the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. (AP Photo/ Winfried Rothermel) Japanese Sentry Tower - Camp O'Donnel (Capas, Tarlac)Established in 1940 as a USAFFE training camp, Camp O’Donnel became known as the Capas Concentration Camp where some 60,500 survivors of the Bataan Death March were incarcerated. Around 30,000 of these prisoners-of-war were dead by 1942.In San Fernando the POW’s where loaded on the trains bound for Capas, Tarlac, The Boxcars normally carried 50 persons, but the Japanese packed them up 100 to 115 Prisoners. At each stop, The Boxcars were open to give the Prisoners fresh Air. The POW’s got off the train at Capas and marched the final kilometer to Camp O” Donnell. Camp O'Donnell was the final stop of the Bataan Death March and was used as an internment camp for Filipino and American prisoners of war. Around 20,000 Filipinos and 1,600 Americans died at Camp O'Donnell. Filipino and American soldiers were said to have been beheaded in front of open graves. It was liberated by the US Army and Philippine Commonwealth Army on 30 January 1945.
The Cement Cross In wishing to honor our comrades who died so far away from home the battling bastards of Bataan Death Marchcommissioned the construction of this Replica of the “Cement Cross” in the hope that all those who may pass by to view this memorial will remember the many young Americans who gave their lives in defense of their country and of the Philippines. Camp O'Donnel (Capas Tarlac). the American sector of the war memorial. In June of 1942 the Japanese authorities at the American side of the Prisoner of war enclosure at Camp O” Donnell, two kilometers north of this site presented the prisoners with some Cement. The American Prisoners decided to build a Cement Cross to honor the memory of their dead comrades. Completed later that month. The cross remained hidden amidst tall grass until was discovered by returning American Forces in 1945. Left where it originally stood unknown to most and battered by the elements. The cross was again forgotten. Rediscovered by Bataan Veterans visiting the area in 1961. The cross became the historical symbol of the American Prisoner of war enclosure and its dead. When American military presence ended in the Philippines in 1992. The cross was brought to the National Historic Site Andersonville, Georgia, USA. Where it is now kept and displayed. This Replica stand as a reminder of America’s unprepared ness before the outbreak of World War II.
Chapel Sculpture Facade of the 60-ft tall chapel of the American Cemetery in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. The sculpture represents, from bottom to top, the young American warrior symbolized by St George, fighting his enemy, the dragon, in the jungle. Above them are the ideals for which he fought: Liberty, Justice, Country. Columbia, with the child symbolizing the future, stands at the zenith. Information sourced from the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial pamphlet.
High Noon at the BatttlefieldRight hemicycle of the Manila American Cemetery, viewed from the entrance of the left hemicycle. The gap between the gray pebbles is the path to the memorial's chapel. For more information, please see
In Memoriam
OppositesShot at the Manila American Cemetery. The brownish smooth hardness of the limestone tablets against the dark, disordered patterns of the tree's foliage. Order and disorder. Life. Gone, and the living.
Wall of the Missing. Shot at the Manila American Cemetery in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. As the sun gently sinks, the shadows slowly draws across the names of the missing valiant - exactly 36,286 American and Filipino servicemen are recorded in these limestone tablets.
Incredible footage reveals how French World War Two prisoners secretly filmed life in their POW camp with tiny camera hidden in a hollowed out dictionary
Their crude camera was smuggled into the camp in sausages and carefully hidden away in a hollowed out dictionary. The precious 8mm film stored in the soles of their home made shoes. Had they been discovered it would have likely meant a firing squad. But for a group of daring French World War Two prisoners incarcerated in a German POW camp in 1940, it was a risk worth taking.
Candid camera: Footage taken using the French POWs' secret camera shows prisoners milling around the compound in the Nazis' Oflag 17a camp in Austria Secret film made by French prisoners of war in WWII And not only did they use the secret device to film daily life around the Oflag 17a camp in Austria, but they even went so far as to film the digging of a tunnel used for their own great escape. The 30 minutes of footage they captured entitled Sous Le Manteau (Under The Cloak) now serves as a unique historical record giving a fascinating glimpse into what life was really life in the Nazi-run prison camps. The incredible story of the French prisoners' secret camera is being celebrated in Paris this week after the only living prisoner who managed to escape the camp and make it back to France celebrated his 100th birthday, the BBC reports. Lt Jean Cuene-Grandidier was among 5,000 officers marched to Oflag 17a situated close to the Czechoslovakian border following their defeat in the battle of France. Covert operation: The camera was hidden in a hollowed out dictionary and the film was stored in the soles of their home-made shoes Originally built for German troops it was a sprawling camp composed of 40 barracks and surrounded by two lines of barbed wire with lookout towers and floodlights guarding the perimeter. Life was bleak and monotonous and with little food many of the prisoners were left on the brink of starvation. But they refused to allow their spirits to be broken. Realising that when the German soldiers checked food deliveries they only cut down the middle, the prisoners arranged for camera parts to be brought in smuggled in the ends of sausages. Once assembled a hollowed out dictionary from the camp library served as the perfect hiding place with the spine of the book opening up like a shutter. High security: The camp was surrounded by two lines of barbed wire and with lookout towers and flashlights used to guard the perimeter A cape-wearing POW is seen holding the dictionary used to hide the camera as he stands next to one of the barracks. The 30-minute film produced was entitled Sous Le Manteau (Under The Cloak) Considering the conditions and the basic equipment the quality of the footage is quite remarkable. The cameramen would become so bold they even filmed the guards tearing their barracks apart in a surprise search. But perhaps the most striking footage shows badly malnourished prisoners digging their own escape tunnel. Lt Cuene-Grandidier who has been presented with France's highest award - the Legion d'honneur, recalled the escape attempt. He said: 'In the early days we tried digging a number of tunnels from the huts in which we were barracked. 'It was viewed as a form of resistance. We were never punished. The Germans seemed to accept it, though it never worked. The distances to the wire were too great. And in any case the guards were clever. They always found the tunnels we started. They were looking for the earth we'd removed.' Brazen: A German guard is filmed walking past one of the barracks. In total the prisoners of Oflag 17a dug 32 tunnels. Most were discovered by the guards but one attempt did prove successful. The Germans had permitted the prisoners to build a theatre which they decorated with branches to obscure the view of the guards. Situated between the barracks and the wire it meant the distance they had to dig was far shorter. In addition the prisoners had been issued with shovels to dig their own air raid trenches folowing a complaint fromn the International Red Cross. Using these valuable tools they braved suffocating conditions to burrow 90m underneath the perimeter and on September 17 1943 they were ready to go. Over two nights, 132 men slipped out into the darkness. They had been provided with civilian clothes and forged papers. Each had been ordered to travel in different directions to reduce the possibility of capture. Gruelling: A French POW is seen inside the tunnel through which 132 prisoners made their escape. Only two managed to make it back to France. Lt Cuene-Grandidier recalled: 'The short length of the tunnel and the number of people inside, meant we had to lie in the foetal position. 'There was so little air. Some of the men fainted. We waited almost 10 hours to go, all the time imagining the worst; the German firing squad that would surely be waiting at the end of the tunnel.' But getting onto the other side of the perimeter was just the first step and finding themselves deep in enemy territory hundreds of miles from France, the odds were stacked against them. Of the 132 who broke out, 126 were recaptured within the first week. Only Lt Cuene-Grandidier and one other prisoner managed to return to France. The story of Lt Cuene-Grandidier's escape sounds like the plot to a Holywood film. After making his way to Vienna, he worked as a hospital nurse treating German soldiers for venereal disease. After securing a weekend pass to Paris he travelled by train with German officers. His work treating their embarrassing problems must have held him in good stead as one even offered to drive him home in a German army staff car. But Lt Cuene-Grandidier's loyalty was never in doubt and Within weeks he had joined the Resistance.
Sketches from hell: Humorous cartoons drawn by British soldier kept as a Japanese PoW for three years in Changi prison . The lost drawings made by a British soldier during his time as a Japanese PoW during the Second World War have emerged. Lance Bombardier Des Bettany used his humorous work to keep himself sane during his three years in the notorious Changi prison in Singapore. It was only after his death that his three children uncovered a book containing hundreds of paintings.
Lance Bombardier Des Bettany depicting the futility of attempting to having some peace and quiet in the crowded library at Changi prison camp in Singapore
Mr Bettany painted the prisoners with smiles on their faces and rosy cheeks when illustrating the notoriously cramped conditions and lack of food that faced the Allied prisoners at Changi
A cartoon by Lance Bombardier Des Bettany illustrating the prisoners need for something more exotic during their harsh prison days. His images include drawings from memory of British countryside, imagining life after the war and poking fun at the grim existence faced by the 50,000 prisoners of war. Lance Bombardier Bettany, from Burnley, Lancashire, a talented artist before the war, fashioned a paintbrush out of human hair and a bamboo cane and used different coloured soil mixed with rice water for paint. Any scraps of paper that could be salvaged - from loo roll to old work rotas were turned into a canvass for him to draw and paint satirical scenes of prison life.
What Bettany imagined it could be like after a Red Cross delivery, however in real life this was definitely not the case
Lance Bombardier Des Bettany pictured near Brighton before his imprisonment during World War II, left, and painting pottery at South Shields Art School after the war in the 1950's, right
Lance Bombardier keeping his spirits up illustrating a British prisoner subtly hunting birds with a catapult and whistling innocently when caught Although the 300 paintings kept in a ledger book survived the war, the Dunkirk veteran, hid them from his family in his wardrobe for 50 years. His son Keith, 60, said: ‘We knew that this book of paintings was there but we never saw it. ‘Dad hardly ever spoke about the war but he opened up a little in his later years. Dad painted to keep his sanity, that is what he told us. ‘And when you look at his work you can see what he meant.
Mr Bettany illustrating the moment he had his sketch book confiscated by a guard
Humour: He took refuge in jokey drawings to keep him sane during his imprisonment Mr Bettany’s images of life in the Singapore prison camp include a contented PoW with his hands on his enlarged stomach following a Red Cross drop of food rations. Another is of two soldiers working on building Changi airport wearing sunglasses and leaning of shovels as they idly exchange gossip. There is a cartoon of a PoW carrying an enormous pineapple the size of a man, telling a comrade that there is one for everyone in the canteen.
The difference in statue between the Allied prisoners and their Asian captors is a common theme in Bettany's cartoons, as seen in this 'reversed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' painting
One of the more satirical drawings making fun of the way security operated in the Changi prison. Lance Bombardier Bettany’s images of life in the Singapore prison camp include a painting entitled ‘Oh Boy, Liberation’ and shows a PoW at the camp gates kicking a Japanese guard high into the air. And another poking fun at the Japanese is a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and shows seven burly PoWs being escorted by a tiny guard. Some of the images of Mr Bettany’s memories of home depict a quaint church in Windermere and a chocolate-box country cottage. Des Bettany imagines how Changi may eventually be liberated by drawing a PoW kicking one of the guards out of the prison
He suspected they may return after the war and feel a bit different about women. His humourous cartoons of life in the future focus on how the ex-PoWs struggle to adjust to life in the normal world. For example, one depicts a smartly dressed wife telling her husband, who is dressed only in his underwear, ‘Changi or not, you’re not coming out with me dressed like that.’ Another shows a man cracking open a coconut with a hammer in his lounge, with his wife telling him to ‘keep it off the carpet.’ He also helped celebrated artist Ronald Searle with the programmes for theatre productions in the camp. THE CHANGI PRISONFirst built by Britons as a civilian prison in 1936 it was taken over by the Japanese during the Second World War when Singapore fell in 1942. Until the end of the Pacific War it held over 50,000 Allied military men. It was notorious for the way they treated their prisoners with low food rations and slave-like labour. Prisoners had to come up with imaginitive ways of gaining food and medicine, and the black market flourished. Imprisoned army medics concocted pills from their Red Cross rations and sold them to Japanese guards as tablets against STDs - and used the money to buy proper medicine for their sick fellow inmates. During the hellish hardship there were some brighter times – the prisoners were sent 20,000 books from libraries in Singapore and the University fo Changi was set up with classes in agriculture, general education, languages, law, engineering, medicine and science. 400 men learned to read and write while prisoners of war in Changi. The prison is described in James Clavell’s 1962 novel King Rat which depicts the fight for survival at Changi and the prisoners’ hierarchy and the black market among them. It follows ’The King’ an American corporal who wishes to dominate the prisoners and those who hold them captive thought exploiting the black market and corruption withing the camps and Peter Marlowe, a young British pilot, who strikes a friendship with The King by becoming his Malay interpreter. Clavell himself was a prisoner at Changi during the war and suffered greatly at the hands of his captors.
An illustrated programme for 'Smile and Carry On'. Prisoners of war in Changi sometimes put on productions to boost morale
Theatre programmes illustrated by Mr Bettany of 'In Clink Tonight' and Christmas panto Aladdin. Lance Bombardier Bettany had a natural talent for art although he trained as an industrial chemist before the war. He joined the Royal Artillery in 1939 aged 20 and fought in France and Belgium before being evacuated at Dunkirk. After that he was sent to the Far East and fought against the Japanese in what was then called British Malaya before Singapore fell in 1942.
Just de-bugging my dear, that's all: Mr Bettany also imagined what it would be like adapting to 'normal-life' after the war
A former Changi PoW struggles with what to wear after years in prison, drawn with a good sense of humour by Mr Bettany
A former Changi prisoner has opened a coconut with a hammer in his lounge, with his wife telling him to ¿keep it off the carpet' After the war he married and had three children. He eventually emigrated to Australia where he died in 2000. Keith said of his father’s art: ‘The spirit of much of the work is one of light-heartedness that helped my father keep a sense of optimism in the face of a brutal captor. What you see in the work is the opposite to what life was like. ‘He painted cartoons of happy PoWs with bloated bellies and healthy pink skin and wearing clean clothes and being chauffer driven to their work by the Japanese.
He managed to draw this picture of a church in Windermere from memory using used different coloured soil mixed with ricewater
Nostalgic: Painting what he remembered of the nature back home kept him sane in prison ‘There is no sign of what life was really like. There are no skin-and-bone bodies or men dressed in loincloths or showing a life where anything that crawled was eaten. ‘If he had painted what actually went on it may have destroyed him. What helped him and his mind was to paint the opposite and put a humourous spin on it. ‘He drew touching works of nostalgia and of life after the war to keep him going.’ Nearly 1,000 prisoners perished at Changi and a further 16,000 died while working on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway or the ‘Death Railway’. Des Bettany’s artwork can be seen at changipowart.com.
Des Bettany painted by fellow PoW Ronald Searle and a more poignant painting depicting their surroundings
A nostalgic cottage in the English countryside that Mr Bettany painted from his memories of pre-war days
Inside a doomed ghetto: Chilling images of the Jews of Lublin captured on film by German soldiers
Squeezed into a cattle truck under the watchful gaze of Nazi soldiers, this haunting photograph captures Polish Jews being expelled from their homes at the outset of what was to become the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. Part of a collection that has come to light for the first time in around 70 years, the picture is believed to have been taken in 1941 as German forces established Lublin Ghetto in east Poland, confining the district's Jewish community of around 40,000 into a single, tightly packed area. The following year the ghetto was 'liquidated' as part of Operation Reinhard, and tens of thousands of Lublin Jews were herded into trucks once more - this time bound for the Nazi death camp Belzec.
Doomed: The chilling photographs, revealed for the first time in more than 60 years, were taken as the Jewish occupants of Lublin Ghetto were herded on to cattle tracks to be transported to Nazi death camps The chilling photographs of the resettlement of Lublin Jews have emerged after owner Raymond Krzyzewski sent them to a local historian in the city last week. The pictures were smuggled from Lublin by Mr Krzyzewski's father, who had worked for the Jewish Central Welfare Committee in the district at the time. A PRISON WITH NO ESCAPE: THE HISTORY OF LUBLIN GHETTOMarch 1941: Ernst Zorner, the district's Governor, proclaimed the establishment of a ghetto in Lublin. October 1941: The Nazi administration began preparing the eventual expulsion of the Jews of Lublin - apart from the 25,000 working for the German Army, the S.S., and police. Early 1942: Lublin Ghetto was divided into two sections, with Ghetto A housing unemployed Jews and Ghetto B the remainder 16 March 1942: Lublin Ghetto was surrounded by S.S., many sick and elderly Jews were shot in the street Later, it was ordered that 1,500 people per day were to be deported 'to the east for work' 17 March 1942: The first of Lublin's Jews were deported to the Belzec extermination camp By 14 April 1942 around 26,000 Jews had been sent to their deaths at Belzec from the ghetto. The remainder were sent to the nearby Madjan Tatarski Ghetto where many were killed, and others were sent to the Majdanek death camp. The proximity of the photographer to the subjects in the chilling images has led historians to conclude they were taken by German troops. Historian Jakob Chmielewski said: 'We received a collection of five images that are likely to have been taken between 10 and 13 March 1941 at the time the Germans were carrying out their expulsion of Jews from the Jewish quarter. 'They wanted to create a ghetto and rid Lublin of the Jews, which they did on March 24, 1941. 'We know that they are from before the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 because that happened at night time, so these clearly aren’t from then,' the historian said. 'Also, you can see that the Jews are clearly being prepared for deportation as they have the remains of their belongings with them. 'I think the photos were probably taken by other Germans, because of the proximity of the photographer to the soldiers. 'It seems that some of the Germans are posing and smiling - they seem quite at ease,' said Mr Chmielewski. 'And it’s interesting to note that two of the photos show Jews posing. My guess is that these were to be used as propaganda.' Lublin Ghetto was one of at least 1,000 established in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. In 1942, Lublin Ghetto became one of the first to be liquidated by the Nazis, with the majority of its prisoners deported to the Belzec extermination camp between March 17 and April 11 that year.
Jewish residents of the ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland can be seen holding their belongings as they were made to form a line under the watchful eye of German soldiers
The fact that the three elderly men are posing has led historians to conclude the photos were taken by German soldiers and used for propaganda purposes The remainder were sent to the nearby Majdan Tatarski Ghetto, and were either killed there or sent to the Majdanek death camp. Of the some 40,000 Lublin Jews, no more than 300 are thought to have survived the horrors of Nazi occupation. Operation Reinhard was the name given to the Nazi plan to murder Polish Jews in the General Government area of the country during the Second World War. The operation marked the introduction of extermination camps, and saw as many as two million people - almost all Jews - sent to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka to be murdered.
Harrowing: Ghettos like Lublin were created by the Nazis for the purpose of isolating, exploiting, and then eradicating Jewish populations in territories they occupied
Death camps: A woman holds a child close to her chest alongside a man laden down with belongings as German troops herded residents into cattle trucks to deliver them to their deaths at Belzec or Majdanek
Alistair Urquhart was just 20 when he was called up in World War II. For 60 years, he has remained silent about the relentless brutality he endured at the hands of the Japanese army. Now, he reveals the full horror of his 750 days as a Far East prisoner-of-war. Here, in our first extract of his compelling autobiography, we learn of his capture and enforced labour on the notorious 'Death Railway'.
Survivor: Former prisoner of war Alistair Urquhart as a young soldier The construction of the Death Railway was one of the greatest war crimes of the 20th century. It was said that one man died for every sleeper laid. Beatings on the railway were totally routine. The threat of a rifle butt across your head loomed large. For no reason at all, wire whips would lash into our backs and draw blood. Some guards would creep up on you and strike the open tropical ulcers on your legs with a bamboo stick, causing intense agony. No man was more sadistic than the Japanese camp commandant Lieutenant Usuki, whom I called the Black Prince. He was a true bastard. Darker than the other Japanese soldiers, he strutted around like royalty, his beefy gut protruding from beneath a shabby uniform. He despised us totally. We were scum to him. His right-hand man was Sergeant Seiichi Okada, known to us Brits simply as Dr Death. Short and squat, he took the roll-calls and carried out all of the camp commandant's orders. Ruthless in the extreme, he loved tormenting us. He especially revelled in a sickening brand of water torture. He had guards pin down his hapless victim before pouring gallons of water down the prisoner's throat using a bucket and hose. The man's stomach would swell up from the huge volumes of water. Okada would then gleefully jump up and down on him. Sometimes guards tied barbed wire around the poor soul's stomach. Most died; only a few survived. But no matter how hard these two terrible men pushed us, we could not progress more than 20 feet per day through the dense jungle. 'He delighted in tormenting us' After 60 straight days on the railway - with no days off - we had reached the dreaded slab of rock that barred our path for the next 500 to 600 yards. The mere sight of that rock must have been enough for one prisoner, who made a bid for freedom. I was unaware that anyone had escaped until one morning at tenko (camp), a sorry-looking chap was dragged before us. He had been beaten horrifically, his swollen and bloody features were virtually unrecognisable. The interpreter told us: 'This man very bad. He try to escape. No gooda.' Two guards threw him on the ground in front of us and made him kneel. He did not plead for mercy. He knew his fate and waited silently, resigned to it. The Black Prince, who seemed to have dressed up especially for the occasion, strode forward and unsheathed his samurai sword. He prodded the prisoner in the back, forcing him to straighten up. Then he raised his sword and there followed a moment of such horror that I could scarcely believe it was happening. This was one of the many instances of barbarism on the railway that I would try to shut out of my mind. But I could not escape the chilling swoosh of the blade as it cut through the air or the sickening thwack as it struck our comrade's neck, followed by the dull thump of his head landing on the ground.
Retribution: Prisoners who tried to escape were beheaded often in front of the other captives I kept my eyes firmly shut but swayed on my feet and felt a collective gasp of impotent anger and revulsion. I know that I am a lucky man. I am 90 now, one of the last remaining survivors of my battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. Why did I - a 20-year-old, ambitious apprentice for an Aberdeen plumbers' merchant when I was called up shortly after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 - survive the unbelievable horrors inflicted by the Japanese when so many others did not? It's a question I have often asked myself. But it is not one I have discussed with those of us who did survive because, like them, for more than 60 years I have kept my silence. So many of us Far East prisonersofwar did, and all for the same reasons. We did not wish to upset our wives and families - or ourselves. I swayed with shock, as if I had been punched The Gordons were Aberdeen's local regiment. My father George, a teacher, had served with them during World War I. Like so many others of his generation, he had known the horrors of the Battle of the Somme, during which 9,000 Gordons were killed. My father never talked of his experiences. Later, after my own hellish war, I would understand why. I have never fully recovered from my time in captivity. In the early years, the nightmares became so bad that I had to sleep in a chair for fear of harming my wife Mary as I lashed out in my sleep. And I have never been able to eat properly since those starvation days. As to why I survived, I speculated that it was due to a combination of determined spirit and physical fitness. I had always been very sporty. As a grammar school boy, I played football, rugby and cricket as well as taking part in swimming and athletics. Little did I know then just how my sporting endeavours would save my life during the war. Three months after being called up, I was posted to Singapore. It was widely regarded as a cushy number, a place where British colonials enjoyed a privileged, bungalowdwelling existence, with servants to prepare their Singapore Sling cocktails, grown men - known as 'boys' - to run their households and ayahs (native nannies) to look after their children.
Brutality: Unlike the well-fed extras in the movie, the POWs did not whistle the Colonel Bogey tune. Nor did they have any semblance of uniform As a member of the Armed Forces, I was among the thousands sent there to protect them. Not that anyone thought back then that Singapore was vulnerable. The diamondshaped island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula was Britain's greatest fortress east of Suez, protected by huge 15in guns that pointed out to sea to deter naval assault. But in February 1942, the Japanese soldiers landed on Singapore island. We learnt the terrible news that the Japanese had committed a massacre at the Alexandra military hospital. More than 300 patients, doctors and nurses were systematically murdered in the shadow of the Red Cross that was meant to protect them. The invaders actually bayoneted some of the patients on the operating table. Each beating chipped away at my will to live On February 15 the shelling stopped and a ceasefire was proclaimed. But with water cut off and no air cover, the situation was deemed impossible. During humiliating negotiations, General Arthur Percival, General Officer Commanding (Malaya), was bluffed into surrendering to an overstretched and much smaller Japanese force. Two days later, I came face-toface with Japanese soldiers for the first time. I was in my office at Fort Canning, where I worked as a Garrison Adjutant's Clerk, when suddenly the door burst open and two men were standing before me - their eyes filled with fury and hate. Yammering and screaming in Japanese, they began jabbing their bayonets at our chests. They punched, slapped and kicked me and the other servicemen in the office before ordering us outside, where an astonishing sight met our eyes: hundreds of men filing out of the underground bunker, their hands above their heads, fear writ large across their ashen faces. They lined up alongside us while some of the Japanese privates went down the rows snatching watches off wrists, cigarette lighters, packets of cigarettes - anything of value. Officers had their faces slapped and their epaulettes ripped off, their caps thrown to the ground. As we stood there in the blazing sun, reality broke over me in sickening, depressing waves. I was a captive. My liberty was gone, and there was no telling when I would have it back.
Incessant: The POWs were routinely tortured during their time with the Japanese, many thousands died as a result of overworking or ruthless barbarism In October 1942, after almost eight months incarceration at the notorious Changi POW camp (where, in the early days, 50,000 men were crammed into accommodation designed for 4,000), I was selected to go up-country. Along with other Gordon Highlanders, I was marched to Singapore railway station where, inside the waiting train, we heard banging and frantic cries: 'We can't breathe! Open Up! Open Up!' I was wedged into a container of around 18ft by 10ft with about 30 other men. Our captors screamed and lunged at us with bayonets. There was no room to sit down; to make matters worse the sides of the steel carriage were searingly hot. Dehydration set in quickly. It was like being buried alive. As the train headed northwards, the smell inside the carriage became unbearably foul. Without toilets the men had to relieve themselves where they stood. Several were ill with malaria, dysentery and diarrhoea. People vomited and fainted. Dust swirled around the wagon stinging our eyes and adding to our unbearable thirst. I was wedged into a container of around 18ft by 10ft with about 30 other men On and on we went. Day became night. No one spoke; it was just too much effort. I considered suicide and began to fantasise that the train would jump its tracks and that I would be killed swiftly, without any more suffering. I willed the RAF to drop bombs on us and end our misery. Just before dusk on the fifth day we ground to a halt, the doors rolled back and the guards ordered us off. We were in Thailand. Our 900-mile train journey was over. Helping some of the sicker men off the train, I noticed a teenage soldier lying at the rear of the carriage. One of the lads jumped back up and tapped his foot. 'Come on, son, we're here.' Lifeless eyes stared back. I turned my back and walked away. I did not want to see his face and carry that image with me; anything that sapped the will to live had to be avoided. The Japanese officer's translator then told us that we had yet to reach our final destination. We had a 50-kilometre march ahead of us. Starting immediately. To be completed that night. I swayed with shock, as if I had been punched in the face. About 600 prisoners - diseased, vermin-infested and at their lowest ebb - began that trek into the jungle. Leaving behind our last glimpse of civilisation, we started what was to be in total a 160-kilometre death march. Anyone who collapsed or refused to go on was left to die. Theirs was either a lingering and lonely death or the swift and brutal thrust of a bayonet.
Torture: Scenes from the movie starring Alec Guinness were nothing compared to the treatment of the real life POWs In the late afternoon of the sixth day, after we had been trudging for around 32 hours, we arrived at a small, sparse clearing in the middle of the jungle. It took some time for us to comprehend that this was 'it', the ultimate objective of our tortuous journey. Through an interpreter, a guard told us: 'This is your camp. You make home here. Build own huts. All men work on railway.' A railway! Here in the middle of nowhere. It seemed mad. The following morning, we began work on the infamous Death Railway, the 415-kilometre Burma to Siam track through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. If I had realised then that it was just the first of 750 days I would spend as a slave in the jungle, I would have broken down and cried like a baby. We all had various stages of beriberi, malaria, dengue fever and dysentery Later, the Australians would dub the railway Hellfire Pass, and I could not have thought of a better name for it myself. Even Japanese engineers had estimated that it would take five years to complete. The Japanese Imperial Army would prove them wrong, however. It had a secret weapon: slave labour. In just 16 months, a railway linking Bangkok with the Burmese rice bowl and its vital oil fields would be completed at a terrible human cost. We all had various stages of beriberi, malaria, dengue fever and dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some unfortunate prisoners. Called tinea, it was nicknamed 'rice balls' because the hideous swelling had the tormenting tendency to attack, crack and inflame the scrotum. We were beaten frequently but it never got any easier to withstand. Each time I took a beating it chipped away, not just at my waning muscles, but at my will to endure them. The dilemma was whether to swallow your pride by going down at the first blow or to retain some of your dignity by taking several blows and standing up to them. If you refused to show that their blows were hurting you, they would fly into rages and the beating could be severe, even fatal. Some men found the going easier by bonding with another prisoner. They would share food and water and even took beatings together. It was not the way for me. I watched the heartache of men losing their best pals. They soon followed their mates to the grave.
Hollywood: Unline the film prisoners of war in Japan faced terrifying evil on a day-to-day basis with thousands losing their lives at the hands of their captors If a man driven mad by the incessant beatings turned on a guard, he would be tethered, spread-eagled, to the ground. Guards wrapped wet rattan - the same string-like bark used to lash our bamboo huts together - around his ankles and wrists, then tied him to stakes. As the rattan dried, the ties would slowly gash into the skin, drawing blood and tearing into sinew and cartilage as they pulled limbs from their sockets. It reduced even the toughest men to agonised screaming. It was a way of torturing all of us. The ties would slowly gash into the skin, drawing blood and tearing into sinew Often, when we returned from a day on the railway, the men would no longer be there. Nobody asked where they had vanished to. I certainly did not want to know. After such a horrific ordeal, death at the end of a Japanese bayonet would have been welcomed. After a few weeks of steady progress on the railway, we had reached the River Kwai, across which the Japanese intended us to build two bridges. It was going to be a major engineering operation and I doubted that we would manage it in our state and with the pathetic tools we had to hand. As the wood and bamboo structure of the first bridge went up, I made the most of my head for heights and tried to work aloft. Some men hated being up high, but for me it meant I was out of reach of the guards and their flailing sticks. For those working in the river, sometimes up to their necks, life could be much more difficult. The filthy water infected cuts and sores. The additional danger of falling objects, including logs and struts, meant that mortality rates were extremely high. The building of the bridge on the River Kwai took a terrible toll on us, and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very sanitised version of events. Unlike the well-fed extras in the movie, we did not whistle the Colonel Bogey tune. Nor did we have any semblance of uniform. We were naked, barefoot slaves. And there were certainly no pretty and scantily clad local girls wandering through the jungle.
Horror: In the early days of the Changi POW camp 50,000 men were crammed into accommodation designed for 4,000 And, contrary to the film, our real-life commander, Colonel Philip Toosey, did not collaborate with the Japanese. Instead, we made constant attempts at sabotage. Men whispered orders to impair the construction of the bridge wherever possible. Some, charged with making up concrete mixtures, deliberately added too much sand or not enough, which would later have disastrous effects. We collected huge numbers of termites and white ants and deposited them into the grooves and joints of loadbearing trunks. Out of sight of the guards I furtively sawed half way through wooden bolts, hoping they would snap whenever any serious weight, like a train, was placed upon them. One night in our POW camp I awoke with dysentery calling. Holding my aching stomach I raced to the latrines, but on the way back to my hut a Korean guard stopped me. He yammered in my face and at first I thought he was admonishing me for failing to salute him. Then he pointed at my midriff and to my horror I realised he was becoming frisky. 'Jiggy, jiggy,' he was saying, trying to grab me. 'No!' I shouted at him. Without hesitating I kicked him as hard as I could, barefooted, square between his legs. He collapsed, groaning in agony. I bolted, but his roaring had summoned hordes of other guards and, unfortunately, I ran slap bang into one of them. He seized me, and rifle butts and fists sent me to the ground. I was dragged to the front of the Japanese officers' hut. The interpreter was raised, along with the camp commandant, the dreaded Black Prince. He seized me, and rifle butts and fists sent me to the ground This was a moment of absolute terror. Throughout my 14 months of captivity I had tried at all times to stay out of range of the brutal Japanese guards, and now here I was receiving the personal attentions of the camp's sadist-in-chief. He asked the Korean for his side of the story. No doubt he left out the bit about making sexual advances towards me. When he was done the commandant asked why I had assaulted the guard. I told them the truth. The Black Prince started screaming at all and sundry and I knew I was in serious trouble. They took the Korean guard away and marched me to the front of the guardhouse, where I was forced to stand to attention. Racked with pain and suffering from broken toes, I wobbled and wilted. Any sign of slumping over brought a flurry of rifle butts to the kidneys to straighten me up again. Every minute of every hour throughout that night was pure torture. At sunrise my fellow prisoners assembled for breakfast and rollcall before going out to slave on the railway. The guards kept me behind. The rising sun bore down on my defenceless body, and when I lost consciousness my personal minders threw buckets of water over me and kicked me to attention. It was relentless. Sunset came. The other POWs returned and averted their eyes - a sure sign that my predicament was serious. Nobody showed any signs of sympathy, to do so was to risk reprisals on themselves. The rest of the chilly night passed in a blur of kicks and beatings. I hallucinated and felt as if I were going insane. Come the second morning, the Black Prince instructed two guards to haul me off to the black hole. My heart sank. I knew that most men kept in these higher forms of punishment - semi-subterranean cages made out of bamboo and proportioned so you could not stand, lay down or even kneel fully - did not come out alive. And if they did, they had been reduced to crippled wrecks who never fully recovered. The guards threw me into one of the bamboo cages. Darkness and the filth of the previous occupants engulfed me. I sobbed, falling in and out of consciousness. Days came and went. Malaria struck me down, causing uncontrollable shivers. Lice were crawling all over me. In the darkness, the sense of isolation was devastating and I became half out of my mind with pain and exhaustion. My degradation was complete. My only notion of time came from the arrival of a watery bowl of rice once a day. I had counted six or seven bowls by the time they allowed me out. As I crawled out of the dark cell, I deemed myself lucky to have spent such a short period in the black hole. I had been in for a week. It could easily have been a month. I reached my hut on all fours and Dr Mathieson, the British Army doctor in our camp, got to work on me. Slowly he and his orderlies brought me back to life with lime juice, water and scavenged food scraps, a little milk and some duck eggs. Within a week, even in my feeble condition, I was passed as fit and sent back to work. This was just as well. For worse still was to come.
U. S. Army personnel toiled to identify the charred remains of Americans captured at Bataan and burned alive on Palawan. 20 March 1945 During World War II, in order to prevent the rescue of prisoners of war by the advancing allies, on 14 December 1944, units of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army (under the command of General Tomoyuki Yamashita) brought the POWs back to their camp and when an air raid warning was called the remaining 150 prisoners of war at Puerto Princesa dove into three covered trenches for refuge which were then set on fire using barrels of gasoline.[1] Prisoners who tried to escape the flames were shot down by machine gun fire. Others attempted to escape by climbing over a cliff that ran along one side of the trenches, but were later hunted down and killed. Only 11 men escaped the slaughter and between 133 and 141 were killed. The massacre is the basis for the recently published book Last Man Out: Glenn McDole, USMC, Survivor of the Palawan Massacre in World War II by Bob Wilbanks, and the opening scenes of the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid. A memorial has been erected on the site and McDole, in his eighties, was able to attend the dedication. Evidence of the episode has been recorded by two of the eleven survivors: Glenn McDole and Rufus Willie Smith from the 4th US Marines[2] Bones from the victims were discovered in early 1945.[3] 16 Japanese soldiers were put on trial for the massacre in Yokohama in August 1948.[4] A trial of Japanese personnel involved in the massacre initially sentenced the men to death, but later, they were released in the general amnesty.[5] The incident sparked a series POW rescue campaigns by the US, such as the raid at Cabanatuan on January 30th, 1945, the raid at Santo Tomas Internment Camp on February 3, 1945, the raid of Bilibid Prison on February 4, 1945, and raid at Los Baños on February 23, 1945. It was testimony of survivor, Pfc. Eugene Nielsen, US Army, was able to convince the military to embark on a campaign to save the POWs in the Philippines back in 1945. In 2006, Nielsen was interviewed again by Geoffrey Panos on the behalf of the University of Utah. Oliver North’s “War Stories” recently aired a program about the POWs of the Japanese during WWII. According to Mr. Roger Mansell (his website: http://www.mansell.com/pow-index.html ) who was interviewed by Oliver North during the program, this popular Fox News Network show is watched by nearly 18 million Americans every week. One of the episodes included in the program was the Palawan Massacre in which 139 POWs were burned to death by the Japanese on December 14. 1944 on Palawan island, Philippines. A list of victims complied by Ms. Lorna Nielsen Murray is available at http://www.west-point.org/family/japanese-pow/Palawan.htm Ms. Murray is the daughter of Mr. Eugene Nielsen, one of the only 11 survivors of the Palawan Massacre. Here, former member of the 4th Marines Band, Mr. Donald Versaw, who lost two of his fellow band members in the massacre, writes about the dedication of a new marker for the victims that took place on October 4, 2003 in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.
Glen McDole, one of the only three survivors of the Palawan Massacre, tells an audience of about 200 the story of his miraculous escape from Japanese captivity in 1944. Before him lie the remains of 123 victims of one of the most savage atrocities in World War II. Seated about the podium, right to left is: Ralph Church, Cemetery Administrator of Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery; Eugene Nielsen, the second survivor of the Palawan Massacre; Mr. McDole; Joseph A. Dupont Jr., Vice Commander 4th Marine Association and former POW once confined at the POW camp; Captain Martin Christie USMC (ret.) and Commander of 4th Marine Association; Chaplain Weber, Captain Missouri National Guard. In this view the new bronze maker conceived and promoted by Joseph Dupont and others is draped with patriotic bunting as the extreme left of the picture.
Victims of the Japanese Massacre These U.S. prisoners of war of the Japanese were on the island of Palawan, P. I., as slave laborers building an airfield for the Japanese military. Believing that an invasion by the U.S. forces was imminent, the prisoners were forced into three tunnel air raid shelters, thus following orders from the Japanese High Command to dispose of prisoners by any means available. Buckets of gasoline were thrown inside the shelters followed by flaming torches. Those not instantly killed by the explosion ran burning from the tunnels and were machine gunned and bayoneted to death. |
|
| Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Unit 731 was the code name of an Imperial Japanese Army unit officially known as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. It was initially set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces.
Russian troops approach Moscow with German prisoners on February 10, 1942. (AP Photo)The Katyn Wood Massacre The first news of a massacre at Katyn Wood came in April 1943 when the Germans found a mass grave of 4,500 Polish soldiers in German-occupied Russia. The discovery at Katyn Wood was to greatly embarrass the Russian government. The Russians responded to the German claims that Russia's secret police did it, by claiming that the massacre was carried out by the Germans themselves. In the context of the war - the Allies were fighting the Nazi war machine and Russia was a valued ally - the German version was not accepted by the British or other Allied governments. However, in the era of the Cold War, the Russian version was heavily scrutinised and questionned. The first announcement of what had been found at Katyn Wood was made on Radio Berlin on April 13th, 1943. "A report has reached us from Smolensk to the effect that the local inhabitants have mentioned to the German authorities the existence of a place where mass executions have been carried out by the Bolsheviks and where 10,000 Polish officers have been murdered by the Soviet Secret State Police. The German authorities went to a place called the Hill of Goats, a Russian health resort situated twelve kilometers west of Smolensk, where a gruesome discovery was made." Radio Berlin broadcast The Germans claimed that they found a ditch 28 meters long and 16 meters wide at the Hill of Goats in which were 3,000 bodies piled up in layers of twelve. All the bodies were fully dressed in military uniform; some were bound and all had pistol shots to the back of their heads. The Germans believed that they would find 10,000 bodies (hence the figure in the broadcast) but eventually the final total was 4,500. The Germans claimed that the bodies were in good condition and they even recognised a general Smorawinsky as one of the victims. The soil had done a great deal to preserve the bodies and any documentation found on them. However, any information relating to this massacre made public during the war came from Goebbel's propaganda ministry and had to be treated as suspect by the Allies. In January 1943, the Russians had turned the tide of the war with the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad - a victory Churchill had urged all on the Allied side to celebrate. As if in a knee-jerk reaction, any criticism about the Russians in Easter 1943 would not have been acceptable. Any connection between the massacre and the Germans, however, would have been more readily accepted by all those fighting against the Nazis. But what exactly did happen at Katyn Wood? When German forces attacked Poland in September 1939, the Blitzkrieg tactic tore great holes in the Polish defence. However, on September 17th, as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Russian forces also invaded Poland. The Russian leadership called on the Polish soldiers to rise up against their officers and political leaders as a punishment for getting the country into an unjust war. Those Polish officers and senior NCO's captured by the Red Army were arrested and deported to Russia. It is known that they were taken to three camps in Russia - Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. One of the camps, Kozelsk, contained more than just officers. It contained arrested Polish university lecturers, surgeons, physicians, barristers and lawyers. One woman prisoner was held at Kozelsk - Janina Lewandowski. Her body was found at Katyn clothed in the uniform of the Polish Air Force. Ostashkov held officers - but it also held anybody from Poland who was considered to be 'bourgeois'. It seems that only Starobelsk held only officers from the Polish military. To start with, the Russians attempted to 're-educate' the Poles in all three camps. Brigadier Zarubin of the Soviet Secret State Police was put in charge of this task. His efforts to promote the Soviet way of life probably had no chance. The Poles in the camp were forbidden to say Mass - which for a devout Roman Catholic nation was a major blow and it was almost certainly done secretly. Therefore, it is untenable to think that there were any takers for the Soviet view point which Zarubin was trying to sell. It seems that Zarubin reported his failure to Moscow and shortly after this a colonel from the Soviet Secret State Police turned up at all three camps. Just after the visit of this colonel, groups of prisoners were taken from the camps to an unknown destination. In April 1940, all three camps were simultaneously cleared. On June 22nd, 1941, Nazi Germany launched 'Operation Barbarossa'. The German military swept aside the Russian army and penetrated deep into Russia. Stalin, alarmed by the collapse of the Red Army, ordered that an amnesty should be granted to all Polish prisoners who were willing to fight against the Germans. On August 14th 1941, a Polish-Soviet military agreement was signed. However, no-one could account for the whereabouts of the officers held in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. Winston Churchill himself wrote about the embarrassment such a disclosure brought on the Russian authorities. The Polish government in exile, based in London, was especially concerned that the Russians explain where these men were.Stalin gave two answers. Initially, he claimed that the men had escaped to Manchuria. However, the authorities in Moscow - which was effectively Stalin - claimed that the men were held in territory that the Germans had taken in their lightning attack in June 1941 and that only the Germans could account for their whereabouts. This was to become the standard Moscow answer to the problem - the Germans were responsible. Locals at Katyn Forest had long known that it was an area used by the secret police to execute those who had fallen out with Stalin's government. As early as 1929, the Soviet secret police had built a dacha there surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. To keep out the locals, the secret police also used guard dogs to patrol the perimeter of the dacha. On July 16th, 1941, Smolensk fell to the Germans. The Russian authorities had fled from Katyn and for the first time in years, the area was open 'to the public'. In 1942, Poles from the Todt Organisation arrived in the area to collect any form of scrap. As they worked on the Hill of Goats, they found the body of a dead Polish officer who was later buried in a dignified service. However, the winter for 1942-43 was severe and the ground at the Hill of Goats was frozen over. In the Spring of 1943, a Russian peasant, Ivan Krivozertzev, read an article in a newspaper ('Novyj Put') regarding General Sikorski and his search for thousands of Polish officers whom he could not account for. Despite communism in Russia, Krivozertzev had maintained his religious beliefs and re-called what he had seen in Smolensk in 1940. He had seen rail wagons coming into Smolensk station but being shunted into screened sidings. He had seen men being herded under armed guard into 'Black Ravens' - the local nickname for prison vehicles. Krivozertzev had also seen 'normal' prisoners being driven from Smolensk city in lorries with shovels and pick axes. Krivozertzev went to the Germans and told them that he believed the Polish officers would be found at the Hill of Goats. The Germans went to the forest and dug up mounds that had young fir trees on the top of them. These trees gave away an obvious secret as the rings on them indicated that they had been planted in April 1940. The Germans started digging in the Hill of Goats and found the bodies of many men, still in military uniform, who had been shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs. The Germans also found the bodies of Russian men and women who had been shot long before 1940. Curiously, the Germans claimed that the way the Russians and Poles had been tied was identical and that whoever did both sets of murders was the same organisation. The 4,500 bodies that were exhumed came from Kozelsk - no-one knows what happened to the men held at Starobelsk and Ostashkov. Moscow announced its stance on April 14th 1943: "The Polish prisoners in question were interned in the vicinity of Smolensk in special camps and were employed in road construction. In was impossible to evacuate them at the time of the approach of the German troops and, as a result, they fell into their hands. If, therefore, they have been found murdered, it means that they have been murdered by the Germans who, for reasons of provocation, now claim that the crime was committed by Soviet authorities." On April 15th, the British government publically stated via the BBC that the Germans had told lies and that it accepted the Russian version. This caused the Polish government in exile to call for an independent inspection of Katyn - something the International Red Cross in Switzerland could do. The German and Polish government (in exile) agreed to this; Moscow did not. The Russians broke off all relations with Poland and set up a puppet Polish government in Moscow. When Russia advanced into Europe and re-captured Katyn, it seemed as if the issue was solved as it was clear that the Russians were not going to allow any investigation into what happened at Katyn. At the Nuremburg trials, the murders were linked to the indictment against Goering and the Russians presented their evidence to 'prove' it was the Germans, but they were never probed and Katyn drifted into obscurity. At the final judgment of the International Tribunal, Katyn was not even mentioned. For their part the Russians claimed that the massacre took place after it became obvious that the Wehrmacht was in full retreat after their defeat at Stalingrad and that it was carried out by the Nazis. They put up the following evidence gathered at Nuremburg: The Germans did not allow any external authority to fully examine either the bodies or the grave sites. The Polish Commission, set up by the Nazis to examine the evidence, was only allowed to see what the Germans wanted them to see. One Bulgarian professor, Marko Markov, claimed that he was only allowed to dissect one body that was presented to him and that he could not conclude from this body that it had been in the ground for three years – as the Nazis tried to suggest to him that it had been. In his written report, Markov only wrote about what he found on the body – he did not give a conclusion as to how the body got into its state. He and seven other experts were only allowed two half-a-day visits to the grave sites by the Germans. “It reminded me of a tourist trip”, claimed Markov. The Russians also claimed that the issue of the three year old saplings was also easy to explain. They claimed that there was no evidence that they came from the grave mounds themselves and that they could have been gathered at any point from Katyn Wood and handed in as ‘evidence’. The Russians also claimed that all the bullets found on the bodies were made by the German firm Geko. It was claimed that they were all Geko 7.65 mm bullets which only the German would have had access to. Who committed the murders remained a mystery until 1990 when the Russian authorities admitted that it was the Russian Secret police (NKVD), that then spent much time and effort in attaching blame on the Germans. |
Russian prisoners of war, taken by the Germans on July 7, 1941. (AP Photo) #
An column of Russian prisoners of war taken during recent fighting in Ukraine, on their way to a Nazi prison camp on September 3, 1941. (AP Photo) #
This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier. (AP Photo/USHMM/LOC) #
German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops. (OFF/AFP/Getty Images) #
Workmen clear up raid debris in Singapore on January 17, 1942, after a Japanese bombing raid on the British naval base. (AP Photo) #
The conference at which Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942. Man seated at left, facing camera, is identified as Lieut. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese Commander. Man in right foreground, profile to camera, is identified as Lieut. Gen. A. E. Percival, British commander. (AP Photo) #
A large freighter settles slowly after being hit by Japanese bombs alongside of one of Singapore's docks on February 12, 1942. Smoke from other struck objectives billows over the waterfront in this photo by C. Yates McDaniel, Associated Press correspondent, who was among the last to leave the besieged port on February 12. The next day his ship was bombed and he reached safety after further harrowing experience. (AP Photo/C. Yates McDaniel) #
An American soldier stands tense in his foxhole on Bataan peninsula, in the Philippines, waiting to hurl a flaming bottle bomb at an oncoming Japanese tank, in April of 1942. (AP Photo) #
A big coastal gun is fired from fortified American positions on Corregidor Island, at the entrance to Manila Bay on the Philippines, on May 6, 1942. (AP Photo) #
Japanese forces use flame-throwers while attacking a fortified emplacement on Corregidor Island, in the Philippines in May of 1942. (NARA) #
Billows of smoke from burning buildings pour over the wall which encloses Manila's Intramuros district, sometime in 1942. (AP Photo) #
American soldiers line up as they surrender their arms to the Japanese at the naval base of Mariveles on Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in April of 1942. (AP Photo) #
Japanese soldiers stand guard over American war prisoners just before the start of the "Bataan Death March" in 1942. This photograph was stolen from the Japanese during Japan's three-year occupation. (AP Photo/U.S. Marine Corps) #
American and Filipino prisoners of war captured by the Japanese are shown at the start of the Death March after the surrender of Bataan on April 9, 1942, near Mariveles in the Philippines. Starting from Mariveles on April 10, some 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were force-marched to Camp O'Donnell, a new prison camp 65 miles away. The prisoners, weakened after a three-month siege, were harassed by Japanese troops for days as they marched, the slow or sick killed with bayonets or swords. (AP Photo) #
American prisoners of war carry their wounded and sick during the Bataan Death March in April of 1942. This photo was taken from the Japanese during their three year occupation of the Philippines. (AP Photo/U.S. Army) #
These prisoners were photographed along the Bataan Death March in April of 1942. They have their hands tied behind their backs. The estimates of the number of deaths that occurred along the march vary quite a bit, but some 5,000 to 10,000 Filipino and 600 to 650 American prisoners of war died before they could reach Camp O'Donnell. Thousands more would die in poor conditions at the camp in the following weeks. (NARA)
A man carries away the bodies of dead Jews in the Ghetto of Warsaw in 1943, where people died of hunger in the streets. Every morning, about 4-5 A.M., funeral carts collected a dozen or more corpses from the streets. The bodies of the dead Jews were cremated in deep pits. (AFP/Getty Images) #
A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. (AP Photo) #
After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Ghetto was completely destroyed. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to killing centers or concentration camps. This is a view of the remains of the ghetto, which the German SS dynamited to the ground. The Warsaw Ghetto only existed for a few years, and in that time, some 300,000 Polish Jews lost their lives there. (AP Photo) #
A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial. (AP Photo/USHMM) #
Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned. (AFP/Getty Images) #
Anne Frank poses in 1941 in this photo made available by Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In August of 1944, Anne, her family and others who were hiding from the occupying German Security forces, were all captured and shipped off to a series of prisons and concentration camps. Anne died from typhus at age 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her posthumously published diary has made her a symbol of all Jews killed in World War II. (AP Photo/Anne Frank House/Frans Dupont) #
The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob. (AP Photo/Yad Vashem Photo Archives) #
Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, who was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005 documentary: "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me." (AP Photo/Auschwitz Museum) #
A victim of Nazi medical experimentation. A victim's arm shows a deep burn from phosphorus at Ravensbrueck, Germany, in November of 1943. The photograph shows the results of a medical experiment dealing with phosphorous that was carried out by doctors at Ravensbrueck. In the experiment, a mixture of phosphorus and rubber was applied to the skin and ignited. After twenty seconds, the fire was extinguished with water. After three days, the burn was treated with Echinacin in liquid form. After two weeks the wound had healed. This photograph, taken by a camp physician, was entered as evidence during the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, NARA) #
Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in 1945. (AFP/Getty Images) #
American soldiers silently inspect some of the rail trucks loaded with dead which were found on the rail siding at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, on May 3, 1945. (AP Photo) #
A starved Frenchman sits among the dead in a sub-camp of the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp, in Nordhausen, Germany, in April of 1945. (U.S. Army/LOC) #
Bodies lie piled against the walls of a crematory room in a German concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. The bodies were found by U.S. Seventh Army troops who took the camp on May 14, 1945. (AP Photo) #
A U.S. soldier inspects thousands of gold wedding bands taken from Jews by the Germans and stashed in the Heilbronn Salt Mines, on May 3, 1945 in Germany. (AFP/NARA) #
Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945. Photo taken in an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U.S. Army. (U.S. Army/LOC) #
This heap of ashes and bones is the debris from one day's killing of German prisoners by 88 troopers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in Germany, shown on April 25, 1945. (AP Photo/U.S. Army Signal Corps) #
Prisoners at the electric fence of Dachau concentration camp cheer American soldiers in Dachau, Germany in an undated photo. Some of them wear the striped blue and white prison garb. They decorated their huts with flags of all nations which they had made secretly as they heard the guns of the 42nd Rainbow Division getting louder and louder on the approach to Dachau. (AP Photo) #
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers in the Ohrdruf concentration camp, shortly after the liberation of the camp in April of 1945. As American forces approached, the guards shot the remaining prisoners. (U.S. Army Signal Corps/NARA) #
A dying prisoner, too weak to sit up amid his rags and filth, victim of starvation and incredible brutality, at the Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany on April 18, 1945. (AP Photo) #
Prisoners on a death march from Dachau move towards the south along the Noerdliche Muenchner Street in Gruenwald, Germany, on April 29, 1945. Many thousands of prisoners were marched forcibly from outlying prison camps to camps deeper inside Germany as Allied forces closed in. Thousands died along the way, anyone unable to keep up was executed on the spot. Pictured, fourth from the right, is Dimitry Gorky who was born on Aug. 19, 1920 in Blagoslovskoe, Russia to a family of peasant farmers. During World War II Dmitry was imprisoned in Dachau for 22 months. The reason for his imprisonment is not known. Photo released by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (AP Photo/USHMM, courtesy of KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau) #
American soldiers walk by row after row of corpses lying on the ground beside barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen, Germany, on April 17, 1945. The camp is located about 70 miles west of Leipzig. As the camp was liberated on April 12, the U.S. Army found more than 3,000 bodies, and a handful of survivors. (AP Photo/US Army Signal Corps) #
A dead prisoner lies in a train carriage near Dachau concentration camp in May of 1945. (Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images) #
Liberating soldiers of Lt. General George S. Patton's 3rd Army, XX Corps, are shown at Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. (AP Photo/U.S. Army) #
General Patch's 12th Armored Division, forging their way towards the Austrian border, uncovered horrors at a German prison camp at Schwabmunchen, southwest of Munich. Over 4,000 slave laborers, all Jews of various nationalities, were housed in the prison. The internees were burned alive by guards who set fire to the crude huts in which the prisoners slept, shooting any who tried to escape. Sprawled here in the prison enclosure are the burnt bodies of some of the Jewish slave laborers uncovered by the US 7th Army at Schwabmunchen, May 1, 1945. (AP Photo/Jim Pringle) #
The corpse of a prisoner lies on the barbed wire fence in Leipzig-Thekla, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany. (NARA) #
These dead victims of the Germans were removed from the Lambach concentration camp in Austria, on May 6, 1945, by German soldiers under orders of U.S. Army troops. As soon as all the bodies were removed from the camp, the Germans buried them. This camp originally held 18,000 people, each building housing 1,600. There were no beds or sanitary facilities whatsoever, and 40 to 50 prisoners died each day. (AP Photo) #
A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body in the Thekla camp outside Leipzig, in April of 1945, after the US troops entered Leipzig April 18. On the 18th of April, the workers of the Thekla plane factory were locked in an isolated building of the factory by the Germans and burned alive by incendiary bombs. About 300 prisoners died. Those who managed to escape died on the barbed wire or were executed by the Hitler youth movement, according to a US captain's report. (Eric Schwab/AFP/Getty Images) #
Burned bodies of political prisoners of the Germans lie strewn about the entrance to a barn at Gardelegen, Germany on April 16, 1945 where they met their death a the hands of German SS troops who set the barn on fire. The group tried to escape and was shot by the SS troops. Of the 1,100 prisoners, only 12 managed to escape. (AP Photo/U.S. Army Signal Corps) #
Some of the skeleton-like human remains found by men of the Third Armored Division, U.S. First Army, at the German concentration camp at Nordhausen on April 25, 1945, where hundreds of "slave laborers" of various nationalities lay dead and dying. (AP Photo) #
When American troops liberated prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp, Germany, in 1945, many German SS guards were killed by the prisoners who then threw their bodies into the moat surrounding the camp. (AP Photo) #
Lt. Col. Ed Seiller of Louisville, Kentucky, stands amid a pile of Holocaust victims as he speaks to 200 German civilians who were forced to see the grim conditions at the Landsberg concentration camp, on May 15, 1945. (AP Photo) #
Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in a concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria, on May 7, 1945. The camp was reputedly used for "scientific" experiments. (NARA/Newsmakers) #
A Russian survivor, liberated by the 3rd Armored Division of the U.S. First Army, identifies a former camp guard who brutally beat prisoners on April 14, 1945, at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany. (AP Photo) #
Dead bodies piled up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. The British found 60,000 men, women and children dying of starvation and disease. (AFP/Getty Images) #
German SS troops load victims of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp into trucks for burial, in Belsen, Germany, on April 17, 1945. British guards hold rifles in the background. (AP Photo/British Official Photo) #
Citizens of Ludwigslust, Germany, inspect a nearby concentration camp under orders of the 82nd Airborne Division on May 6, 1945. Bodies of victims of German prison camps were found dumped in pits in yard, one pit containing 300 bodies. (NARA) #
A pile of bodies left to rot in the Bergen-Belsen camp, in Bergen, Germany, found after the camp was liberated by British forces on April 20, 1945. Some 60,000 civilians, most suffering from typhus, typhoid and dysentery, were dying by the hundreds daily, despite the frantic efforts by medical services rushed to the camp. (AP Photo) #
Manacled following his arrest is Joseph Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Belsen, photographed on April 28, 1945. After standing trial, Kramer, "The Beast of Belsen", was convicted and executed in December of 1945. (AP Photo) #
German SS women remove bodies of their victims from trucks in the concentration camp at Belsen, Germany, on April 28, 1945. Starvation and disease killed hundreds of the many thousands imprisoned at the camp. British soldiers holding rifles in the background stand on the dirt which will fill the communal grave. (AP Photo/British official photo) #
A German SS guard, standing amid hundreds of corpses, hauls another body of a concentration camp victim into a mass grave in Belsen, Germany in April of 1945. (AP Photo) #
Piles of the dead at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 30, 1945. Some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in this one camp alone. (AP Photo) #
A German mother shields the eyes of her son as they walk with other civilians past a row of exhumed bodies outside Suttrop, Germany. The bodies were those of 57 Russians killed by German SS troops and dumped in a mass grave before the arrival of troops from the U.S. Ninth Army. Soldiers of the 95th Infantry division were led by informers to the massive grave on May 3, 1945. Before burial, all German civilians in the vicinity were ordered to view the victims. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, U.S. Army Signal Corps)
No comments:
Post a Comment