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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 22

Dr. Ludwik Fleck:
How vaccine-makers fooled the Nazis from inside a concentration camp lab
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"We made a typhus vaccine that did not work. For controls we sent a sample that did work. The illiterates didn’t realize what was going on."

2/n Confined first at Auschwitz then Buchenwald, Jewish microbiologist Ludwik Fleck conspired with a ragtag team of scientists and rebels to send dud typhus vaccines to the German soldiers on the eastern front.
The good vaccine was administered to vulnerable people in the camp.

3/n In the Lwow ghetto, with a vast supply of infected people, Fleck had begun to search for the typhus antigen in human sources – specifically, in the urine of the sick. He found it, deriving first a diagnostic method, and then a vaccine. By August 1942, he would be ready to

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 19

Hinda Cohen - a powerful message in tiny shoes
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Tzipporah (née Barka) and Dov Cohen lived in Kovno. Their first child died at birth before the war.
With the German invasion of Lithuania, the couple tried unsuccessfully to escape to Soviet territory, and eventually found

2/n themselves back home in Kovno. On 18 January 1942, about 6 months after their relocation to the Kovno ghetto, Tzipporah and Dov had a baby girl. They named her Hinda, after Tzipporah’s mother. In late November 1943,

Hinda's parents: Tzipporah and Dov

3/n the couple was assigned to forced labor in the Aleksotas camp for airport workers, outside the ghetto. During the day, men and women would go out to work, while the children remained in the camp with a handful of elderly. Women and children were separated from men,

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 16

Wilhelm Hosenfeld, savior of "The Pianist", Wladyslaw Szpilman
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Although Hosenfeld had already joined the NSDAP in 1935, he soon lost his illusions about the regime and was appalled by the crimes against Poles and Jews that he witnessed. Throughout his military service, he kept

a diary in which he expressed his feelings. The texts survived as he regularly sent the notebooks home. In his notes, Hosenfeld emphasized his growing outrage at the oppression of the Poles by the regime, the persecution of the Polish clergy, the mistreatment of the Jews and,

at the beginning of the "Final Solution", his horror of the annihilation of the Jewish people. In 1943, after witnessing the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he wrote in his diary: "These animals. With this appalling mass murder of the Jews we lost the war, we brought

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 16

Transport XXI from Dossin Barracks, Belgium to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 31 July, 1942
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On July 31, 1943 Giza, born Gitel Wachspress in Tarnow, together with her lover David Weissblum, a furrier, was put on transport XXI to Auschwitz.
The life of this courageous couple became a

2/n symbol of resistance and courage during dark times. After their flight to Belgium in July 1939, they later had to flee to France during the German invasion. When they returned to Antwerp in 1940, they discovered that their house had been looted.

3/n Giza found strength in volunteering at a shelter for the Jewish poor. When her neighbor Eva Fastag begged her for help in smuggling and distributing illegal newspapers, Giza and David got involved in secret activities.

Eva Fastag

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 14

1/n "Aktion T4", the Nazi euthanasia program

T4 Program, Nazi German effort—framed as a euthanasia program—to kill incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly

2/n people. Adolf Hitler initiated the program in 1939, and, while it was officially discontinued in 1941, killings continued covertly until the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
Within a few months the T4 Program—named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the

3/n Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4—involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. While the program’s personnel killed people at first by starvation and lethal injection, they later chose asphyxiation by poison gas as the preferred killing technique. Physicians

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Cowboy Tcherno Bill

@RudiGeerts

Nov 13

German camp brothels in World War II
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In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordelle) to create an incentive for prisoners to collaborate, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos,

2/n functionaries and the criminal elements, because regular inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary of exposure to SS schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners' work productivity

3/n levels, but instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs. The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, except for Auschwitz, which employed its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in

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