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6 There were 144 successful escapes from Auschwitz, including that of four prisoners who dressed in SS uniforms and drove out through the main gate in Commandant Rudolf Höss’s personal automobile. The four were never caught. Höss, on the other hand, was hanged in 1947 for war crimes. A special gallows was constructed in the heart of Auschwitz for the occasion. It stands there to this day.
7 Josef Mengele went on to be captured by the Americans soon after the war ended, but was released because he’d faked his identity. Mengele then successfully fled Germany to begin a new life in South America, where he was protected by corrupt local authorities in Argentina and Brazil. Ongoing efforts by Israel and West Germany to have him repatriated for trial failed. In 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming off the coast of Brazil and drowned. He was buried under a false name, but his body’s location was discovered six years later. To this day, the body is stored in the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine. His story was the basis for the novel The Boys from Brazil.
8 On a normal morning in Auschwitz, a prison orchestra played music near the sign as prisoners marched to work. The rhythm made it easier for them to march in time, which also made it easier for the guards to perform the daily head count.
9 Of those sixty thousand, fifteen thousand died in the death marches just before the arrival of the Soviet army. Some froze due to lack of clothing and shoes, but most were shot when they became unable to continue walking. Their bodies lined the roads leading to the railheads of Loslau and Gleiwitz, where unheated cattle cars awaited them. The trains took them to infamous concentration camps such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald. Many who made the march called it the worst period they spent in Nazi captivity.
10 Roosevelt’s radio address was very specific in informing Americans about the reality of the Holocaust: “In one of the blackest crimes of all history—begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war—the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews who, while living under persecution, have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with a
11 In one of the most famous stories to come out of the Holocaust, A
12 The Nazi plan to develop an atomic bomb began in January 1939, when German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassma
13 Hitler’s bunker complex was much more than a simple air-raid shelter. It consisted of two levels: the upper Vorbunker containing a conference room, dining facility, kitchen, water storage room, and bedrooms for support staff, which numbered more than two dozen; and the Führerbunker, located some thirty feet below ground, with lavishly decorated rooms for Hitler and Eva Braun. A large oil painting of his personal hero Frederick the Great covered one wall. The entire complex was beneath a lavish garden, where Hitler emerged most days to walk Blondi.
Chapter 15
1 Joseph Stalin specifically condoned rape as a reward for his soldiers. “People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers of blood and death has fun with a woman.” The brutality will become systematic in the final days of the war. In the German city of Dresden, the Russians will gang-rape women in the streets, forcing husbands and fathers to watch. Afterward, the men will be shot. The Russians will claim that the rapes were retribution for atrocities committed during the German invasion of Russia, which does not explain the estimated one hundred thousand rapes in Austria, two hundred thousand in Hungary, and tens of thousands of others in Bulgaria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. To this day, the Putin government in Russia denies that the Russian army committed mass rape, but the evidence contained in various eyewitness accounts is overwhelming.
Chapter 16
1 So much so that Winston Churchill was forced to give a pro-American speech in the British House of Commons to heal the wounds.
2 The Siegfried Line was a four-hundred-mile-long defensive array of eighteen thousand bunkers and interlocking rows of pyramid-shaped concrete antitank obstacles nicknamed “dragon’s teeth.” The Germans referred to it as the Westwall, while the Americans continued to use “Siegfried,” after a similar system of forts dating back to the First World War. Hitler built the Westwall between 1936 and 1938, anticipating by almost a decade the day when some great army—in this case, that of George S. Patton—would attempt to invade the Fatherland.