Word: maidanek
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact is that most of the killing was unorganized and spontaneous. In this case, a rare and significant one, the state power was not guilty. As for armaments, the massacres in India and Pakistan were as far removed as possible from modern war or from the gas chambers of Maidanek. The murderers with whom we are dealing used knives, chisels, ropes, hockey sticks, screwdrivers, bricks and slender fingers...
...Nazi mass killing of Jews had a very bad effect in Poland. Once Poles knew it was that easy to kill Jews, the tendency and temptation was there. I will never forget the day that the Nazis killed 17,000 Jews at Maidanek while I was in another part of that concentration camp. That evening many of my Polish fellow prisoners got drunk to celebrate. That's terrible. But it's true...
Russian justice has a flair for getting people to admit most anything. It got Sensualist Koch to admit shooting at least three victims at each mass execution as an example to his men, asphyxiating 30 people in a gas chamber, sending 2,500 to Maidanek (knowing it was a death camp), personally executing more than 5,000 men, women & children in three years...
Between the Nazis and their victims was this difference (among others): those who suffered at Dachau and Belsen and Maidanek may have dreamed of vengeance against the individual Nazis who tortured them, but would not have planned the mass retaliation that has befallen millions of Germans, including children. No one, in fact, wished it; the misery that drags along the roads of Europe today is beneath premeditation, beyond mere vengeance...
Heinrich Himmler's last journey was different. Before, wherever he had travelled, death followed him like a shadow-and the shadow fell on many, at Maidanek. Oswiecim, Buchenwald. "You find people there," he once said of his concentration camps, "with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed and deformed ones . . . a lot of cheap trash . . . the prisoners are made up of slave souls...