Word: maidanek
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...life sentence; another was acquitted; the rest received jail terms ranging from three to twelve years. Thus ended the longest (5½ years), and probably the last, major West German trial for Nazi war crimes against concentration camp inmates. The nine were all guards at the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland between 1941 and 1944. They had been charged with shooting, gassing, drowning or fatally beating some of the 250,000 Polish Jews, gypsies, Russian P.O.W.s and others who died there...
Fairy Tale. Polish Communist response was not moderate at all. Snarled the daily Zycie Warszawy: "Who in Poland empowered the Polish bishops to repent and forgive? On whose behalf have they done it? On behalf of the millions murdered in Auschwitz and Maidanek?" Other government papers chimed in, while "students" and "workers" rallied in Lodz, Szczecin and Warsaw to accuse the prelates of meddling in foreign affairs and sabotaging the national interest...
...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...