Why Nazis documented war crimes
How and why nazs kept documentation of their own war crimes
Paper work
16 miles of vast documents about holocaust victims have recently been scanned and uploaded to the web for the world to see. Over 60,00 of these were published in 2006. And, with all of the detailed pages about inmates, mobile killing units, and death in general, we just have to wonder. Why would someone do anything like that? Well, once you understand, everything makes sense.
"Press Briefing: Government Group Opens Long-Secret Documents under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act." US Newswire 6 May 2004. Research in Context.Web. 21 Jan. 2016.
Auschwitz Survivors Tell Their Stories
Gold rings of inmates
Steinkopf, Matthias. Blood Money. 1943. GR Films Inc, Oswiecim. GR Films Inc. Web. 4 Feb. 2016. <http://www.grfilmsinc.com/broadcast-single.asp?br_id=4>.
Victim's Shoes
Bielawski, K. Victim's Shoes. 1992. Virtual Shtetl, Majdanek. Virtual Shtetl. Web. 4 Feb. 2016. <http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/cms/news/4893,sztutowo-terrain-contains-reminders-of-the-holocaust/>.
Preserving the Holocaust
Moore, Dillon. Preserving the Holocaust. 2010. Amizade Global Service Learning, Oswiecim. Amizade Global Service Learning. Web. 4 Feb. 2016. <https://amizade.org/amizade-in-poland-2011-holocaust-remembrance-and-historical-preservation/>.
In the Mind of the Guilty
With killing being all the rage with the nazis, the amount and quality of death can make you a very important person. The more deaths that one soldier oversees, the more likely that soldier is to advance through the ranks. That one nazi would record the person they killed, their health, cause of death, and property of person at death. Death was their line of business, but, that didn't mean that there couldn't be side deals. Anything that had belonged to the prisoner, now belonged to them, and they sold or used it all, including body parts. Houses of the victims now belonged to the government, clothing and other items on the person would be sold to "help the war efforts", some corpses were even used in experiments or sold on the black market. If all of this stuff is so horrifically terrible, how did one do it without having a mental breakdown? Well, to them, prisoners were only "units", kind of like taking a cattle inventory. That and they transported these people in cattle cars. Sometimes, those who wouldn't kill would instead met their success by deporting the people.
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