Bidspirit auction | A collection of harrowing testimonies

A collection of harrowing testimonies of prisoners from the death camps. Dresden. [1945] - First edition - Tatsachen klagen an! Berichte der Überlebenden - “The Facts Accuse! Testimonies of the Survivors”, published by the Council of the City of Dresden in cooperation with the Welfare Department and the municipal aid agency for the victims of fascism (Opfer des Faschismus). A collection of harrowing testimonies of prisoners from the death camps, documenting the severe experiments carried out on prisoners’ bodies and the various methods of killing in the camps. Dresden [1945]. Extremely rare. An important collection of testimonies by prisoners who were held in the Nazi death camps of Majdanek, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and others, delivered in Dresden at the end of the war, including extensive and difficult-to-read descriptions of the terrible suffering they endured in the camps. At the beginning of the booklet appears the testimony of Eddy Piesel, who recounts the horrors he experienced in the Majdanek and Buchenwald camps: “After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German forces, I was sent, like many other Czechs, to German concentration camps for ‘re-education.’” Piesel was among the first prisoners to arrive at Majdanek and to take part in the construction of the camp: “We had to hastily build bunkers intended for gas burning, crematoria, so-called crematorium furnaces, capable of burning up to two thousand bodies a day in a single installation. They spoke here in truly technical terms about ‘capacity, ’ ‘intake capacity, ’ ‘workload, ’ and so on... I was part of the permanent camp staff and was assigned to build the crematoria...”. In his account, he describes in detail the burning of bodies in the camp: “The ovens were mostly built of firebricks and sealed with thin doors. Each oven held five bodies. As the burnings progressed, up to ten bodies were crammed into each oven. Adjacent external structures were attached to each crematorium, into which the bodies were thrown. There, the bodies were sometimes piled high. Special squads were responsible for stripping the dead, removing their shoes and clothing. Anything usable was taken to storage; unusable items were burned together with the bodies...”. Piesel was among the prisoners who installed the gas pipes for the gas vans used by the Nazis for killing in the early stages of the war. Further on appears the testimony of Johannes Becz, describing the suffering endured by children in Majdanek. The former prisoner Walter Meissen recounts the horrors of the Melk camp in Upper Danube: “Already on the first night I began to scratch all over my body. I quickly changed my shirt, and it was already covered with lice... When we marched through the town, we left behind us a terrible stench. We were not allowed to go to the latrine during the roll call and the march, which lasted for hours, and almost everyone suffered from diarrhea or dysentery... For hours we stood in the cold... The kapo struck our heads at random, so hard that blood ran down our faces and backs. We had done nothing...”. He describes the dreadful conditions in the camp infirmary: “The dead and the sick see one another here as equals. I will never go to the infirmary again. I prefer to die in the mine shaft or remain lying in the street. None of the sick are bandaged; many have severe wounds and fractures from the daily accidents caused by falling sand and rocks... To this are added the victims of daily punishments and the victims of the SS, who are forced to stand in the mine for three or four days and nights for some trivial reason until they collapse from hunger and exhaustion....”,   And more. A prisoner named Willy Michalski recounts the execution of a prisoner who refused to praise Adolf Hitler in front of all the camp inmates. Hugo Weiss documents the horrific experiments carried out on prisoners’ bodies in the Sachsenhausen camp: “Camp physician Dr. Schmitt, an SS-Untersturmführer, immediately set to work and selected his victims from the camp’s surgical ward. Nationality and age, as usual, played no role. In this way, an entire series of Germans, Russians, French, and others suffering from camp diseases were ‘treated’ for experimental purposes. Camp diseases included, in particular, furunculosis (often in very severe cases), ringworm (which could drive sufferers to despair), phlegmon with sepsis, severe bone fractures, stab and cut wounds, bite wounds inflicted by dogs attacking prisoners, skull fractures... malaria and tuberculosis, dysentery, frostbite (especially of the third degree), and more. These innocent victims were then told that they were to receive medical assistance. But what did this assistance entail? The patients were taken to the operating room, placed on the table, and the SS officer and his colleagues ‘immediately set to work.’ An incision of ten to fifteen centimeters, reaching down to the bone, was made in each victim’s leg.