Here’s a 60 Minutes segment I found both intriguing and touching. The show reveals a ton of Nazi documentation on the Holocaust (50 million pages!) that has only recently been made public. The documents and artifacts were found by the Allies after the war and sequestered in a town called Bad Arolsen (you can even search the archive here).
The Nazis were obsessive at recording everything, including details of the victims they killed in the camps. Why? Because they wanted to prove to their superiors that they were “getting the job done.” The minutiae recorded, including the number and size of the lice on prisoners’ heads, is amazing.
Some of the most moving parts include showing three Holocaust survivors their own records, records they’d never seen before. One rolls up his sleeve to show a tattooed number corresponding to his camp document.
Thank you for the link to that archive.
The three survivors are moving indeed. The magnitude of this archive is difficult to comprehend—sixteen miles of shelves.
Thank you for this link.
The attention spent from Nazis counting lice and sizes on a prisoner’s head is astounding. Just being a cog in a wheel to destroy people.
This is how someone used their brain? Sickening.
I can’t imagine being a human being who survived this horror. To think back on this atrocity that happened in your life has to be hideous pain.
The one survivor lost his entire family of sisters and his mother at such a young age. And he is just one person.
I’m glad to see at least there are records of each human being who disappeared. They did have a name besides a number.
This is moving indeed, here is the site of this place, with more additional material to peruse.
https://arolsen-archives.org/en/
I have overlooked this exact link is already there, here is a subpage to their eGuide which shows a large collection of document types, that is interactive: https://eguide.arolsen-archives.org/en/
Unfortunately not viewable in my country says YouTube.