HISTOIRE DU CAMP DE CONCENTRATION DE DACHAU (1933-1945) by Paul Berben, published by International Dachau Committee, Brussels 1968 - First edition. A copy dedicated by the author dated: March 16, 1970, and another dedication by the President of the International Dachau Committee, Dr. Patric O'Leary, who wrote the introduction. French.
The author of the report is the Belgian General Paul Berben, who wrote dozens of publications about the Third Reich. An important and detailed publication about the Nazi extermination machine in the Dachau concentration camp, the result of many years of research in which Berben gained access to original documents in many countries in Europe, the United States and even Israel. The International Dachau Committee even assisted him in obtaining highly classified documents. The book is also based on many survivor testimonies heard by Berben himself. Taken together, Berben presents a complete and detailed picture of the atrocities committed by the Nazis at Dachau. The book is accompanied by photographs that are hard to look at, showing prisoners in Dachau during forced labor, the bodies of the victims, and prisoners in Dachau in horrific physical condition.
One of the most horrifying chapters in the book reveals an unknown fact about the Dachau camp. At the end of the war, small urns with ashes of prisoners whose bodies had been cremated in the crematorium were found near the crematorium. For several years, historians did not understand what these urns were used for, since the Nazis burned the bodies and scattered the ashes, seemingly having no reason to keep the ashes of the victims in urns. Berben managed to obtain testimony from a prisoner who worked in the crematorium throughout 1942 and asked him about those urns. He told him that the Nazis ordered the prisoners to collect the ashes of one percent of the prisoners burned in the crematorium in small urns and write their names on them. These urns were marked and sent to the families of the victims, who had to pay for them in order to receive them. This was a deterrent used by the Nazis to cause certain families marked by the Nazis to despair of their missing loved ones. Those prisoners who worked in the crematorium, and were tasked with collecting the ashes in urns, sought to prevent the grief of the families when learning that their loved ones had perished, and were not even buried, they seemingly filled those urns with ashes for the the Nazis, but in fact buried them in the ground so that they would not reach the families. These were the ash urns found buried near the crematorium at the end of the war.
The report deals extensively with everything that took place in Dachau from its establishment in March 1933 until its liberation by the Allies in April 1945, and includes extensive details of the population imprisoned there, the methods of torture, punishment, and euthanasia used by the Nazis, the number of victims, the methods used by the Nazis to conceal the atrocities they committed, the manner in which the Nazis divided the different classes of prisoners, The fate of the Jewish prisoners in Dachau, the looting of the victims and the various routes Jewish property traveled after the murder of the victims, the experiments carried out by the Nazis on the bodies of the prisoners, the story of the few prisoners who managed to escape from Dachau, as well as the attempts of prisoners to escape from the camp and the Nazi response to these attempts, the orders given in the last weeks of the war by the Nazi commanders, the astonishing story of prisoners who, by virtue of their faith and fortitude, survived the inferno of the camp, The liberation of the camp and the events surrounding it, and more. The report includes, among other things, detailed number tables, aerial maps, camp drawings, and more.
301 p. 23 cm. Condition Very Good.
