Les atrocités de l'enfer de Dachau - "The atrocities of Dachau Hell" - Early and detailed testimony of the terrible atrocities committed by the Nazis against prisoners in Dachau, published by Jos. Jullien Liège (Belgium), 1945 - first edition. French. Rare.
The story of a Belgian partisan who during the war sabotaged rail lines and disrupted communication channels used by the Germans, captured in Liège by the Gestapo while leaving his wife and three young children at home. The Nazis, whom he calls "the Nazi Inquisition" charged him with every possible accusation - "leader of strikes", "saboteur", "emissary of the Freemasons", "working for British intelligence", and more. During interrogation his body underwent severe electric shock torture but he revealed nothing about his comrades. From October 1943 to February 1944 he was in Esterwegen camp, where conditions were relatively comfortable. After several transit camps he was transferred on February 15, 1945 to Dachau, at age 33. In the book he documents the severe torture he and his comrades underwent in Dachau. Roll calls in freezing cold, beatings, starvation, testifying that no day passed without prisoner corpses that could no longer withstand it being piled before his eyes. "This daily corpse removal service was organized in the same way as the road services in our large cities" he writes. He further writes, describing his and his comrades' physical and mental state in the camp: "Faced with so much misery and abandonment we no longer had any reaction... The ongoing physical suffering and moral suffering reached such an acute point that we found ourselves compelled not to think, because 'thinking' constitutes torture". In the second part of the book he documents one by one in separate headlines the variety of torture methods used by the Nazis in the camp, recounting in detail the horrifying events that occurred in the camp in each of these incidents, and how each time the Nazis sought a different kind of sadistic abuse whose purpose alongside causing suffering and death was to erase the human image from the prisoners - these were terrible tortures that are among the greatest war crimes ever committed, that are hard to fathom as being committed by human beings.
On April 29, American tanks entered the camp: "To describe our joy is impossible", he writes, describing the stages of liberation, and the immense gratitude the prisoners felt towards their liberators. And expresses a wish that over time everyone will know and understand what the Nazis did to defenseless prisoners who experienced the most severe horrors in human history on their own flesh.
Only four listings in the world cat library catalog.
72 p. Very good condition.
