Normandie: Additional Information

The other information I found at the Memorial de Caen didn't have items like clothing, hats, or dog tags that went with the story being told. Instead, it was plaques explaining certain pictures or specific events without visual evidence to support it. It's boring to just see a picture of a picture or of a paragraph of writing, so I'll summarize what these textual pictures say.

If any of you haven't heard of "Les Sonderkommandos," you aren't the only one. I had never heard of it, and I'm honestly surprised you don't hear more about it. Jewish people from the extermination camps were singled out for "special duties," and were put in charge of post-mortem practices. These unfortunate jobs included removing and burning the dead bodies from gassing chambers. Even worse, after performing their duties, they were killed so that nobody would be able to say what they witnessed. Any of the sonderkommando who resisted their assigned duty were killed, leaving a mere 90 survivors of the original a thousand.

Scary fact: 53 out of the 4,918 Belgian children sent to Auschwitz survived. Only about one hundred children out of 15,000 sent to Terezin concentration camp survived. A measly 200 teenagers of the 11,400 who were deported from France returned home. By the time the Nazi's reign was over, 1,250,000 children had been murdered and at the most, 120,000 were alive throughout Europe.

The estimated number of victims from the Auschwitz concentration camp alone is one million.

During World War II, Ukraine organized mass executions and "round ups" of their Jewish populations. Three years later, Hungarian forces sent 450,000 of their Jewish population to Auschwitz in a matter of 56 days.

However, the most disturbing was by far T4. T4 was an elimination program where Nazi Germany executed the physically and mentally disabled by euthanasia. The program was meant to achieve "social hygiene" and resulted in the death of 90,000 persons.