Tag Archives: world war ii

1943: Dora Gerson, cabaret singer

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Jewish cabaret singer and silent film actress Dora Gerson was gassed with her family at Auschwitz on this date in 1943.

IMDB credits the Berlin entertainer (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed German) with two silver screen roles,* both in 1920 and both now believed lost.**

Gerson’s cabaret career was the more robust through the roaring twenties but with benefit of retrospection we admit with Liza Minelli that from cradle to tomb, it isn’t that long a stay.

And the ominous next act would not belong to Weimar Jews.

After being elbowed off German stages by Reich race laws, Gerson recorded several songs in German and Yiddish; her “Vorbei” (“Beyond Recall”) hauntingly commemorates the lost world before fascism — “They’re gone beyond recall / A final glance, a last kiss / And then it’s all over.”

Gerson fled Nazi Germany to the Netherlands; once that country fell under its own harrowing wartime occupation, she tried to escape with her family to neutral Switzerland but was seized transiting Vichy France. Gerson, her second husband Max Sluizer, and their two young children Miriam (age 5) and Abel (age 2) were all deported to Auschwitz and gassed on arrival on Valentine’s Day 1943.

* Her first marriage was to film director Veit Harlan, who would later direct the notorious anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß — based on an executed Jewish financier. From the German-occupied Netherlands, Gerson unsuccessfully appealed to this powerful ex for protection.

** Future horror maven Bela Lugosi also appeared in both Gerson films, Caravan of Death and On the Brink of Paradise. Gerson’s German Wikipedia page also identifies her as the voice of the evil queen in the 1938 German-language dub of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

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1943: The five martyrs of the lycee Buffon

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On this date in 1943, Nazi guns immortalized five student martyrs of the French Resistance.

The Five Martyrs of the lycee Buffon were Parisian high school students who greeted the fascist occupation of their republic with every form of opposition they could command.

Jean-Marie Arthus (“Marchand” by his nom de guerre), Jacques Baudry (“Andre”), Pierre Benoit (“Francis”), Pierre Grelot (“Paul”) and Lucien Legros (“Jeannot”)* started small with subversive pamphleting and placarding but soon moved on to sabotage and armed opposition in affiliation with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans.

The arrest of one of their teachers, Raymond Burgard, in 1942 spurred them to lead a student demonstration whose mass arrest they barely escaped. By that time their identities were known, and the boys had to go underground; for their remaining months at liberty they lived on the run and participated in occasional (albeit not very damaging) armed attacks on occupying forces — until that summer, when French intelligence arrested Arthus, Baudry, Grelot and Legros, and French police later caught Benoit.

All five were handed off by their collaborationist countrymen to the eager claws of the Germans, who condemned them as terrorists at a military trial.

A number of public places in France honor their memory, like the 14th arrondissement’s Place des Cinq-Martyrs-du-Lycée-Buffon. Their touching and determinedly optimistic last letters to their families can be read at the Cinq martyrs‘ French Wikipedia page.

* A sixth school chum, Michel Agnellet, could easily have joined them at the execution posts and in the martyrologies, but the five who were captured did not permit their interrogators to extract his name.

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1944: The Homfreyganj massacre of the Andaman Islands

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On this date in 1944, the Japanese shot 44 civilians on the Andaman Islands as possible spies.


(cc) image from Mike Behnken

This breathtaking Indian Ocean archipelago has been seen in Executed Today previously, as the site where Sher Ali Afridi both assassinated the visiting British Viceroy in 1872, and paid for that act with his neck a month later.

Come World War II, the Andaman chain remained in principle a property of the British Raj — pending India’s postwar independence — but they had come under Japanese control in 1942.

Though its sparse population and remote locale insure that it will never be described in the first rank of World War II cruelties, the Andamans suffered a number of atrocities during the war — including hundreds of executions, whose documentation was intentionally hindered by the Japanese army’s systematic destruction of records when evacuating the islands.

Among the most notable was the incident marked today, known as the Homfreyganj massacre. To guess by nothing but the timing, the slaughter of suspected spies might have conducted in anticipation of the 1944 Japanese offensive against British India, Operation U-Go. U-Go was a notable bust, but that didn’t mean the denizens of the Andamans had seen the last of their occupiers’ fury.

“The worst atrocities were saved for the very last,” writes Bryan Perrett, who muses that there was “no discernible reason” for the “particularly savage” conduct of the occupation.

On 13 August 1945 300 Indians were loaded aboard three boats and taken to an uninhabited island. When several hundred yards off the beach they were forced to jump into the sea, one-third drowned and the remainder who reached the shore were simply left to starve — just eleven were alive when British rescuers arrived six weeks later. In a different event, on 14 August 800 civilians were taken to another uninhabited island where they were dumped on the beach. Shortly afterwards nineteen Japanese troops came ashore and shot or bayoneted every last one of the unarmed civilians.

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1950: Anton van der Waals, traitor

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One of the Netherlands’ most infamous traitors, Anton van der Waals, was shot on this date in 1950.

An electrician with a misfiring career, van der Waals joined the Dutch fascist party NSB in the interwar years.

The German invasion of 1940 gave this small-timer a (short) lease on espionage stardom, plus a lasting purchase on his countrymen’s hatred.

“Had I read of my adventures in a book, I would not have believed they could all be true,” he would one day muse from the self-reflective confines of his own dungeon.

Although he would also have a brief turn after the war as an Allied spy upon his former masters, those adventures in the main consisted of posing as a Resistance member for the purpose of informing on his “comrades”.

He was repeatedly, devastatingly good at this evil game. At trial after the war, van der Waals was slated with betraying at least 83 anti-fascists, at least 34 of whom were killed. The true extent of his activities, however, is uncertain and it is commonly thought that the ranks of his victims were well into the hundreds.

Van der Waals was shot on the Waaldsdorpervlakte, a site noted for the 250+ Resistance members executed there.

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1944: Kaj Munk, Danish pastor-poet

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Danish “pastor-poet” Kaj Munk was kidnapped and extrajudicially executed by the German occupation on this date in 1944.

Named for the adoptive family who raised him on the Baltic island of Lolland, Munk (English Wikipedia entry | Danish) was one of his country’s most popular playwrights of the 1930s.

He felt then the era’s pull to the Führerprinzip, and expressed admiration for the fascist rulers emerging in Germany and Italy — and disdain for parliamentarian prattle. Mussolini, he wrote, “was the new man, the future of Europe.”

At the same time, Munk’s deep religiosity led him to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism, and fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, and then later Germany’s seizure of Czechoslovakia — an expansion that would presage Germany’s easy conquest of Denmark in 1940. By now well past disillusionment with Hitler, the outspoken Munk did not shrink from denouncing the occupation, and the “cowardice” of Copenhagen in acceding to it just hours after German tanks rolled across the border. (See Resisters, Rescuers, and Refugees: Historical and Ethical Issues.)

He could scarcely have been ignorant of the danger this posture invited.

To this period dates Munk’s postwar fame, as well as his celebrated play Niels Ebbesen — which is all about a medieval Danish squire who assassinated a German tyrant. You can imagine how that went over in Berlin.

And as a working pastor, Munk had another platform, too.

“The pulpit has become for us a place of responsibility,” he wrote in 1941. “We tremble in our black garments when we ascend its stairs, because here, in God’s house, the Word is free … the Holy Ghost … forces us not to stay silent but to speak.”

And Munk was willing to do it, to exploit his position to oppose the cooperative stance his superiors were trying to promulgate; to preach against the occupation from the Copenhagen Cathedral in December of 1943; and to have subversive sermons illegally printed and promulgated — the last just days before his death.

Seized by the Gestapo on January 4, 1944, he was shot immediately after at Silkeborg. (The site is dignified by a a pious and understated memorial.) His abandoned corpse was discovered the next morning; consequently, January 5 is often the occasion for events marking the anniversary of Munk’s martyrdom.

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1942: Six aspiring escapees from Dulag-205

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On about the 18th December 1942 a group of about 6 prisoners intended to escape but were betrayed by somebody. All six prisoners were led out ofthe camp beyond the wire, taken about 20 metres to a pit and shot without any hearing. Before the execution the interpreter told the prisoners that the 6 men had wanted to escape from the camp and for that they would be executed. This would happen to anyone who tried to escape from the camp. The surnames of those who died are not known to me.

This is the testimony of Konstantin Krupachenko, a Red Army prisoner-of-war retrieved from the Germans’ “Dulag-205” camp — a transit facility behind German lines at Stalingrad which was liberated as the Soviets overran the encircled German position.

Krupachenko’s testimony was part of the evidence prepared against six Wehrmacht officers taken prisoner at that camp and ultimately executed, men whose case we have previously detailed.

Though not well-known and hardly by scale a major contributor to the ghastly death toll among Soviet POWs, Dulag-205 was horror aplenty for those who survived it. Starvation rations gave way to no rations at all in the dead of winter, and the skeletal inmates cannibalized the dead. Harassment by guard-dogs, capricious beatings, and the usual regimen of dawn-to-dusk forced labor were the lot of the lucky ones.

The less fortunate, well …

On about the 25th November 1942 while working on a road which led to Gumrak three kilometres from the camp a group of prisoners of about 50-60 was levelling and clearing the road. One prisoner whose name I don’t know collapsed from tiredness and exhaustion and couldn’t work. The guard tried to force the exhausted man to stand and work but the prisoner couldn’t get up. Then the guard shot the prisoner dead with a sub-machine gun and ordered that he be buried in a ditch at the side ofthe road. (Krupachenko again)

There were public executions in the camp. In January 1943 on about the lOth-llth a former senior Lieutenant of the Red Army, his surname I don’t know, was executed for allegedly organising an escape attempt. (Anatoly Alexeev)

In all cases the Germans would shoot prisoners without any warnings at all. In the month of October 1942 I personally saw up to 30 prisoners shot. They shot people every day for falling behind to and from work, and sometimes for breaking ranks. I am unable to give the surnames of the prisoners shot by the Germans. Moreover, when we were herded from the Alekseevka camp to the area of Karpovka village, then several prisoners were shot dead by German officers for the fact that when we were working we were bombarded by Soviet troops and several prisoners took cover. After the firing had stopped the officers came out of their trench dug-outs and shot them on the spot. Three prisoners were shot dead for taking some tobacco while working on a dump. (Ivan Kosinov)

As one of the Germans on trial for these abuses agreed (Otto Mäder was trying to throw blame onto the camp commanders),

[t]here was no trial of any kind, they [prisoners] were shot without any trial on the order of [Dulag-205 commandant] Colonel Korpert. I am a lawyer by education and I understand perfectly that this these shootings were illegal, simply murder in fact.

All these quotations are via Frank Ellis’s “Dulag-205: The German Army’s Death Camp for Soviet Prisoners at Stalingrad” (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, March 2006),

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1943: The Massacre of Kalavryta

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On this date in 1943, German troops occupying Greece massacred the entire male population of the town Kalavryta.


Memorial to the December 13, 1943 massacre.

Weeks earlier, resistance partisans had waylaid a German patrol in the vicinity, taking about 80 German soldiers prisoner and subsequently executing them.

A bestial Lidice-like mass reprisal, Unternehmen Kalavryta, commenced in December with German columns descending on the small Peloponnesian town — murdering civilians at nearby towns and firing the historic Agia Lavra monastery in the process.

Once they reached their target, the women and children of Kalavryta were locked in a school that was put to the torch, while men and older boys were marched to the outskirts and machine-gunned en masse, killing at least 500. (About thirteen are known to have survived this mitraillade and its ensuing finishing-off with axes.) The total death toll in Kalavryta was near 700, significantly mitigated by the women eventually forcing their way out of their burning tomb. Those survivors faced immediate winter privation to go with the horror of the massacre, for the Germans also destroyed homes and drove off the livestock.

A memorial at Kalavryta today* records some 1,300 names including villagers from the surrounding towns slain during the course of the operation — and the church clock is permanently fixed to 14.34, the moment on that awful December 13 that the massacre in Kalavryta began.

* The city also has a museum dedicated to the event.

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1944: Victor Gough, of Operation Jedburgh

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On this date in 1944, British Capt. Victor Gough was shot at Ehrlich Forest as a German POW.

Gough had been parachuted into occupied France a few months before as part of Operation Jedburgh — a campaign to grow internal anti-German resistance to complement the Allied push via Normandy.*

Unfortunately as Colin Burbidge details in Preserving the Flame, Gough’s destignated stomping-grounds — the Vosges Mountains on the eastern borderlands — had some of France’s most pro-German populace. (Burbidge is Gough’s nephew.)

His complications were exacerbated when his wireless operator was injured — and the wireless set wrecked — in the parachute jump. The British wireless man was soon captured and their third, a French officer, killed in a gunfight, leaving Gough on his own. “Great difficulty working alone,” he managed to report to SOE headquarters. He was finally captured in October of that year, tortured by the Gestapo, and eventually shipped to the labor camp at Gaggenau.

In accordance with Hitler’s anti-saboteur Commando Order Gough was shot at a nearby forest in a gaggle of 14 POWs — six British special forces, four American airmen, and four French civilians. Their fate was discovered in part thanks to a German fellow-prisoner, a former officer in the Wehrmacht who had been sent to the camps for refusing orders to issue his men sawed-off shotguns, a weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention, who escaped shortly before the executions using a British map that Gough gifted him. That Captain Werner Helfen survived the war and gave evidence to a British war crimes investigation.

Many years later, Helfen gave something else too: according to Burbidge, his mother — Gough’s sister — in 1991 received a package from Germany containing a photo of Werner Helfen by Victor Gough’s grave, and the escape map that Gough had given to Helfen.

* Future CIA director William Colby was a notable Jedburgh alumnus.

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1941: Francisc Panet

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On this date in 1941, “the Romanian Einstein” Francisc Panet was shot with his wife Lili and three other Communists at a forest near Jilava.

A chemical engineer by training, Panet or Paneth (English Wikipedia entry | Romanian) was fascinated by the theoretical research then revolutionizing physics.

While studying in Czechoslovakia, his work on elementary particles brought him to Einstein’s attention, and the two met in 1932 and corresponded thereafter. Panet’s advocates claim that Einstein foresaw for him a brilliant future.

But back in a Romania dominated by fascism, his scientific gifts would be required for more urgent and less exalted purposes: cooking homemade explosives in his bathroom for Communist saboteurs.

Eventually the secret police traced the munitions back to Panet, and he and his wife were arrested in a Halloween raid. Condemned to death in a two-hour court martial on November 5, they allegedly went before the fascists’ guns with the Internationale on their lips.

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1946: Takashi Sakai

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On this date in 1946, Japan Gen. Takashi Sakai was shot by the World War II Allies at Nanking for war crimes.

Fifty-eight years old at his death, Sakai had built his career in the 1920s and 1930s manning various commands in the occupation of China.

Hours after Japan struck the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, Sakai commenced an attack on Hong Kong, then under British control but defended with only a token force that had no odds against the Japanese.

Sakai’s forces committed numerous summary executions and other cruelties on troops captured from the overwhelmed garrison before Hong Kong finally surrendered on Christmas Day.

The whole operation was much more protracted and difficult than Japan had anticipated and perhaps as a result Sakai was relieved of responsibility for the (similarly brutal) occupation of Hong Kong, and eased into retirement back on the mainland.

His next visit to China would occur under very different circumstances — where he would find himself obliged to dissociate himself from the atrocities that his men had authored in the capture of the city. His war crimes tribunal was not impressed.

The Tribunal dismissed the accused’s plea that he could not be held responsible for the above violations because they were perpetrated by his subordinates and he had no knowledge of them. The Tribunal’s findings were as follows:

That a field Commander must hold himself responsible for the discipline of his subordinates, is an accepted principle. It is inconceivable that he should not have been aware of the acts of atrocities committed by his subordinates … All the evidence goes to show that the defendant knew of the atrocities committed by his subordinates and deliberately let loose savagery upon civilians and prisoners of war.

The principle that a commander is responsible for the discipline of his subordinates, and that consequently he may be held responsible for their criminal acts if he neglects to undertake appropriate measures or knowingly tolerates the perpetration of offences on their part, is a rule generally accepted by nations and their courts of law in the sphere of the laws and customs of war.

(Conversely, Sakai’s attempt to cite superior orders as defense against charges for his part in initiating the war also got short shrift. So in terms of the chain of command, he got it coming and going.)

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