Explore Log in Sign up

Terms of Use Privacy Policy Community Standards Help Get the app

Grilled Cheese is a product of Village Compute

Version devBuilt at: 2026-10-10 01:38:52 EDT

Explore

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 11:56 PM

October 9, 1942: 1703 Jews were deported from #Westerbork to #Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were whole families as well as many infants, children and elderly people. 423 persons under the age of 18. The youngest just four months and the oldest deportee we know of was 86.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

The last known words of an anonymous deportee, who had been sent away together with his wife and daughter, were written on a postcard on the train dated October 9 and addressed to Ph. V. Praag in The Hague: "Dear People, I write this on the train, on the way to our foreign home. I don't know what to write. If I could write everything that we have experienced in the last 12 hours I would need many sheets of paper … This is the last message that you will hear from us for some time. We wish you the very best … We still continue to hope that we will see each other soon."
The train arrived at Auschwitz on October 11, two days after its departure from Westerbork/Hooghalen. Of the 1,703 Jews that arrived at the extermination camp. 334 men and 108 women were admitted into the camp for slave labour and were tattooed with the numbers 67362-67705 and 22282-22389. The remaining deportees were immediately murdered in the gas chambers.
SS Camp physician Johann Kremer wrote in his diary about the mass murder: "Present at night at a special operation from Holland (1600 people). Ghastly scenes in front of the last bunker! That was the 10th special operation. (Hössler!)", Kremer testified on July 18, 1947, that SS Officer Franz Hössler had driven the whole group into a single bunker. One man could not be crammed into the room and so he shot him.
Only four people from this transport survived the war.
Photo: Selection on the train platform at Auchwitz II-Birkenau May 27, 1944.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 1:29 AM

October 8, 1941: Construction of #Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II) began in #Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday
@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social

The prisoners were forced to live in the barracks as they were building them; in addition to working, they faced long roll calls at night. As a result, most prisoners in BIb (the men's camp) died of hypothermia, starvation or exhaustion within a few weeks. Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz I between 7 and 25 October 1941, but by 1 March 1942 only 945 were still registered; they were transferred to Auschwitz II, where most of them had died by May.
The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was operational by March 1942. On or around 20 March, a transport of Polish Jews sent by the Gestapo from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the Oświęcim freight station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, then buried in a nearby meadow. The gas chamber was located in what prisoners called the "little red house" (known as bunker 1 by the SS), a brick cottage that had been turned into a gassing facility; the windows had been bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said "Zur Desinfektion" ("to disinfection"). A second brick cottage, the "little white house" or bunker 2, was converted and operational by June 1942. When Himmler visited the camp on 17 and 18 July 1942, he was given a demonstration of a selection of Dutch Jews, a mass-murder in a gas chamber in bunker 2.
Photo: The openings through which Zyklon B was poured into the gas chamber of crematoria II are visible in this February 1943 photo, taken by SS Dietrich Kammann. Poles Ludwik Lawin and Tadeusz Kubik, who worked in the camp photography studio, stole a number of Kammann’s negatives and buried them.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 1:07 AM

October 7, 1944: Jewish prisoners of the #Sonderkommando at #Auschwitz-Birkenau organized a revolt. They set the building of gas chamber and crematorium IV on fire, causing serious damage, as well as attacked the SS men in the vicinity.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social

October 7, 1944: Jewish prisoners of the #Sonderkommando at Auschwitz II-Birkenau organized a revolt. They set the building of gas chamber and crematorium IV on fire, causing serious damage, as well as attacked the SS men in the vicinity.
A group of prisoners who worked in gas chamber and crematorium II killed a kapo (German prisoner) Karl Toepfer, attacked SS guards, and made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the furnaces. A group of prisoners cut through the barbed wire fences enclosing the crematorium as well as the adjacent women’s camp and fled in a southerly direction.
They encountered a three-man SS patrol, whom they killed with knives: SS-Unterscharführer Rudolf Erler, SS-Unterscharführer Willi Freesei SS-Unterscharführer Josef Purke. The SS chase units caught up with the prisoners some 1.5 km from the crematorium. All were killed.
During the revolt and as a result of repressions after it, some 450 Jewish prisoners were killed, among them resistance leaders and organizers of the revolt, including Załmen Gradowski and Józef Deresiński.
Four Jewish female prisoners who had smuggled gunpowder from Union-Werke munition factory to the Sonderkommando were later hanged in a public execution.
Photo: Crematorium III, Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 7, 2026, 5:04 AM

October 6, 1943: Heinrich Himmler gave the second of his two Posen Speeches, outlining the carrying out of the Holocaust to the assembled SS officers. The text of the speech would not be published until 1974.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

The text of the speech would not be published until 1974. In his address, Himmler said;
"The question will be asked: 'What about women and children?' I did not consider myself entitled to exterminate the men, to kill them or have them killed, and then allow their children to grow up to revenge themselves on our own sons and grandsons. The painful decision had to be taken, to remove this people from the face of the earth..."
Photo: Heinrich Himmler – At the Conference of Reich District and Association Leaders in Poznań.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 4:28 AM

October 5, 1942: The 25th transport from #Westerbork left for #Auschwitz-Birkenau with 2012 deportees on board. After selection Roza (17) and Clara (13) and their mother Rachel Meijer were send to the gas chamber together with 1318 other people.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

In the night of 2 to 3 October 1942, by order of the occupying authorities, the 42 Jewish labor camps that were located mainly in the north and east of the Netherlands were cleared.
The forced laborers who were staying there were brought to Camp Westerbork. At the same time, roundups took place in various cities in which the family members of these men were arrested.
To the approximately 2,000 Jews who were in Camp Westerbork at the beginning of October 1942, more than 12,000 people were added. The camp became overcrowded, and there was a shortage of everything.
With the transport of 5 October 1942, the number of Jews departing from Camp Westerbork for the first time exceeded 2,000. Among them were 498 children under the age of 18.
Roza Meijer, 17 years old and her sister Clara, 13, were on this transport together with their parents Rachel (41) and Israël (43). On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and after selection Roza, Clara and their mother Rachel were send to the gas chambers together with 1318 other people. Their father, Israël, was selected for slave labor and died a year later from illness, exhaustion and malnourishment.
Photo: Roza and Clara Meijer

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 4, 2026, 9:50 PM

October 4, 1939: Adolf Hitler issued a secret decree granting amnesty to all crimes committed by German military and police in Poland between September 1 and October 4. The decree justified the crimes as being natural responses to "atrocities committed by the Poles."

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Photo: September 1939, Polish peasants led to execution. A burning village in the background

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 11:09 PM

October 3, 1943: The village of Lingiades, in northwestern occupied Greece, was arbitrarily chosen as a target for reprisals by the Wehrmacht due to the killing of a German officer by the Greek Resistance. The vast majority of the victims were children, women and elderly.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Soldiers of the German 79th Field Battalion (1st Mountain Division) commanded by Major Hans Mayr arrived in Lingiades on that Sunday morning. Of the town's 287 inhabitants, most adults were in an neighboring town for the walnut harvest. Villagers who could not run away were dragged by German soldiers to the central square of the village. After all dwellings were searched and looted, all civilians were divided into small groups and driven into the cellars of various homes. There they were shot down by machine guns. Apart from the church and the village school, all buildings in the village were set on fire.
The majority of the 92 victims were children, infants, women, and the elderly. Thirty-two of the dead were between six months and 11 years. Five civilians managed to survive, two adults and three children. They feigned death among the corpses and then escaped from the burning buildings by ascending via the fireplace chimney.
No one was ever held accountable for the atrocity in Lingiades.
Photo: German mountain troops after destroying a village in Epirus.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 12:28 AM

October 2, 1944: 659 men from Putten arrived at camp Amersfoort, where they were held until October 11 after which, the majority were sent on to #Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday @nmkampamersfoort.bsky.social @neuengamme-mem.bsky.social

On the night of September 30th 1944, a car carrying two officers and two corporals of the German Army was ambushed by members of the Dutch resistance near the Oldenallerbrug bridge between Putten and Nijkerk. In the attack, a resistance fighter named Frans Slotboom was wounded; he later died. One German officer, Lieutenant Otto Sommer, was also injured, and escaped to a nearby farmhouse to raise the alarm; he died the following day. The two German corporals fled while the second officer, Oberleutnant Eggart, was injured and captured. Due to his wounds, the resistance fighters abandoned him in a place where he could be found by the Germans.
The German reprisal raid was conducted the following day. At the command of General Friedrich Christiansen, Putten was surrounded by German forces. The women and men of the village were captured and separated, and over 100 houses in the village were set on fire. Six men and a woman were shot dead during the raid. The women were held at the church until 9 pm, while the men and boys were detained separately nearby at the village school. On 2 October, 661 men between the ages of 18 and 50 were taken to Amersfoort concentration camp, where 59 older or unfit men were released. The remaining 602 men left Amersfoort on 11 October and taken to Neuengamme concentration camp as forced labour. During the transportation, 13 men escaped by jumping off the train. From Neuengamme, some were moved to other camps or sub-camps, including Ladelund, Bergen-Belsen, Meppen-Versen, Beendorf, Wöbbelin and Malchow.
Only 48 men returned after the end of the war, but another 5 died, due to their mistreatment in the camps, after they arrived home. Some people returned crippled, as they had been kept in small cages they could not stand in. As further repri.
Photo: German soldiers transporting prisoners from Amersfoort train station to the camp.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 2, 2026, 2:17 AM

October 1, 1941: Majdanek concentration and extermination camp became operational.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday @majdanekmuseum.bsky.social

It was built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland. It had three gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps.
Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder an estimated 78,000 people during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
The camp was nicknamed #Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacent to the Lublin ghetto of Majdan Tatarski. Nazi documents initially described the site as a POW camp of the Waffen-SS, based on how it was funded and operated. It was renamed by the Reich Security Main Office as "Konzentrationslager Lublin" on April 9, 1943, but the local Polish name remained more popular.
After the camp's liberation in July 1944, the site was formally protected by the Soviet Union. By autumn, with the war still raging, it had been preserved as a museum. The crematorium ovens and gas chambers were largely intact, serving as some of the best examples of the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany.
Photo: The remains of victims at Majdanek.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Oct 1, 2026, 3:31 AM

September 30, 1938: Munich Agreement. Four powers in Munich agreed that Czechoslovakia would cede the Sudetenland to Germany by October 10. The territorial integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia was guaranteed by all signatories. Czechoslovakia was not invited.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy agreed with the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where three million people, many ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal. Czechoslovakia was not invited.
On his return to London British, Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain declared "Peace for our time...!", concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration.
Sadly Chamberlain and his French counter part were very wrong and WWII would officially start 11 months later. WWII had an estimated total of 70–85 million deaths, representing about 3% of the global population of 2.3 billion in 1940.
Photo: From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement (1938).

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 30, 2026, 4:05 AM

September 29, 1943: 292 inmates of the #Syrets concentration camp, Kyiv, Ukraine, rose up against their German captors. For 6 weeks, the prisoners had been working to destroy the evidence of the massacre at Babi Yar, when the SS murdered nearly 34000 people over two days.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

September 29, 1943: The 292 Jewish inmates of the #Syrets concentration camp, located in Kyiv, Ukraine, rose up against their German captors as their work assignment was drawing to a close. For six weeks, the prisoners had been directed to destroy the evidence of the massacre at Babi Yar, when the Germans murdered nearly 34,000 people over two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941.
The group had labored at excavating and burning the bodies of the victims, then grinding and scattering the cremains. As it became clear that they, too, would be executed when the work was finished, the inmates, led by Vladimir Davydov, staged a mass race to the prison walls at dawn. The German guards, who delayed firing their machine guns until they realized what was happening, killed 280 of 292, but Davydov and eleven other men were able to escape, and would later reveal what had happened.
Photo: Syrets concentration camp.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 29, 2026, 3:34 AM

September 28, 1942: After a 5 km walk from #Westerbork, 610 Jewish men, women and children were herded onto the train at Hooghalen station that was standing ready with destination #Auschwitz-Birkenau. After selection on arrival 562 of them were taken to the gas chambers.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

On this train was Bertha Louise (Betty) Bloemendal. She was the daughter of Abraham Bloemendal and Jochwet Feige Beder. She had an older brother, Philip Eduard Bloemendal. She grew up in De Baarsjes. At the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam, Betty was a classmate of Anne Frank.
Betty was one of the classmates invited to Anne’s thirteenth birthday. Together with Henny Metz, she gave Anne the book Lydia’s Difficulties as a gift. According to Anne, she looked rather poor and lived in Jan Klasenstraat in the western part of the city, “but none of us knows where that is.” Anne also wrote that Betty was an intelligent girl, “but that’s because she is so diligent, since her cleverness already leaves a little to be desired.”
In the summer of 1942, Betty was taken from her home together with her mother and brother and deported to Westerbork, where they arrived on 9 September 1942. Her father was allowed to stay behind thanks to a doctor’s certificate stating that he had tuberculosis. He would die of the illness in early 1944 while in hiding. On 21 September 1942, Anne wrote in her diary that she had heard from Bep Voskuijl about the arrest of her former classmate. On 28 September 1942, Betty, her mother, and her brother were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered immediately upon arrival on 1 October 1942.
Photo: Betty and Philip.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 28, 2026, 2:53 AM

September 27, 1933: Ludwig Müller was elected as the 1st Reichsbischof of the Nazi-controlled German Church. The same day the assembled ministers voted to approve the Aryan paragraph for the church bylaws, expelling any Protestant minister who had a Jewish ancestor.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Photo: Speech of Ludwig Müller after his formal inauguration as Reichsbischof in Berliner Dom, 23 September 1934.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 26, 2026, 3:44 PM

September 26, 1941: 1608 Jews in Kaunas, German occupied Lithuania, were loaded into trucks, driven to the outskirts of the city and killed.

“It happened, therefore it can happen again. It can happen and it can happen anywhere” (Primo Levi, Survivor of #Auschwitz).

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Photo: The Kaunas Ghetto

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 26, 2026, 12:45 AM

September 25, 1944: Eugeniusz Lokajski, 34, a Polish athlete, gymnast and photographer was killed by an artillery barrage during the Warsaw Uprising.
He is the creator of more than 1000 photos documenting the Warsaw Uprising.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday #WarsawUprising

Photo: Lokajski during the Warsaw Uprising.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 25, 2026, 4:15 AM

September 24, 1941: The first wave of the remaining 1,600 Jews of the Grodziec and Rzgow ghettos were forced into trucks and taken to the Niesłusz-Rudzica forest where they were murdered by soldiers with machine-guns.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

September 24, 1941: Transport from Grodziec, Ghetto, Nazi occupied Poland to Niesłusz-Rudzica, Murder Site, Nazi occupied Poland
The first wave of the remaining 1,600 Jews of the Grodziec and Rzgow ghettos were forced into trucks and taken to the Niesłusz-Rudzica forest where they were murdered by soldiers with machine-guns. This action was repeated on September 25, 26, and October 3, which suggests that approximately 400 Jews were deported on each of these days.
In February 1944, the corpses of the victims were dug up and burned by Sonderkommando Legath (also called Wetterkommando), named after Hauptsturmführer Dr. Johannes Legath from the Gestapo in Hohensalza, one of two special units formed at the end of 1943 to obliterate all traces of mass murder in the Wartheland. This exhumation was part of Sonderaktion 1005 aimed at destroying any evidence that people had been murdered by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland and Russia.
Photo: German guards and Ukrainian militia shooting a Jewish family in Miropol, Ukraine, in 1941.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 24, 2026, 2:01 AM

September 23, 1943: The liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, began with the removal of 5,000 people, mostly women, children, and elderly people, who were sent to the #Majdanek extermination camp.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday @majdanekmuseum.bsky.social

Photo: Zyklon B stored in Majdanek concentration camp.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 23, 2026, 5:23 AM

September 22, 1943: In the afternoon of the 21st, Elena Mazanik went into her employers bedroom, Nazi Generalkommissar Ostland, Wilhelm Kube, and placed a timed bomb under his mattress. At 1:20 am on 22 September the bomb under Kube's bed went off, killing him.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

September 22, 1943: In the afternoon of the 21st, Elena Mazanik went into her employers bedroom, Nazi Generalkommissar Ostland, Wilhelm Kube, and placed a timed bomb under his mattress. After planting the bomb Mazanik left the apartment, saying she was going to go to the doctor for a toothache.
At 1:20 am on 22 September 1943, the bomb under Kube's bed went off, killing him. His pregnant wife was not hurt because she had been sleeping in a different bed at the time. A truck had evacuated Mazanik from Minsk and she was never apprehended by the Nazis, but over 1,000 people in Minsk were forced to dig their own mass grave and were shot in collective punishment inflicted on the city.
Photo: Yelana Mazanik, 1964.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 22, 2026, 1:08 AM

September 21, 1943: A transport departed #Westerbork to #Auschwitz carrying 979 deportees. After selection, 303 men and 288 women were led into the camp. 100 women were chosen for Block 10 (experiments). only 14 men and 44 women survived this transport.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

The transport reached Auschwitz on September 23, 1943, with 979 Jews - 60 children, 384 men and 394 women aged 50 and below, and 141 persons aged 51 and above. The deportees were required to remove their luggage from the train by themselves and were told that they would receive it later. Most of the survivors remember the first time they saw Jewish prisoners in “striped suits” and SS men with dogs clutching whips behind them.
After selection, 303 men and 288 women were led into the camp. The men were tattooed with the serial numbers 151852–152154, and the women received the numbers 62984–63271. The other deportees were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after reaching the camp.
One hundred of the women who had passed the selection process were chosen for Block 10 - the barracks at Auschwitz where experiments were conducted. Out of the 2,685 Jews who had been deported in this transport and in the transports that had set out from Westerbork to Auschwitz on August 24 and September 14, 1943, 244 women were assigned to this block. After being threatened with death, 240 of them agreed to undergo the surgical procedures and 110 survived the war. Theresia van Praag was selected for medical experiments and survived the war.
In their testimonies, the Dutch women survivors from this transport describe the humiliation that they felt as male prisoners shaved their body hair, given that their block was part of the men’s camp. Only married women were placed in this block. Theresia managed to see her husband from a distance but was not allowed to speak with him; about two months later, he died.
Of the 979 deportees in the transport that left Westerbork for Auschwitz on September 21, 1943, only 14 men and 44 women are known to have survived.
Photo: The Black Wall (execution wall), between Block 10 (left) and Block 11 (right) in Auschwitz.

@ramonfliek.bsky.social Sep 21, 2026, 4:39 AM

September 20, 1933: Albrecht "Ali" Höhler was summarily shot by several Nazi SA members while on a transport in-between prisons. He was convicted of manslaughter (the murder of Horst Wessel) and sentenced to six years and one month imprisonment.

#RememberHistory #USAtoday

Höhler was convicted of manslaughter (the murder of Horst Wessel) and sentenced to six years and one month imprisonment at Wohlau Prison in Lower Silesia.
On 11 August 1933, Höhler was transferred to Berlin by the new Nazi administration for interrogation at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. On 20 September 1933, the RSHA stated that Höhler had been sent back to Lower Silesia, allegedly to be returned to prison. In reality, the transport had been rerouted under orders of SA-Gruppenführer Karl Ernst. Besides the three prison officers in charge of the transfer, also involved were two SS officers, Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels and Richard Fiedler, and three SA men, Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, Walter von Mohrenschildt [de], Willi Schmidt [de], and Willi Markus [de]. He was transferred from the police prison at Alexanderplatz on the basis of a Gestapo-signed delivery order. Near Potsdamer Platz, several more vehicles approached the prisoner van. The vehicle column drove towards Frankfurt an der Oder.
About 12 km from Frankfurt, the column stopped on the Berlin-Frankfurt Chaussee, Höhler was ordered to leave the transport and was led by a group of at least eight people away from the road to a nearby forest. There, Gruppenführer Ernst gave a short speech, in which he condemned Höhler to death as the murderer of Horst Wessel. Höhler was then shot by several of those present. The body was buried on the spot in a shallow grave; the remains were found in August 1934.
Photo: Mugshot of Höhler in 1930