Showing results for "Survivors" in Germany

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

Louis and Jenni Böhm were a middle-class Jewish couple who established a thriving business and raised a family in a small country town in Upper Silesia in 1885. The book follows the fortunes of the family over a period of 70 years, during which their peaceful and prosperous existence is gradually eroded as they are forced to suffer increasing humiliation and ostracisation under the Nazi regime imposed on pre-war Germany by Adolf Hitler.