Latest news with #HeinrichHimmler
Daily Mail
22-05-2025
- Daily Mail
The tiny detail that unmasked fleeing Nazi monster Heinrich Himmler... before he committed suicide with hidden cyanide and was buried by British troops in an unmarked grave that remains hidden to this day
As the right-hand man of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler was perhaps the most feared man in Nazi Germany. Under his command, the monsters of the SS had carried out unspeakable horrors, not least the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. But on May 22, 1945, Himmler - who had been on the run with two SS henchmen after the Nazi surrender to the Allies - was stopped by British troops in northern Germany. Wearing an eye patch and posing as a lowly sergeant called Heinrich Hizinger, Himmler had handed over his false identity documents in the hope that they would pass muster. Instead, he was given away by a stamp that his own people had placed on the document. British military intelligence had already spotted it being used by members of the SS who were trying to flee, and so Himmler was held. The following day, having been taken to a detention camp, he made the stunning admission to his captors that he was Heinrich Himmler, the most wanted man in Germany. It was a fantastic result. The hunt for one of the world's most wanted Nazis was at an end less than a month after Adolf Hitler's suicide, and it was the British who had pulled it off. Wearing an eye patch and posing as a lowly sergeant called Heinrich Hizinger, Himmler had handed over his false identity documents (above) in the hope that they would pass muster. But he was held after British troops spotted a stamp that British military intelligence had already spotted being used by members of the SS who were trying to flee But what happened next was catastrophic. Medical officer Captain CJ 'Jimmie' Wells was asked to check Himmler. The examination initially proceeded as normal. Knowing that he might have a cyanide capsule hidden somewhere, Captain Wells looked at Himmler's chest, between his buttocks, inside his nostrils and ears and between his toes and fingers. Two capsules had been found about his person. So when it came to checking his mouth, Himmler realised the game was up. Having seen that Captain Wells had spotted the blue capsule hidden in the corner of his mouth, Himmler clamped down on his finger. After a struggle, Himmler wrenched himself away and then cracked open the capsule with his teeth. It was 11.14pm. Within minutes, Himmler - now in agony - would be dead. Describing the disaster, Captain Wells later wrote: 'The dramatic rapidity of death I anticipated but slightly. 'There were a slowing series of stertorous breaths which may have continued for half a minute, and the pulse for another minute after that. 'The stench coming from Himmler's mouth was unmistakably that of hydrocyanic, and the dose must have been enough to kill an elephant.' He added: 'I felt a vague surge of distinct anger. Not because I had been outwitted but oddly enough because of a feeling of contempt and disgust that a man in his position should choose this way out from the wreck and torture which he had had such a large hand in creating. 'I could not see a Churchill or Montgomery, or a thousand others, under any circumstances even contemplating such an action.' In 2011, a startling unseen image of Himmler's corpse emerged. It had been taken by one of the SS chief's interrogators, Corporal Guy Adderley of the Military Intelligence Corps. Taken just minutes after his death, it showed him lying backwards with his glasses on his face and his hands resting on his stomach. Adderley's family had been set to sell the image at auction, but then withdrew it. Himmler's fake documents came to light in 2020 after being donated to the Military Intelligence Museum in Shefford, Bedfordshire, by the great niece of former wartime intelligence agent Lieutenant Colonel Sidney Noakes. Experts believe that he may have been one of two MI5 interrogators who questioned Himmler before he was medically examined. Himmler's suicide made the front page of the Mail. Under the headline, 'Himmler Poisons Himself Inside British HQ', the story said: 'Heinrich Himmler, once the most-feared man in Europe, committed suicide at four minutes past eleven last night at the headquarters of the British Second Army. 'To-night the body of this man, architect of the horror camps, Chief of Hitler's police, and Minister of the Interior, lies in the red-roofed villa which is the army headquarters. 'Grey faced, bespectacled, the thin-lipped face turned to the ceiling, half covered with a grey British blanket. 'The body is collarless and is clothed in a British Army shirt, Army slacks, and Army socks.' The BBC said in a German-language broadcast: 'The most devilish figure which Nazism created has committed suicide. 'Ad head of the Gestapo and the SS, he was responsible for the atrocities inside the concentration camps. He topped the list of the war criminals'. Moscow Radio announced: 'The Devil's lieutenant has returned to his master'. The BBC said in a German-language broadcast: 'The most devilish figure which Nazism created has committed suicide. 'Ad head of the Gestapo and the SS, he was responsible for the atrocities inside the concentration camps. He topped the list of the war criminals'. Responsibility for burying Himmler's corpse fell to four British soldiers. They took it to an unmarked grave on Luneburg Heath. The Mail reported on May 26, 1945: 'Himmler's body was buried in a secret, nameless grave on the edge of the heath here at dusk this evening. 'A small party of British soldiers carried the blanket-swathed body to the heath and dug the grave. 'An Army chaplain said the last rites as the body was lowered. The grave was immediately filled in and left unmarked.' With the precise location of his remains kept top secret to this day, conspiracy theories about Himmler's fate have abounded. Some have suggested that he lived for years beyond his supposed capture, and that the man who fell into British hands was a mere lookalike. It has also been claimed that Himmler was murdered by British agents to keep secret the alleged fact he had been negotiating with the Allies behind Hitler's back. The notion that there were talks and that they went on for months is not backed by substantive evidence.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Neo-Nazis Are Obsessed With the Occult
Deep in northwestern Westphalia, Germany, stands a twelfth-century castle conceived by Heinrich Himmler, leader of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel, as a kind of 'Camelot' for the triumphal knights of the Aryan race. The Wewelsburg Castle was also a fantasy nerd's dream come true. In its bowels lies an occult enclave straight out of Cecil B. DeMille: an Arthurian-style set of catacombs designed to look medieval but actually made of concrete. Above, in the Hall of the Supreme S.S. Leaders, there's a marble floor inlaid with a design of the Black Sun, or Sonnenrad—a circle containing swastika-like arms that epitomizes Nazi striving to create an idealized Norse-Aryan past for themselves. Himmler started renovations on the castle in the mid-1930s; the Nazi paradise he built was meant to host S.S. ceremonies, such as handing particularly distinguished murderers the Totenkopfring, a ring adorned with the signature S.S. skull but also a variety of quasi-Nordic runes and symbolic oak leaves, designed by Himmler's personal occultist, a purportedly clairvoyant mystic by the name of Karl Wiligut. The Nazis, in short, were obsessed with legend and magic. Consider the swastika itself: First written about in Germany by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the ruins of Troy in 1868, the swastika was seized on by Hitler—whose birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year—as emblematic of the idealized, quasi-mythical Aryan race he sought to recreate. More to the point, the Nazis were murder nerds, LARPing as wizards of racial superiority as they committed very real atrocities. And the same is true of their successors today. Partly aping their dead heroes and partly engaged in a similar delusion—self-mythologizing as the scions of an ancient white race—neo-Nazis are a remarkably myth-oriented bunch. This manifests in a lot of different ways, like engaging in werewolf-themed cultic neopaganism or dedicating themselves to Norse gods. Or, in a recent newsworthy example, following the Order of the Nine Angles, a late-twentieth-century neo-Nazi pseudoreligion that seeks to turn its adherents into racially pure Satanic wizards. Earlier this week, a Waukesha, Wisconsin, teenager and devotee of the Order of the Nine Angles, or ONA, was charged with murdering his mother and stepfather and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump, in order to further the Order's goals of a world plunged into chaotic violence. 'Jewish occupied governments must fall. The white race cannot survive unless America collapses,' the 17-year-old, Nikita Casap, wrote in a manifesto. 'Huge amounts of violence will be required.' He called himself a 'niner' (a Nine Angles devotee) and encouraged his imitators to read a variety of extremist books. In doing so, Casap drew on nearly a century of blood-drenched legacy in his pairing of violent death with a potent dose of magical thinking. The symbol of the Order of the Nine Angles looks, more than anything, like a mutilated cat's cradle, just as their ideology is a muddle of inverted myths, profligate cruelty, and pure bigotry. It's a religion of shock and destruction, and as such, it has appealed particularly to young men—teens seeking to break away from their parents, and aimless mid-twenties men who want to blaze a path of dubious glory by blood. The movement was created in the 1970s by a British neo-Nazi named David Myatt, nicknamed the 'Cat Strangler' by his friends because of his affinity for torturing animals. His ideology reflects the charming sobriquet. In 1999, a 22-year-old man reportedly inspired by Myatt's book A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution planted bombs embedded with nails in areas frequented by London's minority and gay communities, injuring 129 people and killing three. In Myatt's work and speeches, an increasingly elaborate cosmology is paired with direct calls to terrorist action, all in the service of ushering in an eschatological race war. Affiliated with the so-called 'Left-Hand Path' of magic—dark or black magic—the ONA offers such occult hokum as a world divided into the seven branches of the 'Tree of Wyrd,' a creator deity named Vindex, and individual cells called 'nexions.' It's a religion of edgelords who've cliff-dived over the edge into madness. The chief tenet of the Order of the Nine Angles, though, is chaos. It's a religion of edgelords who've cliff-dived over the edge into madness. The creation of chaos—ideally through violence, particularly murder and rape—is a form of magic, which, if enacted often enough and brutally enough, will destabilize a moral order dominated by 'Magian' (Jewish) and 'Nazarene' (Christian) morality. The ultimate goal of the Order is a climactic race war, which will usher in a new 'Aeon,' or age—in essence, a Thousand-Year Reich. With enough chaos magic unleashed on the world through acts of violence—the more spectacular the better, like Casap's would-be assassination of Trump—the 'Dark Imperium' led by evil wizards will commence. 'According to the ONA, Judeo-Christian morals, such as 'Don't rape and murder people,' and 'racial equality, human rights'—those are part of a worldwide illusion,' Barrett Gay, a threat-analysis researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me in an interview. 'Part of becoming self-actualized and pursuing the eternal Imperium is to act out the taboos of that system, and by doing so you take away its power. They practice a more mystical form of accelerationism: They believe they can destabilize the entire moral fabric of our civilization through mystically boosted, but also very real, murder and rape.' They also, Gay added, 'get into some weirder stuff, like an Aryan empire in space.' The movement made the transcontinental jump from the U.K. to the United States by the mid-1990s, but took off in the early 2000s. One early and prominent American branch got the cheesily murderous name the Tempel ov Blood. The cult spread among neo-Nazis on the now-defunct white supremacist forum Iron March; according to Gay, until quite recently, information on the Order was hard to come by unless you already knew what you were looking for, deep in the fever swamps of Telegram. It isn't, in and of itself, a path to radicalization: It's a method of making murderers out of those already inclined toward white supremacist ideals; an instrument of self-justification and self-aggrandizement. It isn't especially innovative, either: The Ku Klux Klan wore robes and called themselves wizards too. All of the Order of the Nine Angles' seminal texts are written in a pseudo-elevated tone, larded with jargon that reads like a particularly depraved D&D campaign. Rites such as the 'Black Mass of Heresy' open with adulation of Hitler and include chants like: We believe in justice for our oppressed comradesAnd seek an end to the world-widePersecution of believe in the magick of our wyrdAnd curse all who oppose us. This is, to put it mildly, dorky; it's generally a social faux pas to chant loudly about the 'magick' of your 'wyrd.' It's also part of a murderous doctrine of total amorality. These two things go together better than you think; as events around us are illustrating all the time, things can be ridiculous and awful all at once. The 'Sevenfold Way' of the Order dictates an incremental increase in violence—with a particular focus on sexual violence, which is something of an obsession in the creed—along with personal asceticism and the military or paramilitary training common among neo-Nazi groups of all stripes. To put it another way: The rigmarole of the order is an occult support structure for the endgame of creating a decentralized army of racist rapists and murderers. And it's been quite successful. There's been a lot of murder, and a great many terror attempts and attacks, inspired by this ideology. There's been a lot of murder, and a great many terror attempts and attacks, inspired by this ideology. It's been taken up by a number of neo-Nazi groups as their chosen niche sub-ideology, and has inspired lone gunners like Casap, along with multiple rapes and widespread dissemination of child pornography (in keeping with its doctrine of sexual depravity). In 1997, members of a Swedish affiliate group murdered a gay Algerian man in a Gothenburg park, as part of a human sacrifice (which ONA literature refers to as a 'culling'). In 2008, eight young Russian Satanists killed four teenagers in the Yaroslavl region, fried their hearts over a bonfire, ate them, and buried the bodies in a peat bog; an ONA cult dedicated to their deeds sprang up in the region. The pace picked up in the 2010s and 2020s; affiliates of the Order were charged with possessing child pornography, planning terror attacks, multiple child rapes, and murders. In 2022, a U.S. soldier and Order member was caught plotting to ambush members of his unit in order to cause 'the deaths of as many soldiers as possible.' The same year, an 18-year-old in London murdered two sisters in a park after signing a pact with a demon in blood, promising to 'sacrifice only women.' Why are murder and magic so intertwined for these adherents? Whether you wear Crusader gear, don a skull ring bedecked with runes, chant black masses, or sacrifice to Odin, it all serves the same goal: It's a process of bonding and becoming. Neo-Nazis lean so heavily on myth because their ideology is prima facie absurd; the purported oppression of whites needs tortuous, even mythological explanations to ring remotely true. Hence the dorky architecture propping up all that manic violence. It serves social and psychological purposes too: The commission of crimes in service of an ideology binds one tighter to it. Embracing a faith that is repugnant and outlandish to outsiders shuts one off from the rest of the world. And the profession of belief in concert with others is one of the most ancient, and simple, forms of human communion. It's also a big confidence booster, at age 17, to think you're at one with the underlying forces of the cosmos. Even if you're not one hundred percent sold on the 'magick' of your 'wyrd,' it's exciting to be part of a secret scary movement that does scary things, and know you can scare or impress people just by being part of it. It's one thing to post racist things online from the comfort of your home; another thing entirely to embrace the notion that you are a master of magic, a powerful wizard whose bloodletting will usher in an 'Imperium' of racially pure enlightenment. To wield that kind of power is to be wondrous; to stride atop multiple planes of reality. In other words, the appeal of evil wizardry is, on some level, the same as the desire to be Harry Potter: to be the most special boy in the world. These ideologies dangle just that promise, convincing people around the world that shooting your mother will make you a wizard, instead of just another killer. That's what creates murder nerds, and the myths and legends that support them: the urge to achieve a great apotheosis and to do so via the blunt instruments of the knife, the gun, and the pain of others. In Westphalia, the Wewelsburg Castle is now a museum of the horrors of the S.S. Despite Himmler's grandiose desire to drench his murders in myth and mystery, the elaborate occult ceremonies he and his pet clairvoyant hoped for didn't materialize; there were unfathomable atrocities to commit. Less than a kilometer from Himmler's faked-up magic playground stand the remnants of a concentration camp where over a thousand people died, conscripted as slave labor to build ever-grander extensions to the castle. The tombs in the great S.S. catacomb are empty; they always were. But the graves are full, the only true monument to the small, sadistic men who dreamed they were the kings of legend. All they ever made was a heap of bones.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Her father owned Himmler's personal copy of ‘Mein Kampf' — but how?
The book had long lingered there. Known, but not acknowledged. Sitting on her father's bookshelf for decades after the war in Western Europe had culminated in an Allied victory on May 8, 1945. Except it was no ordinary book. It was Heinrich Himmler's — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust — personal copy of Adolf Hitler's Volume I of 'Mein Kampf,' replete with Himmler's own annotations. It wasn't until the death of her father, John Fletcher Sisson, who served in the 4th Infantry Division, in 1992 that author and historical preservationist Karen Sisson Marshall recognized what she described to Military Times as the 'magnitude of evil' the book possessed. But what began as a simple process of donating a piece of history forced Marshall to contemplate her own father's history — and his path to possessing such ephemera. Can you talk about what occurred after your father's death in 1992 and what led you down this path? Two days after my father died, I was asked to go through the files for my mother. As I was going through his files I discovered a 70-page manuscript that had been typed fully, that had been completed and even edited. There was memorabilia, information from World War II and and then this letter that I found with his pictures from the time he returned to Normandy in 1979. He had retraced his own footsteps and he identified on an old map where he thought they had been. I was shocked when my mother told me she didn't know anything about any of this. As I said in the book, I felt like I was meeting a man I'd never met. So then, for the first time, I actually paid attention to Himmler's 'Mein Kampf' book. I had always been aware of it, vaguely, but I didn't realize that he had kept this little book on Himmler with it. I just had never taken anything seriously about his service in World War II. So what we did was we published his manuscript into a small pamphlet and my mother gave it to her close friends and that was it. But in 2004 for a number of reasons, I decided that I was going to find a home for the 'Mein Kampf' volume. My mother came to live with us after dad died, and I realized she was getting older — that was probably the most important impetus. I began to think about this book. I'd gone back to school and gotten a degree in historic preservation and I think I was becoming more aware of the past, its ramifications. So I brought it up to her that I did not want to be responsible for the book if something happened to her. I tell the story in the book and I shouldn't laugh, but it was actually very amusing. I was just wandering around, calling people up, telling them that I had Heinrich Himmler's 'Mein Kampf' and I didn't know what to do with it. Can you share a little more about the process of deciding what to do with Himmler's book? I got my degree and this was, I think, really important. I had gone back to school and I began to think about why I was ignoring my father's role in history? That's when I began to look around the house and look at these artifacts and think, 'Who was my father?' So the book fell in line with that. Sotheby's essentially hung up on me, thinking I was a crank. And that is how I was treated, sort of like a crank by various places I would call — I probably sounded like one to be fair. You have to remember, we're in the very beginnings of the internet. That's where the Baldwin's [Bookbar comes in. I finally went in because I had bought books from him and he knew I was legitimate. He finally listened to me and he's the one who found the article on the internet about Volume II. That in turn led us to meet the curator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and going through that whole process of learning how you authenticate something. In your book, 'Finding My Father's Footsteps' you write about two soldiers and two crossed stories. How did you resolve those of Mr. Williams and his father's, and your own? I never questioned my father, but the world has to question him. It was then that I received a phone call from Mr. Williams [a pseudonym]. Mr. Williams couldn't have been nicer. We chatted. I told him my father's story, and he said, 'Mrs. Marshall, with all due respect, I believe your father lied to you.' Just like that. What a gut punch. His father had told him that at the end of World War II, he was in possession of both volumes — one and two. So he thought my father's story had to be made up. He seemed to indicate that my father must have, for some reason, decided to take one of the books from his dad, otherwise he couldn't explain his father's story. So in the book I focused my story on resolving my father's story. I do not want to call into question his father's story, because I want to respect the fact that soldiers came home and just tell you a little bit of their experience. In this book you had to work backwards — you had the ending, albeit a confusing one, and to resolve it you had to work back from the beginning. How did you eventually come to resolve the question of your father's honor? I wish I could tell you that I was such a good researcher, but I met Bob Babcock, who is the historian for the 4th Infantry Division and he sent me the list of documents they had and I was intrigued by [Swede] Henley's name. I got copies of different diaries and journals. It wasn't until I had gone through it that I realized he'd been my father's commanding officer at the end of the war. My father's own journal ended in January [1945], but Henley kept a diary for all of the 11 months that he fought through Europe. So I followed Henley's diary knowing my father was under him. So there it was when Henley put the entry in his diary that they had taken 3,000 prisoners in Tegernsee, [Germany], on May 3. My father's story always was: 'I was the commanding officer in charge of securing Heinrich Himmler's home.' Somehow my father's story just came completely alive. He even sent a postcard home to my grandmother from Tegernsee. So I was like, 'Okay, there's no question in my mind. This is what I think happened.' The intelligence officer has to file a report, has to report back to their commanding officer and tell them what they've done. So I think my father must have been in a report, and I think William's father saw the report. And so when he said he had both copies, I think that's what he thought. I think he meant he had Volume II, and that he knew Volume I was in the system. That's what I think, but I am surmising. You write about holding Himmler's copy of 'Mein Kampf' and recognizing the magnitude of evil it possessed. Were there any personal annotations of Himmler's that stood out to you after it was translated? I drew a very strong line between Dr. [Richard] Brightman's expertise on Heinrich Himmler and what our family was doing. I actually don't know what the annotations are. I did not want explore that side of the book with him. Can you tell me a little bit about your father, John's, wartime experience? The 4th Infantry Division had a storied contribution to the Second World War — it was the first U.S. unit to land on Utah Beach, helped to liberate Paris, fought in the grueling battles of the Hurtgen Forest and in the Battle of the Bulge and was among the first units to liberate Dachau. How did researching and following in your father's footsteps bring about a different understanding of your father? It changed my life. At that moment when I stood there in Normandy, I reflected back yelling at my father at the dinner table about the Vietnam War. I yelled, 'You just don't understand that people are dying. You don't care that people are dying. You don't know anything.' I knew he had a Nazi bullet — we all knew the story about the bullet that was in his abdomen that didn't go away. That was sort of a little family joke, you know, that he still had the bullet. I obviously knew somewhere in the back of my foolish 19-year-old brain that my father had been shot at. I don't know why I never put two and two together. It wasn't until I stood there in Normandy that I put the pieces together. As you mentioned, you were among the protesters of the Vietnam War. How did researching your father's war experience affirm or alter your opinions on war and its necessity? What our generation did … it's just unconscionable what we did. I guess because we were all kids, but we somehow blamed the soldiers who were just kids like us who were sent off to war. We mixed it up. You can stand your ground politically but not conflate the politician's war with the soldier's war. It has been really nice to go to those 22nd Infantry reunions. It's mainly Vietnam vets now, and we've talked and I'm very honest when I sell the book, I always say, 'You know, if you're going to be offended by the fact that I was an anti-war demonstrator, please don't buy the book.' I've had wonderful discussions with these men. How would you like your book used as a blueprint for others? At the heart of my book is the idea of how well do we know the stories that impact our lives? What I'm hoping to do is to inspire people to go up in the attic. Get those letters down. Think about someone you love and go learn the story behind the story. You don't have to become an expert on World War II, just become an expert on your area. Every war has all kinds of stories to tell — important stories to tell. World War II called upon an entire generation to do unbelievable things and the vast majority of them rose to the occasion. And we now have these stories buried in our attics.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Survivor speaks on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 80th anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation
( — This International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi labor and extermination camp where 1.1 million people were murdered. SS chief Heinrich Himmler was the mastermind of what's known as the 'final solution' the deliberate and systematic plan for the mass murder of the Jewish people via camps like Auschwitz. 96-year-old Benjamin Lesser survived several unimaginable ghettos and concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of his family of 7, only he and his sister survived. His brother was murdered for forging documents that allowed Mr. Lesser and dozens of others to escape the ghetto to get to Hungary. They were transported in a truck and hidden under coal, where they were almost caught by Nazis. 'We hear soldiers walking on top of the coal and the coal dust was filtering through,' Mr. Lesser recalls. 'My little brother is about to sneeze, and I'm holding his nose and mouth, but three hours they were with us, and then they said they left.' When the truck returned to pick up his parents, they were caught, lined up against a wall and publicly executed by a firing squad. When Mr. Lesser made it to Hungary, the Nazis told the Jewish community that they would be sent to work, and women and children would be cared for. He recalls groups of 80 people being packed into small cattle cars. 'If somebody wanted to sit down, someone else had to stand up,' Mr. Lesser recalled. 'There were two buckets of water inside that cattle car. There were no sanitary facilities or toilets, so people started to use those buckets and the buckets were overflowing.' It was three days later when Mr. Lesser first saw 'Arbeit Macht Frei' which translates from German as 'work sets you free,' the haunting sign on what's known as the 'Gates of Hell' at Auschwitz. 1.1 million people would enter through this gate, never to see the other side again. 'Women and children were sent to the right, man to the left,' he said. 'I'm holding on to my sister, Goldie, and my little brother Tuli, and we were pulled apart never to see each other again. They went directly to the gas chambers.' Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengle, known as 'The Angel of Death' for conducting inhumane medical experiments on thousands of Jewish people noted Lesser's strength and sent him to work. 'We saw these five chimneys and flames are shooting out, ashes are flying like snow,' he said. 'Every step you made, you leave a footprint in the ashes.' He soon learned that these were the ashes of his family and was told he would be next at the first mistake. 'Every morning, we had to stand, and they were counting us naked, and they were looking at each body,' he says. 'If you're too skinny, they pushed you to the crematorium.' Mr. Lesser shared one of the most horrific scenes he witnessed the Nazis partake in. 'I crossed the other barrack behind us, and I see three trucks full of people in them, and I they're picking up children who were alive, screaming and throwing them into the fiery pits like they were garbage,' Mr. Lesser said. In June 1944, Mr. Lesser was sent to Durnhau concentration camp for slave labor where he was tortured. 'Every time they hit me, I feel my flesh being torn apart.' He then endured a 7-week long death march, walking through the snow with no food or shoes. 'Why did they call it the death march? Because if you could not keep up pace with the soldiers, they simply shot you,' Mr. Lesser explained. 'You can hear pop, pop, pop, people being shot.' He arrived at Buchenwald but was soon evacuated and thrown into another cattle car where he was stabbed trying to get a piece of bread. 'I feel my mouth is filling up with blood, but I have to get the bread,' he said as he pointed to his scar. 'I put my finger here, it went right through the tongue. I have the terrible cut to this day.' The cattle car arrived at Dachau. 'From 80 people in my cattle car, only four of us walked out, my cousin and I and two other people, everybody else was dead.' While Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, Dachau was liberated several months later in April. He recalls the first thing he saw at Dachau. 'We see a mountain full of bodies, skeletons,' he recalled. 'Apparently, they ran out of coal to burn the bodies, so they piled up. I mean, as far as you can see was nothing but bodies.' On the day of liberation, Mr. Lesser's cousin who survived the Death March alongside him died of dysentery in Lesser's arms. Countless other survivors would also go on to die of dysentery upon liberation. Mr. Lesser was 16 years old and weighed 60 pounds, adding that he was a 'sack of bones.' He said his survival was a miracle and soon realized his purpose was to educate others on the horrors of the Holocaust. And at 96 years young, he continues to do just that, as often as he can. 'God needed a witness, someone who could talk about it, and I thank god that he gave me the years so that I can do that.' And with the staggering rise in antisemitism, Mr. Lesser stresses the importance of Holocaust education. Without it, he says history can repeat itself. 'Hitler and the nazis did not start with killing, it all started with hate, hate propaganda.' And as the number of concentration camp survivors begins to dwindle with age, Holocaust museums and institutions have made it their mission to continue educating the next generation. '80 years emphasizes the responsibility on those of us that are educators and have the honor and privilege to have learned with survivors who have entrusted us with their testimony,' Miriam Blum Schneider, Director of the JFCS Holocaust Center said. Mr. Lesser says sharing his testimony leaves him with nightmares but adds that nothing will stand in the way of his will to teach the next generation the necessary tools to combat hate. Through his non-profit, Zachor, which translates as remember in Hebrew, he has reached thousands of students from across the world. The 96-year-old survivor leaves us with an important message. 'Love and hate are both contagious. Choose love.' For more information on Benjamin Lesser's story, you can head to Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
