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, plus BIBLIOGRAPHY , enter on pg. TOWER BLASTER LLAS fusiladosdetorrellas.blogspot.com / English Republicans in the Nazi death camps (1). The convoy of 927. PHOTOS IMAGES Many people collide, at least, the title of this post. Others do not want to give you credit. When we hear about Nazi death camps always think of them as something alien and distant, that little or nothing to save us.
The
blue triangle, symbol of the English Republicans in Mauthausen
. Source: Forum for Memory Associates
Holocaust, which few people know, because this has involved, which is, is that thousands of English Republicans killed perished in gas chambers, in medical experiments, the scaffold groups, the mass shootings, forced labor carried beyond any resistance or just plain deprivation of all power to cause death by starvation. The question then is, what were the paths followed to reach out to what for most of them would be their final destination? The answer is simple. All of them were part of half a million Republicans who crossed the border in recent months of the Civil War, after the fall of Catalonia. Hoping to leave behind the war and escape the vengeance of the murderous regime imposed by Franco, was huge disappointment to the poor reception of the French. Most were confined in appalling conditions in refugee camps in the south as Argeles-sur-Mer, Le Vernet d'Ariege, Barcarès, Septfonds ... (1) with hope by the French authorities that those considered "undesirable red" return to the Spain from which they had fled. Despair made quite a few did, but in our country could only expect to be killed, imprisoned or condemned to social ostracism and misery because had dared to defend the democratic values \u200b\u200bof the Second English Republic.
However, with the onset of World War II, the English begin to be useful for the French authorities to strengthen border defenses. Be harangued by the French saying that defend France against the same enemies who had fought during the Civil War. Many English and join the Militarized Companies Working with the mission to strengthen, in particular the famous Maginot Line, the "impenetrable defense" in a few days was crushed by the Wehrmacht.
Many others enroll in the Foreign Legion and the Battalions of March, real shock squads which are used as cannon fodder. It was this or forced repatriation.
In May 1940 he produced the collapse of France before the German attack. Some 20,000 English Republicans are imprisoned and abandoned to their fate by the government of Marshal Pétain, despite having broken under the French flag. Contrary to the Geneva Convention provides, the English prisoners of war are interned in prison camps, but in death camps.
Many are already research showing that
were victims of a triple clamp. On the one hand, the French government got rid of some "indésirables"-term contained in the files, "undesirables" - and, secondly, Germany got a precious manpower and Franco's Spain extended the repression of his political enemies beyond their borders
.
When asked about them in September 1940, the ineffable Foreign Minister Franco, Ramon Serrano Suner, said contemptuously: "My government does not consider English to those subjects. They are mercenaries working for the French. Do with them what they consider most appropriate. "
The Germans did so with his usual effectiveness. So that, in 1945, lived only a fifth. The remaining 16,000 had been killed.
September 1940. Serrano Suner traveled to Berlin to prepare for the meeting of Franco and Hitler in Hendaye. There, the Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop asked what should be done with the English republicans prisoners. To which Serrano replied that there were English and had no homeland. In this way, was sealed the fate of thousands of English exiles who, being considered enemies of the German state, were sent to extermination camps, where they would take the blue triangle stateless. Source: MarbellensesEn the department of La Charente, in central-western France, had many English refugees in places like Ruelle-sur-Touvre, Cognac and others. Many were in the refugee camp of Les Alliers, on the outskirts of Angouleme, the capital of the department.
The scheme was not properly field of detention, although people living in it were subject to a degree of control by the Prefecture. It was mostly families that had managed to regroup and had achieved a degree of integration into local society to be working in the field, businesses and homes. An abundance of very young or very old. There were many sick and maimed in the war in Spain. In June 1940 the German army occupied Angouleme and in the weeks after all were rumors about what they would do with the English of Les Alliers. Finally, told them that they were going to take some to Franco's Spain and others to free France, and was called to Vichy France which was akin to the Nazi government led by the French hero of World War General Pétain. On 20 August, 927 people, men, women and children, are forced to board a freight train as if they were cattle. Everyone is afraid. Where are they?
For the narrow slit of the train where they have been drawn as animals, almost no water or food, no hygiene, they realize the landscape that are directed towards the north. Some survivors remember the names of passing towns: Poitiers, Orleans, Paris, Strasbourg, Munich ...
After four grueling days of travel, arrive in a charming medieval village in Austria. On the banks of the Danube, its name, Mauthausen, says nothing . Soon it will be remembered by all mankind.
At the station, after several hours of waiting, you hear the sound of the locks and doors are opening wagons. We hear the cries of the SS and the barking of dogs. Van wagon by wagon asking "Wie alt, wie alt!" Which means their age.
Those who pass the age of 10 are shouting "Raus, raus!" And take off the train. Do not let them not even say goodbye to their families.
scenes that live on the station are terrible ... women cling desperately to their husbands, their sons ... to be brutally separated. No appeal is granted. Some mothers try to make their children are not taken off the train by hiding their age. Nothing would serve. There are selected
train 470 members from 10 years of age, all men, to be confined to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Within hours, the naked, the shower head peel them, give them a striped suit, a number with a blue triangle with a big S for "Spaniers (blue triangle to be identified stateless).
His fate is sealed: the quarry at Mauthausen need slaves to build this and many other fields. His work, now that there is still no Jews in the country, is building its own prison.
His last illusions of freedom vanish forever when the camp commander, Frank Ziereis lets them know that there came through the door and out the chimney of the crematorium.
Women and children are returned to Franco's Spain, the place from which they had fled just after the Civil War. After 18 days of travel on vile conditions, reach the station of Hendaye. Once back in their country, awaits prison, persecution and anguish of not being able to know their families left at Mauthausen. A 40-year ordeal confined in a country that is nothing but a vast prison run by the state.
life waiting for the English in the concentration camp is hell on earth, as has been applied Night and Fog Decree, "Nacht und Nebel", a euphemism inspired an opera by Wagner to say that nobody had it out alive as it provides the physical elimination of opponents to the Nazi regime. Shortly
care to know that the convoy which departed from Angoulême is the first train of deportees from Western Europe. English Republicans, the first anti-fascist fighters the world has known, have the dubious honor of being the first passengers of the death trains bound for Nazi death camps.
In the first winter, 1940 and 1941, killed most of the English who have traveled on the train.
the end, of the 470 who were imprisoned in Mauthausen, remained alive only 13% ...
"English For these special orders received, they could not write and no one would know they were in the field, since they were French prisoners of war, had had problems with the Vichy government, to rid of them had created a commission Berlin settlement order of Serrano Suner, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain. The transfer dates from 1941. The English should no longer exist. The start was successful, but these English were not so easy to kill as the Poles. "
are the words of director of Mauthausen, Franz Zieireis in the Nuremberg trials. Speaks well of those who, in happier times for him, called "the pigs", the English under their vesanías.Tratados as an uncomfortable merchandise, Franco's Spain in alliance with the French collaborationist with the Nazis decided to exterminate thousands of English exiles. They applied the decree "Nacht und Nebel" ("night and Fog "), code name for the" final solution. "They would enter in the field and could only go" smoke-stack ".
Successive trains were unloading prisoners of all nationalities in Mauthausen station. The English remember how, after several days and nights locked up without food or water, doing his business in a corner of the carriage of cargo, including vomiting and diarrhea, they saw a tall chimney of the smoke and flames coming out. The odor emitted was nauseous but at first thought it was the heating system. did not suspect even the magnitude of the horror that awaited them and that those flames were caused by burning the bodies of many killed.
Forming a column at the station, was flanked by a large garrison holding vicious dogs. Young fans of the SS was responsible for the compilation of slippery ground with rifle butts if they fall, hot on his hands trying to grab a handful of snow to put out their tenacious thirst, despite the intense cold prevailed. Bringing up the rear of the sad procession were two trucks that do not hesitate to run over anyone who, unable to follow, it crossed his path.
reached the field, they tattooed his prisoner number, were dressed in the famous striped pajamas and were identified with a blue triangle of statelessness and, paradoxically, with an "S" of "Spanier." A further contradiction in the midst of madness.
Many survivors remember the count of prisoners in a clearing a few hundred meters long and fifty meters wide (the "Appel Platz") on a thick layer of snow. Consisting of five, at attention, were between one and twelve hours so. Colleagues looked down and could not help them, none that moved the head was beaten to death. The record was 40 hours straight, below zero, and resulted in 500 deaths, which were collapsing in training. We have seen in dozens of films, without suspecting that the victims had
English ... For whatever nonsense they were subjected to whipping sessions. They had to count every shot in German and, if wrong, then they started again. The need was that many of the survivors ended up dominating the language of Bach and Kant.
The "Kapos" prisoners of trust of the SS, had the right to life and death over the deportees, most bloodthirsty allowing up to higher grades in the hierarchy of the field. Blindly obeyed the orders of the SS and each morning awoke to prisoners with a whip to ring a bell that was home to the day. The count of prisoners included those who had died every night, whose bodies were placed peers left alive at his side.
Avoiding the cruelest kapos, who did not conceal his hatred of the "Roten Spanier" ("English Reds") was a major concern. Unaware of his real name, but the English, always imaginative, eager not to be part of the Kommandos under command of the most brutal they were baptized with names that identify them. All, without exception, sought to avoid those most enjoyed with their torture, and in the quarry, the biggest criminal of them, nicknamed "Charimba" and another big man to that designated as "King Kong."
The "Kapos", recruited among the worst offenders were the lackeys of the SS. It thus became the largest Nazi concentration camp regime murderers. Source: World War II
Although not included in exteminio camps, Mauthausen was as much as anyone, for there the man was worth far as they went to work forces. When they were unable to do so, its destination was invariably the same: the gas chamber.
The raison d'être of this field was the granite quarry-Wienergraben Steinbruch, one of the most famous shredders criminal prisoners of that system. Your ladder of 186 steps was built in the winter of 1940-41 by the English. And remember that each of its steps cost the lives of 10 of our countrymen.
According to an order of Heinrich Himmler, prisoners of concentration camps were to be trained as masons to build sumptuous works that the Nazis after they won the war. Forced to climb the 186 steps of the damned quarry with a heavy block of stone on his back, the prisoners of Mauthausen were quickly weakened until they succumbed to exhaustion. Not in vain did the inhabitants of that region, known as "the Austrian Siberia, called it" Totenberg ", the" mountain of death. "
Mauthausen was soon known among the exiles as "the field of the English" and that, coupled with the large number prisoner of that nationality was the fact that they were the first to occupy the field, giving the fact that even became prisoners English masons who built it.
Besides the high degree of organization and solidarity among them (which we will discuss in the next article) prevented the death toll was higher. Yet, a French survivor even said that "every stone of Mauthausen is a English life."
A glance at a map will suffice to prove that the Nazis transformed Germany and countries occupied by their armies in an immense concentration camp. Exploitation and extermination of the prisoners were centralized in 22 major fields, many of whom were also prisoners of English nationality.
As in Buchenwald, near Weimar, where the survivors, as the writer Jorge Semprun, remember the perpetual hunger, the continuing lack of sleep, abuse of the Kapos, the tortures of the SS., Work in armament factories, the smoke from the crematorium, public executions, the endless counts under the snow in the winter, exhaustion, death of fellow ... There were also English
anonymous at the base of Peenemünde on the Baltic coast of Germany, whose facilities underground German scientist Von Braun was carrying out the development of the terrifying winged V-1 bombs and V-2. Special mention must
Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin, where it came to pass about 150,000 women of 23 nationalities, of which 92,000 would be exterminated.
survivors of an unspecified number of English prisoners captured by the Gestapo in France remembered with horror that the most abject stage of pseudo-medical experiments. The doctors were aborting all those whose pregnancy exceeds eight months. As for the others, the chief physician of the field, Dr. Treit, specialized in attending the event, immediately afterwards, choke or suffocate the baby (sometimes kill them by throwing them against the wall) in the presence of the mother, to study their physiological reactions and their sequelae.
Some babies delivered from time of immediate death, but guinea pigs were used in many other techniques of extermination, after which, if not killed, maimed or morons forever. English
was also in many other camps. In Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Esterwegen, Flossenburg, Dora-Mittelbau, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen (Germany), Terezin (Czechoslovakia); Natzwailer-Struthof, Schirmek (France / Alsace), Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, Treblinka
(Poland) ...
In one of his best poems León Felipe speaks to one of these factories of death, Auschwitz, whose monstrous cruelty could not even imagine the imaginative poets in a dream down to hell.
Neither Dante or Virgil, or Blake, or Rimbaud discovered in the course of his amazing nothing so terrible nightmares.
Walker said ... January 30, 2011 18:57
How many times you copy the text and the previous one, to publish it.
also did with Ernesto Catalan Cruzado, the blog: Witness, who had been through the French concentration camps, after the victory of the rebels, financed by the High Balls, Economic and Patriots.
All this comes to him cremated yesterday, had to be big boy and was a year ago and entered a time.
I rolled up, good afternoon, it rains-PAQUITA
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