"The Holocaust and the children from Bullenhuser Damm" -A reminder of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps 71 years ago in Germany- by Heinz Baade

In the era of National Socialism in Germany there were some 1,000 concentration and sub-camps and seven extermination camps. They served the murder of millions of people, the elimination of political opponents, the forced labor exploitation, medical experiments on human beings nand the nternierung of prisoners of war. The storage system constituted an essential element of the lawless National Socialist rule. Width branches of German industry benefited directly or indirectly from it.

Today it is assumed that about two-thirds of the six million Jews that the German Holocaust, Shoah or Holocaust later called, were killed, were murdered right in extermination and concentration camps - about a third was killed in mass shootings.

Because of the incredibly large extent of mass murder is little tangible to us today, should here be representative reminded of the incomprehensible to the hanging of 20 children - based on the Children's Portraits get a victims 'face' - the former murders of innocent children is on this way be made more comprehensible.

About the murder of the children from Bullenhuserdamm towards the end of the war once said the famous Magnum photographer Erich Hartmann:

"If I would have to summarize it (the Holocaust) in one place, then it would not Auschwitz, but Bullenhuserdamm. In Auschwitz, more than one million people died; in the school on Bullenhuserdamm there were twenty children. They were used by the Nazis for medical experiments. In April 1945, the SS brought these children in the middle of the night in the boiler room and hanged them. The youngest were 5 years old. There can be nothing worse than that.”

Quote: Erich Hartmann , photographer and author of the Book `In the Camps`".

The Holocaust is so far the largest organized mass murder in history. Approximately 6 million Jews, Sinti, Roma and other people have systematically murdered by the National Socialists during the second world war. In particular, in the concentration camps of Auschwitz -Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec murders took an industrial character in the course of every day, thousands of people in the gas chambers using Zyklon B were gassed. Although it also countless children were murdered, falling an event from the framework that towards the end of the war took place: the murder of the 20 children from Bullenhuserdamm in Hamburg - in their fate the incredible and experienced cruelty of the murderers of the Nazi regime is particularly evident.

Josef Mengele, notorious camp doctor at Auschwitz was instructed to deliver twenty Jewish children to medical experiments at the Neuengamme concentration camp towards the end of the war in Berlin. There they were to be provided to the SS doctor Kurt Meyer for human experiments for the development of vaccines TB available.

As British troops already had reached the city of Hamburg, the command came from Berlin ,to eradicate child to conceal the evidence of the crime.

Then, the children were brought together with their supervisors in the late evening hours of April 20, 1945 by KZ Neuengamme in the basement of the empty school on "Bullenhuserdamm" in Hamburg's Hammer Brook.

The SS - physician Alfred Trzebinski gave the children an injection of morphine, and then the SS sergeant Johann Frahm them put a rope around his neck and hanged by the children of the row in the adjacent boiler room of the school on two hooks.

On the same night another 28 adults were - the caregivers, and Soviet prisoners of war murdered.

The bodies of the children were burned in the crematorium in Neuengamme.

The photos were taken in the memorials of the former concentration camps Neuengamme and Bergen - Belsen as well as in the memorial "Bullenhuser Damm" in Hamburg and in the adjacent "Rose Garden".

The photos appear courtesy of "Vereinigung Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm e.V.”, Hamburg, Germany.

The “"Vereinigung Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm e.V.” has following web -side: http://www.kinder-vom-bullenhuser-damm.de/_english/index.html.

In memory of all 60 million victims of the Nazi–regime and 6 million victims of the HOLOCAUST.

Heinz Baade, in January 2016.