The Family Handyman is an American home-improvement magazine, owned by Trusted Media Brands, Inc.
127-848: The magazine was founded in 1951 by Universal Publishing & Distributing. UPD sold the magazine to Webb Publishing in 1977 to pay down debts that would ultimately finish off the company. Robert Maxwell acquired Webb in 1987, and sold the magazine to the Reader's Digest Association that year. Every issue features contributions from members of a crew of more than 1,100 reader-volunteer Field Editors. Monthly features include: Car + Garage, Stuff We Love, Home Care + Repair, Handy Hints, Top Ten Tips, Pro Tips, DIY Quiz, and Great Goofs. Both magazine and web content provides resources for do-it-yourself homeowners, including how-to instructions for improving homes, yards and vehicles. The Family Handyman also publishes several special interest publications, tablet editions of
254-434: A sex trafficking ring with Jeffrey Epstein (who had already died in jail the previous year). She was convicted on 29 December 2021, and sentenced to 20 years in prison on 28 June 2022. Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and
381-565: A car with a Red Cross symbol that carried the Zyklon B, as well as an SS doctor in case officers were poisoned by mistake. Inmates arriving at night, or who were too weak to walk, were taken by truck. Work on a new railway line and ramp (right) between sectors BI and BII in Auschwitz II, was completed in May 1944 for the arrival of Hungarian Jews between May and early July 1944. The rails led directly to
508-602: A digital presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and in free, weekly email newsletters. Robert Maxwell Ian Robert Maxwell MC (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch ; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak -born British media proprietor , politician and fraudster . After escaping the Nazi occupation of his native country, Maxwell joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile during World War II and
635-561: A finger into the water of the washbasin. Under the first is written: " So bist du rein " (like this you are clean), and under the second, " So gehst du ein " (like this you come to a bad end); and lower down, in doubtful French but in Gothic script: " La propreté, c'est la santé " [cleanliness is health]. Prisoners received half a litre of coffee substitute or a herbal tea in the morning, but no food. A second gong heralded roll call, when inmates lined up outside in rows of ten to be counted. No matter
762-576: A flamboyant lifestyle, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford , from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailing in his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine , named after his daughter Ghislaine . Maxwell was litigious and often embroiled in controversy. In 1989, he had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in
889-726: A former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate , approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the US with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror ' s foreign editor, Nicholas Davies , were both long-time agents for Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that, in 1986, Maxwell informed the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu revealed information about Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times , then to
1016-594: A gas chamber in bunker 2, and a tour of the building site of Auschwitz III, the new IG Farben plant being constructed at Monowitz . Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. Bunker I was demolished in 1943 and bunker 2 in November 1944. Plans for crematoria II and III show that both had an oven room 30 by 11.24 m (98.4 by 36.9 ft) on
1143-409: 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
1270-574: A group of Soviet prisoners of war—took place around August 1941. By the end of that year, during what most historians regard as the first phase of the Holocaust, 500,000–800,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered in mass shootings by a combination of German Einsatzgruppen , ordinary German soldiers, and local collaborators. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich outlined
1397-536: A group of male prisoners arrived to set up an infirmary in October 1942, their first task, according to researchers from the Auschwitz Museum, was to distinguish the corpses from the women who were still alive. Gisella Perl , a Romanian-Jewish gynecologist and inmate of the women's camp, wrote in 1948: There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of
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#17330937671471524-569: A letter on 12 July 1940, Höss told Glücks that the local population was "fanatically Polish, ready to undertake any sort of operation against the hated SS men". By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land around the camp to create a 40-square-kilometer (15 sq mi) "zone of interest" ( Interessengebiet ) patrolled by the SS, Gestapo and local police. By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles. An inmate's first encounter with Auschwitz, if they were registered and not sent straight to
1651-539: A new women's camp ( Frauenkonzentrationslager or FKL) in Auschwitz II. This consisted at first of 15 brick and 15 wooden barracks in sector ( Bauabschnitt ) BIa; it was later extended into BIb, and by October 1943 it held 32,066 women. In 1943–1944, about 11,000 women were also housed in the Gypsy family camp , as were several thousand in the Theresienstadt family camp . Conditions in the women's camp were so poor that when
1778-486: A one-off spoof magazine called Not Private Eye . A hint of Maxwell's service to Israel was provided by John Loftus and Mark Aarons , who described Maxwell's contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders in 1948 as crucial to the Czechoslovak decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War . Czechoslovak military assistance was both unique and crucial for Israel in the conflict. According to Loftus and Aarons, it
1905-419: A press conference to publicise his acquisition, Maxwell said his editors would be "free to produce the news without interference". Meanwhile, at a meeting of Maxwell's new employees, Mirror journalist Joe Haines asserted that he was able to prove that their boss was "a crook and a liar". Haines quickly came under Maxwell's influence and later wrote his authorised biography. In June 1985, Maxwell announced
2032-485: A railway station or at one of several dedicated trackside ramps, including one next to Auschwitz I. The Altejudenrampe (old Jewish ramp), part of the Oświęcim freight railway station, was used from 1942 to 1944 for Jewish transports. Located between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, arriving at this ramp meant a 2.5 km journey to Auschwitz II and the gas chambers. Most deportees were forced to walk, accompanied by SS men and
2159-399: A report that concluded: "We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell's acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company." It was found that Maxwell had contrived to inflate Pergamon's share price through transactions between his private family companies. At the same time,
2286-604: A rival of the Evening Standard , Maxwell eventually decided to make it the first 24-hour paper as well. In May 1987, Maxwell's BPCC made an unsolicited bid to acquire US publishing conglomerate Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). HBJ defended itself from the hostile takeover attempt by going deeply into debt to make large cash payments to shareholders. The strain of the debt was a factor in HBJ's 1989 sale of its theme park holdings to Anheuser-Busch . These theme park assets included
2413-815: A secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double agent or a triple agent , and "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia". He had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6 ), to the Soviet KGB , and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad . Six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence services attended Maxwell's funeral in Israel, while Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogised him and stated: "He has done more for Israel than can today be told." Shortly before Maxwell's death, Ari Ben-Menashe ,
2540-492: A serial number, on their left breast for Soviet prisoners of war and on the left arm for civilians. Categories of prisoner were distinguishable by triangular pieces of cloth (German: Winkel ) sewn onto on their jackets below their prisoner number. Political prisoners (Schutzhäftlinge or Sch), mostly Poles, had a red triangle, while criminals ( Berufsverbrecher or BV) were mostly German and wore green. Asocial prisoners ( Asoziale or Aso), which included vagrants, prostitutes and
2667-538: A suitcase owned by his former head of security, John Pole. Later in his life, Maxwell had become increasingly paranoid about his own employees and had the offices of those he suspected of disloyalty bugged so he could hear their conversations. After Maxwell's death, the tapes remained in Pole's suitcase and were discovered by the researchers only in 2007. Maxwell's death triggered instability for his publishing empire, with banks frantically calling in their massive loans. Despite
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#17330937671472794-708: A takeover of Clive Sinclair 's ailing home computer company, Sinclair Research , through Hollis Brothers, a Pergamon subsidiary. The deal was aborted in August 1985. In 1987, Maxwell purchased part of IPC Media to create Fleetway Publications . The same year, he launched the London Daily News in February after a delay caused by production problems, but the paper closed in July after sustaining significant losses contemporary estimates put at £25 million. Originally intending it to be
2921-513: A telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another. Langefeld was succeeded as Lagerführerin in October 1942 by SS Oberaufseherin Maria Mandl , who developed a reputation for cruelty. Höss hired men to oversee the female supervisors, first SS Obersturmführer Paul Müller, then SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Hössler . Mandl and Hössler were executed after the war. Sterilisation experiments were carried out in barracks 30 by
3048-440: A thousand people were crammed into the superimposed compartments of each barracks. Unable to stretch out completely, they slept there both lengthwise and crosswise, with one man's feet on another's head, neck, or chest. Stripped of all human dignity, they pushed and shoved and bit and kicked each other in an effort to get a few more inches' space on which to sleep a little more comfortably. For they did not have long to sleep. Sunday
3175-718: A time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day. After examining several sites for a new plant to manufacture Buna-N , a type of synthetic rubber essential to the war effort, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben chose a site near the towns of Dwory and Monowice (Monowitz in German), about 7 km (4.3 mi) east of Auschwitz I. Tax exemptions were available to corporations prepared to develop industries in
3302-472: A transport of Polish Jews from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, which had just come into operation. On 26 and 28 March, two transports of Slovakian Jews were registered as prisoners in the women's camp , where they were kept for slave labour; these were the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann 's department IV B4 (the Jewish office) in
3429-435: Is not drinkable; it has a revolting smell and often fails for many hours. The walls are covered by curious didactic frescoes : for example, there is the good Häftling [prisoner], portrayed stripped to the waist, about to diligently soap his sheared and rosy cranium, and the bad Häftling, with a strong Semitic nose and a greenish colour, bundled up in his ostentatiously stained clothes with a beret on his head, who cautiously dips
3556-503: Is to be rebuilt to hold approximately 30,000." Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—called a Kriegsgefangenenlager (prisoner-of-war camp) on blueprints—began in October 1941 in Brzezinka , about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. The initial plan was that Auschwitz II would consist of four sectors (Bauabschnitte I–IV), each consisting of six subcamps (BIIa–BIIf) with their own gates and fences. The first two sectors were completed (sector BI
3683-521: The Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp . The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles (for whom the camp was initially established). For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish. In May 1940, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries established the camp's reputation for sadism. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for
3810-572: The 1964 general election , representing the Labour Party , Maxwell was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham and re-elected in 1966 . He gave an interview to The Times in 1968 in which he said the House of Commons provided him with a problem. "I can't get on with men", he commented. "I tried having male assistants at first. But it didn't work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of
3937-601: The 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army . Several other German industrial enterprises, such as Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert , built factories with their own subcamps. There were around 28 camps near industrial plants, each camp holding hundreds or thousands of prisoners. Designated as Aussenlager (external camp), Nebenlager (extension camp), Arbeitslager (labor camp), or Aussenkommando (external work detail), camps were built at Blechhammer , Jawiszowice , Jaworzno , Lagisze , Mysłowice , Trzebinia , and as far afield as
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4064-548: The Allied-occupation authorities to go into business, becoming the British and US distributor for Springer Verlag , a publisher of scientific books. In 1951, he bought three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher; the remaining quarter was held by the experienced scientific editor Paul Rosbaud . They changed the name of the company to Pergamon Press and rapidly built it into a major academic publishing house. In
4191-650: The British retreat to Britain , Maxwell (using the name "Ivan du Maurier", or "Leslie du Maurier", the surname taken from the name of a popular cigarette brand ) took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army, and with 500 other soldiers he was transferred to the Pioneer Corps and later to the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943. He was then involved in action across Europe, from
4318-559: The Daily Mirror . Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years. Ben-Menashe's story was ignored at first, but eventually journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option , Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1991, Labour MP George Galloway and Conservative MP Rupert Allason (also known as espionage author Nigel West) agreed to raise
4445-636: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question to senior Nazis, and from early 1942 freight trains delivered Jews from all over occupied Europe to German extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Bełżec , Chełmno , Majdanek , Sobibór , and Treblinka . Most prisoners were gassed on arrival. A former World War I camp for transient workers and later a Polish army barracks, Auschwitz I was the main camp ( Stammlager ) and administrative headquarters of
4572-616: The London stock markets . Maxwell subsequently lost control of Pergamon and was expelled from the board in October 1969, along with three other directors in sympathy with him, by the majority owners of the company's shares. Steinberg purchased Pergamon. An inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) under the Takeover Code of the time was conducted by Rondle Owen Charles Stable and Sir Ronald Leach in mid-1971. The inquiry resulted in
4699-569: The Normandy beaches to Berlin , and achieved the rank of sergeant . Maxwell gained a commission in 1945 and was promoted to the rank of captain . In January 1945, Maxwell's heroism in "storming a German machine-gun nest" won him the Military Cross (MC), presented by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery . Attached to the Foreign Office , he served in Berlin during the next two years in
4826-607: The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia. Industries with satellite camps included coal mines, foundries and other metal works, and chemical plants. Prisoners were also made to work in forestry and farming. For example, Wirtschaftshof Budy , in the Polish village of Budy near Brzeszcze , was a farming subcamp where prisoners worked 12-hour days in the fields, tending animals, and making compost by mixing human ashes from
4953-719: The Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On 30 March the first RHSA transport arrived from France. "Selection", where new arrivals were chosen for work or the gas chamber, began in April 1942 and was conducted regularly from July. Piper writes that this reflected Germany's increasing need for labour. Those selected as unfit for work were gassed without being registered as prisoners. There is also disagreement about how many were gassed in Auschwitz I. Perry Broad , an SS-Unterscharführer , wrote that "transport after transport vanished in
5080-893: The Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws . One, the Reich Citizenship Law , defined as citizens those of "German or related blood who demonstrate by their behaviour that they are willing and suitable to serve the German People and Reich faithfully", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between those with "German or related blood" and Jews. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, Hitler ordered that
5207-566: The Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg , Germany, to inspect it. Around 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) long and 400 metres (1,300 ft) wide, Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story. A second story was added to the others in 1943 and eight new blocks were built. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler , head of the SS , approved the site in April 1940 on
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5334-645: The SeaWorld chain, which the company had purchased in 1976. By 1988, Maxwell's various companies owned, in addition to the Mirror titles and Pergamon Press, Nimbus Records , Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services and the Berlitz language schools . He also owned a half-share of MTV in Europe and other European television interests, Maxwell Cable TV and Maxwell Entertainment. Maxwell purchased Macmillan Publishers ,
5461-486: The Star of David , overlaid by a second triangle if they also belonged to a second category. The nationality of the inmate was indicated by a letter stitched onto the cloth. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. Next were non-Jewish prisoners from other countries. Jewish prisoners were at the bottom. Deportees were brought to Auschwitz crammed in wretched conditions into goods or cattle wagons, arriving near
5588-529: The United States Congress was investigating Leasco's takeover practices. Judge Thayne Forbes in September 1971 was critical of the inquiry: "They had moved from an inquisitorial role to accusatory one and virtually committed the business murder of Mr. Maxwell." He further continued that the trial judge would probably find that the inspectors had acted "contrary to the rules of natural justice". Pergamon performed poorly under Steinberg; Maxwell reacquired
5715-548: The " Jewish question ". Both during and immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, acts of violence against German Jews became ubiquitous, and legislation was passed excluding them from certain professions, including the civil service and the law. Harassment and economic pressure encouraged Jews to leave Germany ; their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden from advertising in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. On 15 September 1935,
5842-537: The American firm, for $ 2.6 billion in 1988. That same year, he launched an ambitious new project, a transnational newspaper called The European . In 1991, Maxwell was forced to sell Pergamon and Maxwell Directories to Elsevier for £440 million to cover his debts; he used some of this money to buy an ailing tabloid, the New York Daily News . The same year Maxwell sold forty-nine per cent of Mirror Group's stock to
5969-697: The Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried in Jerusalem . Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds . The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992. After Maxwell's death, large discrepancies in his companies' finances were revealed, including his fraudulent misappropriation of
6096-702: The Auschwitz II Sonderkommando , who had been forced to dig up and burn the remains of that camp's mass graves, thought to hold over 100,000 corpses. After visiting Auschwitz I in March 1941, it appears that Himmler ordered that the camp be expanded, although Peter Hayes notes that, on 10 January 1941, the Polish underground told the Polish government-in-exile in London: "the Auschwitz concentration camp ...can accommodate approximately 7,000 prisoners at present, and
6223-515: The Auschwitz [I] crematorium." In the view of Filip Müller , one of the Auschwitz I Sonderkommando , tens of thousands of Jews were murdered there from France, Holland, Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and Yugoslavia, and from the Theresienstadt , Ciechanow , and Grodno ghettos. Against this, Jean-Claude Pressac estimated that up to 10,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz I. The last inmates gassed there, in December 1942, were around 400 members of
6350-578: The British government. This replenishment was limited and also supported by a surplus in the printers' fund, which was taken by the government in part payment of £100 million required to support the workers' state pensions. The rest of the £100 million was waived. Maxwell's theft of pension funds was therefore partly repaid from public funds. The result was that in general, pensioners received about half of their company pension entitlement. The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell
6477-426: The Holocaust . Five of his children—Christine, Isabel, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine—were later employed within his companies. Karine died of leukaemia at age three, while Michael was severely injured in a car crash in 1961, at age 15, when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed headlong into another vehicle. Michael never regained consciousness and died seven years later. After the war, Maxwell used contacts in
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#17330937671476604-601: The Holocaust . It consisted of Auschwitz I , the main camp ( Stammlager ) in Oświęcim ; Auschwitz II-Birkenau , a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers ; Auschwitz III-Monowitz , a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben ; and dozens of subcamps . The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question . After Germany initiated World War II by invading Poland in September 1939,
6731-404: The Mirror Group pension fund. Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the small town of Slatinské Doly, in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno , Ukraine) on 10 June 1923. Like the rest of the then-newly formed Czechoslovakia, the area of Maxwell's birth and upbringing had been part of the Austria-Hungary until early November 1918. The area
6858-441: The Monowitz concentration camp, it was the first concentration camp to be financed and built by private industry. Measuring 270 m × 490 m (890 ft × 1,610 ft), the camp was larger than Auschwitz I. By the end of 1944, it housed 60 barracks measuring 17.5 m × 8 m (57 ft × 26 ft), each with a day room and a sleeping room containing 56 three-tiered wooden bunks. IG Farben paid
6985-453: The PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory , two of the most important nuclear research and national security facilities in the United States. Maxwell allegedly employed John Tower , Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services , to facilitate the sales of the bugged Israeli version of the PROMIS software to Sandia and Los Alamos. The Foreign Office suspected Maxwell of being
7112-424: The Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed. The area around Auschwitz was annexed to the German Reich , as part of first Gau Silesia and from 1941 Gau Upper Silesia . The camp at Auschwitz was established in April 1940, at first as a quarantine camp for Polish political prisoners. On 22 June 1941, in an attempt to obtain new territory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union . The first gassing at Auschwitz—of
7239-406: The Roma, wore black. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses ( Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung or IBV)'s and pink for gay men, who were mostly German. An estimated 5,000–15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 (proscribing sexual acts between men) were detained in concentration camps, of whom an unknown number were sent to Auschwitz. Jews wore a yellow badge , the shape of
7366-404: The SS ordered that the site be evacuated, sending 9,000 inmates, most of them Jews, on a death march to another Auschwitz subcamp at Gliwice . From Gliwice, prisoners were taken by rail in open freight wagons to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The 800 inmates who had been left behind in the Monowitz hospital were liberated along with the rest of the camp on 27 January 1945 by
7493-850: The SS personnel, were members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände ( death's head units). Other SS staff worked in the medical or political departments, or in the economic administration, which was responsible for clothing and other supplies, including the property of dead prisoners. The SS viewed Auschwitz as a comfortable posting; being there meant they had avoided the front and had access to the victims' property. Certain prisoners, at first non-Jewish Germans but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles, were assigned positions of authority as Funktionshäftlinge (functionaries), which gave them access to better housing and food. The Lagerprominenz (camp elite) included Blockschreiber (barracks clerk), Kapo (overseer), Stubendienst (barracks orderly), and Kommandierte (trusties). Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners,
7620-408: The SS three or four Reichsmark for nine- to eleven-hour shifts from each worker. In 1943–1944, about 35,000 inmates worked at the plant; 23,000 (32 a day on average) were killed through malnutrition, disease, and the workload. Within three to four months at the camp, Peter Hayes writes, the inmates were "reduced to walking skeletons". Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II reduced
7747-576: The World ' s editor, Stafford Somerfield , opposed Maxwell's bid in an October 1968 front-page opinion piece in which he referred to Maxwell's Czechoslovak origins and used his birth name. He wrote, "This is a British paper, run by British people ... as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding ... Let us keep it that way". The paper was later purchased by the Australian tycoon, Rupert Murdoch , who later that year acquired The Sun , which had also previously interested Maxwell. In 1969, Saul Steinberg , head of "Leasco Data Processing Corporation",
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#17330937671477874-464: The absentee was found or the reason for the absence discovered, even if it took hours. On 6 July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski , had escaped; following an escape in 1941, a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death. After roll call, prisoners retired to their blocks for the night and received their bread rations. Then they had some free time to use
8001-541: The area around the gas chambers. The day began at 4:30 am for the men (an hour later in winter), and earlier for the women, when the block supervisor sounded a gong and started beating inmates with sticks to make them wash and use the latrines quickly. There were few latrines and there was a lack of clean water. Each washhouse had to service thousands of prisoners. In sectors BIa and BIb in Auschwitz II, two buildings containing latrines and washrooms were installed in 1943. These contained troughs for washing and 90 faucets;
8128-519: The boss." Maxwell lost his seat in 1970 to Conservative challenger William Benyon . He contested Buckingham again in both 1974 general elections , but without success. At the beginning of 1969, it emerged that Maxwell's attempt to buy the tabloid newspaper News of the World had failed. The Carr family, which owned the newspaper, was incensed at the thought of a Czechoslovak immigrant with socialist views gaining ownership. The board voted against Maxwell's bid without any dissent. The News of
8255-409: The camp be established. Living with his wife and children in a two-story stucco house near the commandant's and administration building, he served as commandant until 11 November 1943, with Josef Kramer as his deputy. Succeeded as commandant by Arthur Liebehenschel , Höss joined the SS Business and Administration Head Office in Oranienburg as director of Amt DI, a post that made him deputy of
8382-520: The camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, and in 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO . Auschwitz is the site of the largest mass murder in a single location in history. The ideology of Nazism combined elements of " racial hygiene ", eugenics , antisemitism , pan-Germanism , and territorial expansionism, Richard J. Evans writes. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party became obsessed by
8509-439: The camp complex. Fifty kilometres (31 mi) southwest of Kraków , the site was first suggested in February 1940 as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners by Arpad Wigand , the inspector of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) and deputy of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski , the Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia. Richard Glücks , head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate , sent Walter Eisfeld , former commandant of
8636-459: The camp, including with the SS. Nevertheless, their life expectancy was short; they were regularly murdered and replaced. About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. They were forced on a death march and by train to the camp at Mauthausen , where three days later they were asked to step forward during roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived. Uniquely at Auschwitz, prisoners were tattooed with
8763-477: The camp. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Prisoners kept track of the days in other ways, such as obtaining information from newcomers. About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female. The first mass transport of women, 999 non-Jewish German women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp , arrived on 26 March 1942. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they were brought to Auschwitz as founder functionaries of
8890-447: The camps inspectorate. Richard Baer became commandant of Auschwitz I on 11 May 1944 and Fritz Hartjenstein of Auschwitz II from 22 November 1943, followed by Josef Kramer from 15 May 1944 until the camp's liquidation in January 1945. Heinrich Schwarz was commandant of Auschwitz III from the point at which it became an autonomous camp in November 1943 until its liquidation. Höss returned to Auschwitz between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as
9017-412: The ceiling to resemble showerheads. The daily capacity of the crematoria (how many bodies could be burned in a 24-hour period) was 340 corpses in crematorium I; 1,440 each in crematoria II and III; and 768 each in IV and V. By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity 4,416, although by loading three to five corpses at
9144-502: The ceiling. Historians have disagreed about the date the all-Jewish transports began arriving in Auschwitz. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, the Nazi leadership outlined, in euphemistic language, its plans for the Final Solution . According to Franciszek Piper , the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss offered inconsistent accounts after the war, suggesting the extermination began in December 1941, January 1942, or before
9271-784: The company in 1974 after borrowing funds. Maxwell established the Maxwell Foundation in Liechtenstein in 1970. He acquired the British Printing Corporation (BPC) in 1981 and changed its name first to the British Printing and Communication Corporation (BPCC) and then to the Maxwell Communication Corporation (MCC). The company was later sold in a management buyout and is now known as Polestar. In July 1984, Maxwell acquired Mirror Group Newspapers ,
9398-471: The crematoria with sod and manure. Incidents of sabotage to decrease production took place in several subcamps, including Charlottengrube, Gleiwitz II , and Rajsko . Living conditions in some of the camps were so poor that they were regarded as punishment subcamps. Rudolf Höss , born in Baden-Baden in 1900, was named the first commandant of Auschwitz when Heinrich Himmler ordered on 27 April 1940 that
9525-465: The day. We stood in line to get in to this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentry, we could barely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell that surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on those planks like birds perched on
9652-509: The efforts of his sons Kevin and Ian, the Maxwell companies soon collapsed. It emerged that, without adequate prior authorisation, Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds to shore up the shares of the Mirror Group to save his companies from bankruptcy. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with money from investment banks Lehman Brothers , Coopers & Lybrand , and Goldman Sachs , as well as
9779-499: The end of June or beginning of July 1940. Initially intended not for mass murder but for prisoners who had been executed or had otherwise died in the camp, the crematorium was in operation from August 1940 until July 1943, by which time the crematoria at Auschwitz II had taken over. By May 1942 three ovens had been installed in crematorium I, which together could burn 340 bodies in 24 hours. The first experimental gassing took place around August 1941, when Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch , at
9906-404: The end of the war, the SS sent most of the camp's population west on a death march to camps inside Germany and Austria. Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day . In the decades after the war, survivors such as Primo Levi , Viktor Frankl , Elie Wiesel , and Edith Eger wrote memoirs of their experiences, and
10033-422: The establishment of the women's camp in March 1942. In Kommandant in Auschwitz , he wrote: "In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia." On 15 February 1942, according to Danuta Czech , a transport of Jews from Beuthen, Upper Silesia ( Bytom , Poland), arrived at Auschwitz I and was sent straight to the gas chamber. In 1998 an eyewitness said
10160-472: The factory; and that Auschwitz prisoners be used in the construction work. Auschwitz inmates began working at the plant, known as Buna Werke and IG-Auschwitz, in April 1941, demolishing houses in Monowitz to make way for it. By May, because of a shortage of trucks, several hundred of them were rising at 3 am to walk there twice a day from Auschwitz I. Because a long line of exhausted inmates walking through
10287-497: The frontier regions under the Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law, passed in December 1940. In addition to its proximity to the concentration camp, a source of cheap labour, the site had good railway connections and access to raw materials. In February 1941, Himmler ordered that the Jewish population of Oświęcim be expelled to make way for skilled laborers; that all Poles able to work remain in the town and work on building
10414-517: The functionaries developed a reputation as sadists. Very few were prosecuted after the war, because of the difficulty of determining which atrocities had been performed by order of the SS. Although the SS oversaw the murders at each gas chamber, the forced labor portion of the work was done by prisoners known from 1942 as the Sonderkommando (special squad). These were mostly Jews but they included groups such as Soviet POWs. In 1940–1941 when there
10541-603: The gas chamber, was at the prisoner reception centre near the gate with the Arbeit macht frei sign, where they were tattooed, shaved, disinfected, and given a striped prison uniform. Built between 1942 and 1944, the center contained a bathhouse, laundry, and 19 gas chambers for delousing clothing. The prisoner reception center of Auschwitz I became the visitor reception center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum . Construction of crematorium I began at Auschwitz I at
10668-523: The gas chambers, launched an unsuccessful uprising. After the Holocaust ended, only 789 Schutzstaffel personnel (no more than 15 percent) ever stood trial. Several were executed, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss . The Allies ' failure to act on early reports of mass murder by bombing the camp or its railways remains controversial. As the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, toward
10795-434: The ground floor, and an underground dressing room 49.43 by 7.93 m (162.2 by 26.0 ft) and gas chamber 30 by 7 m (98 by 23 ft). The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened. The chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to
10922-510: The ground". Maxwell also bought into Derby County in 1987. He attempted to buy Manchester United in 1984 but refused owner Martin Edwards 's asking price. Pergamon Press, a Soviet -friendly firm, published numerous Soviet science books in the West. A bugged version of the intelligence spy software PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with Maxwell as a conduit. Maxwell
11049-570: The higher number is probably attributable to the logistics of evacuating the camp. Female guards were known as SS supervisors ( SS-Aufseherinnen ). Most of the staff were from Germany or Austria, but as the war progressed, increasing numbers of Volksdeutsche from other countries, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states, joined the SS at Auschwitz. Not all were ethnically German. Guards were also recruited from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Camp guards, around three quarters of
11176-416: The instruction of Rudolf Höss, murdered a group of Soviet prisoners of war by throwing Zyklon B crystals into their basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I. A second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed on 3–5 September. The morgue was later converted to a gas chamber able to hold at least 700–800 people. Zyklon B was dropped into the room through slits in
11303-626: The issue in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege protection, which in turn allowed British newspapers to report events without fear of libel suits . Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention" and fired Davies. A year later, in Galloway's libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers, Galloway's counsel announced that the MP accepted that the group's staff had not been involved in Vanunu's abduction. Galloway referred to Maxwell as "one of
11430-640: The local SS garrison commander ( Standortältester ) to oversee the arrival of Hungary's Jews, which made him the superior officer of all the commandants of the Auschwitz camps. According to Aleksander Lasik , about 6,335 people (6,161 of them men) worked for the SS at Auschwitz over the course of the camp's existence; 4.2 percent were officers, 26.1 percent non-commissioned officers, and 69.7 percent rank and file. In March 1941, there were 700 SS guards; in June 1942, 2,000; and in August 1944, 3,342. At its peak in January 1945, 4,480 SS men and 71 SS women worked in Auschwitz;
11557-428: The magazine, a DIY Tip Genius app, and The Family Handyman DIY University, an online curriculum of DIY courses. Professional handymen and amateur DIYers can find both new and archived magazine content on The Family Handyman website, which focuses on how-to articles, woodworking project plans, home repairs, bathroom remodeling, kitchen remodeling, do it yourself (DIY) tutorials, and lawn care. The magazine also maintains
11684-624: The minimum space needed to exist". 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) in the early months 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
11811-892: The most trivial of reasons. The first gassings —of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941. Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles , 21,000 Romani , 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war , and up to 15,000 others. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments . At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully, and on 7 October 1944 , two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners who operated
11938-459: The population by nearly a fifth each month. Site managers constantly threatened inmates with the gas chambers, and the smell from the crematoria at Auschwitz I and II hung heavy over the camp. Although the factory had been expected to begin production in 1943, shortages of labour and raw materials meant start-up was postponed repeatedly. The Allies bombed the plant in 1944 on 20 August, 13 September, 18 December, and 26 December. On 19 January 1945,
12065-483: The press section. Maxwell naturalised as a British subject on 19 June 1946 and changed his name by deed of change of name on 30 June 1948. In 1945, Maxwell married Elisabeth "Betty" Meynard , a French Protestant , and the couple had nine children over the next sixteen years: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine , Isabel , Karine, Ian , Kevin and Ghislaine . In a 1995 interview, Elisabeth talked of how they were recreating Maxwell's childhood family who were killed in
12192-471: The public. Maxwell's links with Eastern European totalitarian regimes resulted in several biographies of those countries' leaders, with interviews conducted by Maxwell, for which he received much derision. At the beginning of an interview with Romania 's Nicolae Ceaușescu , then the country's communist leader, he asked, "How do you account for your enormous popularity with the Romanian people?" Maxwell
12319-605: The publisher of six British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror , from Reed International plc . for £113 million. This led to a media war between Maxwell and Murdoch, the proprietor of the News of the World and The Sun . Mirror Group Newspapers (formerly Trinity Mirror, now part of Reach plc ), published the Daily Mirror , a pro-Labour tabloid; Sunday Mirror ; Sunday People ; Scottish Sunday Mail and Scottish Daily Record . At
12446-510: The recommendation of SS- Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss of the camps inspectorate. Höss oversaw the development of the camp and served as its first commandant. The first 30 prisoners arrived on 20 May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp. German "career criminals" ( Berufsverbrecher ), the men were known as "greens" ( Grünen ) after the green triangles on their prison clothing. Brought to the camp as functionaries, this group did much to establish
12573-514: The sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly at Polish inmates, until the political prisoners took over their roles. Bruno Brodniewicz , the first prisoner (who was given serial number 1), became Lagerälteste (camp elder). The others were given positions such as kapo and block supervisor. The first mass transport—of 728 Polish male political prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews—arrived on 14 June 1940 from Tarnów , Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758. In
12700-582: The same day. According to Danuta Czech , this was the first registered transport sent to Auschwitz by the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) office IV B4, known as the Jewish Office, led by SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann . (Office IV was the Gestapo .) A third transport of 798 Jewish women from Bratislava , Slovakia, followed on 28 March. Women were at first held in blocks 1–10 of Auschwitz I, but from 6 August 1942, 13,000 inmates were transferred to
12827-515: The situation in the Soviet Union during the attempted coup of 1991 . He was a "great character", Major added. Neil Kinnock , then Labour Party leader, spoke of him as a man with "a zest for life" who "attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life." A production crew conducting research for Maxwell , a 2007 biographical film by the BBC , uncovered tapes stored in
12954-470: The sound of " Arbeitskommandos formieren " ("form work details"), prisoners walked to their place of work, five abreast, to begin a working day that was normally 11 hours long—longer in summer and shorter in winter. A prison orchestra, such as the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz , was forced to play cheerful music as the workers left the camp. Kapos were responsible for the prisoners' behaviour while they worked, as
13081-518: The toilet facilities were "sewage channels" covered by concrete with 58 holes for seating. There were three barracks with washing facilities or toilets to serve 16 residential barracks in BIIa, and six washrooms/latrines for 32 barracks in BIIb, BIIc, BIId, and BIIe. Primo Levi described a 1944 Auschwitz III washroom: It is badly lighted, full of draughts, with the brick floor covered by a layer of mud. The water
13208-464: The town of Oświęcim might harm German-Polish relations, the inmates were told to shave daily, make sure they were clean, and sing as they walked. From late July they were taken to the factory by train on freight wagons. Given the difficulty of moving them, including during the winter, IG Farben decided to build a camp at the plant. The first inmates moved there on 30 October 1942. Known as KL Auschwitz III–Aussenlager (Auschwitz III subcamp), and later as
13335-579: The train contained "the women of Beuthen". Saul Friedländer wrote that the Beuthen Jews were from the Organization Schmelt labor camps and had been deemed unfit for work. According to Christopher Browning , transports of Jews unfit for work were sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz from autumn 1941. The evidence for this and the February 1942 transport was contested in 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann . Around 20 March 1942, according to Danuta Czech,
13462-485: The washrooms and receive their mail, unless they were Jews: Jews were not allowed to receive mail. Curfew ("nighttime quiet") was marked by a gong at nine o'clock. Inmates slept in long rows of brick or wooden bunks, or on the floor, lying in and on their clothes and shoes to prevent them from being stolen. The wooden bunks had blankets and paper mattresses filled with wood shavings; in the brick barracks, inmates lay on straw. According to Miklós Nyiszli : Eight hundred to
13589-469: The weather, they had to wait for the SS to arrive for the count; how long they stood there depended on the officers' mood, and whether there had been escapes or other events attracting punishment. Guards might force the prisoners to squat for an hour with their hands above their heads or hand out beatings or detention for infractions such as having a missing button or an improperly cleaned food bowl. The inmates were counted and re-counted. After roll call, to
13716-438: The women's camp. Rudolf Höss wrote of them: "It was easy to predict that these beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power ... Spiritual suffering was completely alien to them." They were given serial numbers 1–999. The women's guard from Ravensbrück, Johanna Langefeld , became the first Auschwitz women's camp Lagerführerin . A second mass transport of women, 999 Jews from Poprad , Slovakia, arrived on
13843-549: The worst criminals of the century". On 4 November 1991, Maxwell had an argumentative phone call with his son Kevin over a meeting scheduled with the Bank of England on Maxwell's default on £50 million in loans. Maxwell missed the meeting, instead travelling on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine , to the Canary Islands , Spain. On 5 November, Maxwell was last in contact with the crew of Lady Ghislaine at 4:25 a.m. local time, but
13970-436: Was 300 grams of bread, often moldy, part of which the inmates were expected to keep for breakfast the next day, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Prisoners engaged in hard labour were given extra rations. A second roll call took place at seven in the evening, in the course of which prisoners might be hanged or flogged. If a prisoner was missing, the others had to remain standing until
14097-406: Was Maxwell's covert help in smuggling aircraft parts into Israel that led to the country having air supremacy during the war. Maxwell is alleged to have distributed a bugged version of a software, PROMIS , to a plethora of national governments and global financial institutions that enabled mass spying by the government of Israel. Maxwell was allegedly able to sell the bugged Israeli version of
14224-645: Was afforded a lavish funeral in Israel, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir , Israeli President Chaim Herzog , at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and many dignitaries and politicians, both government and opposition, and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem . Herzog delivered the eulogy, and the Kaddish was recited by his fellow Holocaust survivor, friend and longtime attorney Samuel Pisar . British Prime Minister John Major said Maxwell had given him "valuable insights" into
14351-510: Was also the chairman of Oxford United , saving them from bankruptcy and attempting to merge them with Reading in 1983 to form a club he wished to call " Thames Valley Royals ". He took Oxford into the top flight of English football in 1985, and the team won the League Cup a year later. Maxwell used the club's old grounds , close to his office at Headington Hill Hall , to land his helicopter—fans would chant, "He's fat, he's round, he's never on
14478-461: Was an SS escort. Much of the work took place outdoors at construction sites, gravel pits, and lumber yards. No rest periods were allowed. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to measure the time the workers took to empty their bladders and bowels. Lunch was three-quarters of a litre of watery soup at midday, reportedly foul-tasting, with meat in the soup four times a week and vegetables (mostly potatoes and rutabaga ) three times. The evening meal
14605-503: Was annexed by Hungary in 1939. Maxwell was born into a poor Yiddish -speaking Orthodox Jewish family and had six siblings. Most of Maxwell's relatives were murdered in Auschwitz after Hungary was occupied in 1944 by Nazi Germany , but years earlier he had escaped to France . In May 1940, Maxwell joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille . After the fall of France and
14732-474: Was death by a heart attack combined with accidental drowning , although three pathologists had been unable to agree on the cause of his death at the inquest; he had been found to suffer from serious heart and lung conditions. Murder was ruled out by the judge and, in effect, so was suicide. His son discounted the possibility of suicide, saying, "I think it is highly unlikely that he would have taken his own life, it wasn't in his makeup or his mentality." Maxwell
14859-402: Was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin, Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud , but were unanimously acquitted by a 12-person jury the following year. In November 1994, Maxwell's widow Elisabeth published her memoirs, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell , which sheds light on her life with him, when the publishing magnate
14986-575: Was decorated after active service in the British Army . In subsequent years he worked in publishing, building up Pergamon Press to a major academic publisher. After six years as a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) during the 1960s, Maxwell again put all his energy into business, successively buying the British Printing Corporation , Mirror Group Newspapers and Macmillan Publishers , among other publishing companies. Robert Maxwell led
15113-568: Was found to be missing later in the morning. It has been speculated that Maxwell was urinating into the ocean nude at the time, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard from the vessel, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, south-west of Spain. Maxwell's naked body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and taken to Las Palmas . Besides a "graze to his left shoulder", there were no noticeable wounds on Maxwell's body. The official ruling at an inquest held in December 1991
15240-825: Was initially a quarantine camp), but the construction of BIII began in 1943 and stopped in April 1944, and the plan for BIV was abandoned. SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff , an architect, was the chief of construction. Based on an initial budget of RM 8.9 million, his plans called for each barracks to hold 550 prisoners, but he later changed this to 744 per barracks, which meant the camp could hold 125,000, rather than 97,000. There were 174 barracks, each measuring 35.4 by 11.0 m (116 by 36 ft), divided into 62 bays of 4 m (43 sq ft). The bays were divided into "roosts", initially for three inmates and later for four. With personal space of 1 m (11 sq ft) to sleep and place whatever belongings they had, inmates were deprived, Robert-Jan van Pelt wrote, "of
15367-466: Was interested in a strategic acquisition of Pergamon Press. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations, Maxwell falsely stated that a subsidiary responsible for publishing encyclopedias was extremely profitable. At the same time, Pergamon had been forced to reduce its profit forecasts for 1969 from £2.5 million to £2.05 million during the period of negotiations, and dealing in Pergamon shares was suspended on
15494-471: Was known to be litigious against those who would speak or write against him. The satirical magazine Private Eye lampooned him as "Cap'n Bob" and the "bouncing Czech", the latter nickname having originally been devised by Prime Minister Harold Wilson (under whom Maxwell was an MP). Maxwell took out several libel actions against Private Eye , one resulting in the magazine losing an estimated £225,000 and Maxwell using his commercial power to hit back with
15621-480: Was not a workday, but prisoners had to clean the barracks and take their weekly shower, and were allowed to write (in German) to their families, although the SS censored the mail. Inmates who did not speak German would trade bread for help. Observant Jews tried to keep track of the Hebrew calendar and Jewish holidays , including Shabbat , and the weekly Torah portion . No watches, calendars, or clocks were permitted in
15748-462: Was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874. The Sonderkommando removed goods and corpses from the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed their bodies afterwards, and took their jewelry, hair, dental work, and any precious metals from their teeth, all of which
15875-506: 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
16002-650: Was ranked as one of the richest people in the world. Having earned her degree from Oxford University in 1981, Elisabeth devoted much of her later life to continued research on the Holocaust and worked as a proponent of Jewish-Christian dialogue. She died on 7 August 2013. In July 2020, Maxwell's youngest child, his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell , was arrested and charged in New Hampshire with six federal crimes, involving minors' trade, travel, and seduction to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy to entice children to engage in illegal sex acts, allegedly linked to
16129-420: Was sent to Germany. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the Sonderkommando burned them in the crematoria. Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the Sonderkommando lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them. Their quality of life was further improved by their access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded within
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