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https://theconversation.com/charlotte-delbo-and-the-women-of-convoy-31000-how-researching-their-stories-led-me-to-a-forgotten-subcamp-and-nazi-lies-in-the-auschwitz-archive-221626>
"The taxi bumped along a track just off the main road heading south from the
Auschwitz Museum, past a row of bungalows with straggly November gardens. It
crunched to a halt in front of a pair of rusty gates, hanging half open, their
padlock dangling. Dilapidated and overgrown greenhouses could be seen inside.
Stepping out of the taxi, I pushed open the gates and entered. I approached the
greenhouses, trying to reconstruct in my imagination the forced labourers from
the nearby Nazi concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau who
built and worked in this place from 1943.
This was the remains of the Rajsko subcamp, one of over 40 satellite
concentration camps of Auschwitz.
It was once a Nazi experimental botanical station and was intended to boost the
work of the IG Farben factory by growing and extracting latex from a type of
Russian dandelion (
Taraxacum kok-saghyz) to meet the Nazis’ ever-increasing
war need for rubber. The camp was the dream-child of Heinrich Himmler, a key
architect of Hitler’s genocidal programmes.
Despite Himmler’s intentions, Rajsko produced no rubber, and was liquidated by
the Nazis in 1945. The botanical station sank into disrepair before being
turned into a private commercial garden centre. It was largely forgotten about
and was very hard to find – even the customer service staff I spoke to at the
Auschwitz Museum had no knowledge of it.
Much of the village of Rajsko was cleared for the SS to establish this
botanical research station as well as an SS Hygiene Institut. This was a clinic
which screened blood and other bodily fluids for signs of typhus (a major
killer in the camps), malaria and syphilis.
Later, notorious Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who had an interest in racial
genetics, carried out experiments on Roma and Sinti twins at the SS Hygiene
Institut, and from May 1944 subjects for Mengele’s experiments were also picked
from the unloading ramps at Auschwitz."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
