10 Facts About the Holocaust That You Might Have Not Known About

6. Over 8,000 Jewish lives were saved by two Polish doctors who faked a typhoid outbreak.

Two doctors, Stanislav Matulewicz Lazowski and Eugene Lazowski, saved the lives of over 8,000 Jews during the Holocaust by injecting them with a fake strain of organism that causes typhoid fever. The orchestrated typhoid outbreak resulted in the quarantine of 12 towns, thus preventing the Nazis from entering them.

7. The company that manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions during the Holocaust, still exists today.

Zyklon B was a cyanide-based pesticide that was invented in Germany in the early 1920s. Its primary ingredient was hydrogen cyanide, a poisonous gas that hinders cellular respiration. The lethal Zyklon B was used to murder about one million people in gas chambers installed in various extermination camps. The manufacturing company claimed that they were unaware that their product was being used to execute people. Today, the said company only produces pest products.

8. A female Auschwitz prisoner’s life was saved – thanks to love affair with a Nazi soldier.

Helena Citronova, a female Auschwitz prisoner, and Franz Wunsch, an SS guard, probably had one of the most dangerous secret love affairs in history. Wunsch gave Citronova a job to save her from certain death, and she ended up sorting the clothes of the gas chamber victims. Her sister’s life was also saved, thanks to Wunsch, but they were not able to save her nephews and nieces who were dragged into the gas chamber.

9. The Allied Forces accidentally sunk several German ships three days after Hitler’s suicide, inadvertently killing at least 10,000 concentration camp survivors on board.

The Allied forces accidentally killed thousands of concentration camp survivors when they bombed German ships. They thought that the ships only carried Germans and were completely unaware that there were prisoners below deck. Apparently, the mishap was a result of a breakdown in the chain of command.

One pilot was quoted saying,

“Horrible thing, but we were told to do it. That’s war.”

10. The Nazi soldier who captured Anne Frank and her family bought Anne’s published diary to “see if he was mentioned.”

Anne’s diary ended abruptly when their family was captured, following the raid of the small attic where they were hiding.

Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Nazi soldier who seized the Franks, later stated,

“I bought the little book last week to see if I was mentioned there, but I saw that I was not.”

These stories are only a handful out of the countless accounts from the Holocaust era and surely, many stories remain unheard until this day. But thanks to the bravery and compassion of some, many lived and survived to tell the tale. Our hearts bleed for the victims of the tragic Holocaust.