Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's Eugenics-based euthanasia program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were considered "incurably sick, by critical medical examination." The program officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but it continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
A Book By Me began as a Holocaust children's book project designed to preserve the stories of Quad City area Holocaust survivors, WWII veterans, and Righteous Gentiles. These nonfiction stories are written by secondary students for readers of all ages.
[A section of the wall that separated the Warsaw ghetto from the rest of the city. 1940-41. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.]
When Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, mobile killing units, known as Einsatzgruppen, began moving from town to town, rounding up Jews for extermination. In 2004, Father Patrick Desbois traveled across Ukraine to locate the estimated 2,500 sites of mass killings of Jews during the Holocaust. He was motivated by the memory of his own grandfather, a French soldier who was deported to the Ukraine by the Nazis.
On Jan. 20, 1942, fifteen officials, comprised of mid-ranking SS commanders and government ministers, attended a conference at Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. The meeting was organized by SS Major Eichmann under the direction of Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich. The subject was the organization and coordination of the "final solution."
[One of the milk cans of Oyneg Shabbos] Historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum led a group called Oyneg Shabbos which hid secret archives in three milk cans inside the Warsaw Ghetto. They collected written works by children as documentation of young lives. See "What we see in the street" by Yaffa Bergman, age 14. http://www.mjhnyc.org/ringelblum/essay.htm
