Ilse Koch: The Skin Harvester of Buchenwald December 21, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryIlse Koch, ‘the bitch of Buchenwald’, seems to have been an unpleasant human being. She was a sadist, and she was, as a matter of record, – something almost as serious in the 1940s and 1950s when her reputation was made – ‘promiscuous’: she had opportunities to sate both desires as the wife of the […]
The 5 Greatest Historical Graphic Novels March 26, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, MedievalGraphic novels must be, surely, the most underestimated genre in the modern arts: perhaps about 40% of the adult population have such strong feelings that, with the exception of Charlie Brown, they could not bring themselves to pick up a comic. This is a tragedy. There are great works out there that have been largely ignored and […]
The Lie of the Lie of Christian’s Yellow Star March 19, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryOne of the most attractive stories to come out of the Second World is that of Christian X of Denmark and the yellow star. When told that Jewish Danes would have to wear said star the elderly king threatened to wear one himself. The King, adored by his people and a symbol of Danish nationhood, […]
The Peshev Insurgency February 9, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryDimitar Peshev was a middle ranking interwar Bulgarian politician of conservative persuasion. He served briefly as Bulgarian minister of Justice in the mid 1930s, then returned to the back benches with an honorific position in parliament. He survived the Second World War and, miraculously, the communist purges that followed, though he spent a year in […]
Review: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union September 13, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBooks on the holocaust have, broadly speaking, two choices. They can either focus on the big picture and describe the liquidation of an entire people from this or that national territory, or they can focus on an individual, family or a village and concentrate, instead, on the micro-tragedies: an excellent example of the latter is […]
The Stalags: Israeli Holocaust Erotica March 15, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryLiterature has some pretty bizarre dust balls under the bed – roadkill cookbooks, Marxist-Leninist poetry… – but there are few things that compete with the so-called ‘stalags’, Israeli erotica based around Nazi murder camps. In the late 1960s Israel was experiencing holocaust delerium: sweating out the killing of six million Jewish Europeans just two decades […]
Ardeatine and Truth August 24, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryIn the now long-ago examination of the Ivanhorod picture Beach came across a number of sites with, let’s say, disreputable agendas. One of these led to the website of one Germar Rudolf, who must be the only German since the Second World War to have sought asylum in the United States. GR was prosecuted in Germany over […]
Image: Murder of Woman and Child at Ivanhorod July 28, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryOf all the murderous shots taken on the eastern front in the Second World War here is the one that has slowly pushed its rivals aside to become the atrocity picture: it appears on book covers, DVDs and in trailers for TV programmes. This is quite understandable. The shot has the right combination of pathos […]
The Children of Bjelaja-Zerkow April 26, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryA horrid story from August 1941 at Bjelaja-Zerkow in German occupied Soviet territory. In this town the SS murdered as many as nine hundred Jewish residents. That is nightmarish enough, of course, if unfortunately an all too typical act in the war in the east. What allows Bjelaja-Zerkow to climb a little higher in the […]
I was afraid to move: I was gasping for breath February 12, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryAs those who favour the death penalty have found, killing a human being is surprisingly difficult. How much more difficult if you have a hundred, or a thousand or a hundred thousand human beings to kill and little time to do it. Bullets will only do so much, men and women can be filled with […]
Saving and Murdering in the Holocaust May 10, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing noted in this place a month ago – death-dealer of Kovno – that an important new book on Germany’s wartime atrocities is coming out: Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret by Chris Hale. CH argues in this work that subject populations of the occupied territories often partook enthusiastically in the Final Solution or ‘Outdoor […]
The Death Dealer of Kovno March 31, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryCall it the month of the massacres: Beachcombing in the past four weeks has gone knee deep in blood ‘that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’. Even he gets a little queasy thinking about it. There was Queen Victoria drinking blood; then killer ice-cream; followed up by a horrific […]