What are the most disturbing facts about WWII that most people do not know?
1.
Children's wounds are not all outward, 1948. Teresa Adwentowska lived
in Warsaw during Nazi occupation and during the Warsaw uprising. She was
put into a home for traumatized children. She was asked to draw what
her home looked like and this is what she drew. Both her parents passed
away due to their association with the Polish resistance.
Between
1948 and 1975, the United States Army utilized former Nazi scientists
to assist in conducting experiments that exposed around 7,000 American
soldiers to a variety of chemicals.
2. The Soviet 13th Gaurds Rifle Division,
one
of the units in the Battle of Stalingrad, suffered 30% killed in the
first day of fighting. Just 320 of the original 10,000 soldiers survived
the entire battle.
3.Between 1948 and 1975,
the United States Army utilized former Nazi scientists to assist in
conducting experiments that exposed around 7,000 American soldiers to a
variety of chemicals.
These substances ranged from mustard gas and sarin to PCP and LSD.
These
unsettling human trials were carried out under the supervision of "Dr.
Delirium" at the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland. As a result of
these experiments, the Army accumulated a staggering $1 billion worth of
LSD. Some experiments involved doctors applying lethal chemicals onto
the arms of volunteers to observe their reactions, while in other cases,
soldiers were administered pills without any knowledge of their
contents. Reflecting on his experience, one participant later expressed,
"Had I been informed about its effects, I would have never agreed to
take it," upon discovering that the "aspirin" he had ingested was, in
fact, LSD.
4. On Sep 13, 1944, a princess from India lay dead at Dachau concentration camp.
She had been tortured by the Nazis and then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan.
The
Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy who had gone into
occupied France using the code name Madeline. She carried her
transmitter from safe house to safe house with the Gestapo trailing her,
providing communications for her Resistance unit.
Wireless operators in France had a life expectancy of six weeks. Noor was actively transmitting for over three times as long.
While
she was in France, every other wireless operator in her network was
slowly picked off until she was the last radio link between London and
Paris. It was "the most dangerous and important post in France."
She was offered a way back to Britain and refused.
In
fact, in her transmissions to London, she once said that she was having
the time of her life, and thanked them for giving her the opportunity
to do this.
She was captured by the Gestapo,
but never gave up; she made three attempts at escape. One involved
asking to take a bath, insisting on being allowed to close the door to
preserve her modesty, and then clambering onto the roof of the Gestapo
HQ in Paris.
Her last word before being shot was, "Liberté!"
5.After the Battle of Ambon, Japanese soldiers massacred hundreds of POWs.
Allied
casualties in the battle were relatively light. However, at intervals
for a fortnight after the surrender, IJN personnel chose more than 300
Australian and Dutch prisoners of war at random and summarily executed
them, at or near Laha airfield. About 300 of those men who surrendered
at Laha airfield on Ambon were killed in four separate massacres around
the airfield. They were bayoneted, clubbed to death or beheaded. None
survived.
In part, this was revenge for the
sinking of the Japanese minesweeper, as some surviving crew of the
minesweeper took part. Those killed included Wing Commander Scott and
Major Newbury. According to an Australian War Memorial principal
historian, Dr Peter Stanley, over the following three and a half years,
the surviving POWs:
...suffered an ordeal and a
death rate second only to the horrors of Sandakan, first on Ambon and
then after many were sent to the island of Hainan [China] late in 1942.
Three-quarters of the Australians captured on Ambon had died before the
war's end. Of the 582 who remained on Ambon, 405 died. They died of
overwork, malnutrition, disease and one of the most brutal regimes among
camps in which bashings were routine.
6. One lesser-known disturbing fact is the Unit 731 experiments conducted by Imperial Japan.
This
covert biological and chemical warfare research unit performed inhumane
experiments on thousands of Chinese, Korean, and other prisoners of
war. The experiments included vivisection, germ warfare trials, and
other atrocities.
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