World War 2, Pinchas Kohn

A young Jewish boy, Pinchas Kohn, standing in a court yard. He was the son of Maryshka Kohn.

The Kohn family was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and killed on arrival.

At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to "get rid of ten thousand people in 24 hours," as the SS Kommandant Rudolf Hoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after WW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than Rudolf Hoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate several million people.

Rudolf Hoess related how he often felt weak-kneed at having to push hundreds of screaming, pleading children into the gas chambers:

"I did, however, always feel ashamed of this weakness of mine after I talked to Adolf Eichmann. He explained to me that it was especially the children who have to be killed first, because where was the logic in killing a generation of older people and leaving alive a generation of young people who can be possible avengers of their parents and can constitute a new biological cell for the reemerging of this people ..."