"For this hand now over Poland raised A bullet in the head!"
"For this hand now over Poland raised A bullet in the head!" German commandant of a transit-labor camp Adolf Wilhelms forced to hold a sign saying "I was the executioner of Poles at the Bayer's (factory) in 1939" before his execution, city of Łódź,April 1945. In April 1945, after the liberation of Łódź, the camp commandant Adolf Wilhelms was hanged. Shortly before the execution took place, a photo of him holding a sign saying "I was the executioner of Poles at the Bayer's (factory) in 1939" was taken. As the German Army started to lose the war, they were pushed into retreat towards Germany by the Allies. The Allies then began to liberate the hundreds of camps which the Nazis had constructed across occupied Europe. On 23 July 1944, Majdanek, in eastern Poland, became the first extermination camp to be liberated by the Soviet Army. Abandoned quickly by the German forces, the camp was almost completely intact. Over the following nine months, hund...