“It was determined that the remains represented five individuals and were those of Indian soldiers interned by Japanese forces as prisoners of war,” the spokesman said.
Artefacts found with the remains included military equipment used by Commonwealth forces, including Indians and Australians, during the war. But sewing kit paraphernalia found at the site was of a type used exclusively by the Indian Army.
A new first-hand account of POW life has revealed a horrifying fact: some British prisoners of war were forced to exhume the remains of Jews and extract gold from their teeth.
He said: “One of the jobs assigned to prisoners within the camps was the digging up of graves in a Jewish cemetery and taking the gold from the corpses.
“Many of us refused to participate, quoting the Geneva Convention in protest, but our pleas fell on deaf ears.” Mr Wicketts said that some of the German guards showed “great cruelty”.
The database – originally compiled by the Germans under terms of the Geneva convention requiring them to notify enemies about captured troops – helps bring to life tales told on screen, including The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse.
Among those listed are actor Desmond Llewelyn, famous for his performances as grumpy gadget inventor ‘Q’ in the James Bond films, but who in real life was captured in 1940 and held in notorious prison camp Colditz Castle for five years.
Researchers have found that there were around 20,000 Nazi prisons, ghettos and camps in WWII, over 4 times the number they were expecting to catalogue.
The Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945 aims to catalogue most of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi concentration camps, POW camps, prisons, and other persecution sites used during the Second World War. Project director Geoffrey Megargee of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC told Deutsche Welle that the first surprise he encountered in this endeavor was realising how far the network stretched.
“When the project started we thought we were dealing with perhaps 5,000, perhaps 7,000 sites. But as we started to get into the research for the encyclopaedia we started to see the numbers go up and up and up, and within a couple of years we were up around 20,000,” he said.
A list containing the names of 17 British soldiers has been discovered in a bunker at the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is puzzling researchers because they have no idea why it was there.
The document is a piece of white celluloid with 17 surnames handwritten in pencil in block letters, while a list of numbers sits on the top right hand corner of the same page.
Polish historian Dominik Synowic, who found the document, told the Austrian Times that the list’s origins was a complete mystery.
Synowic said he was looking for something else entirely when he stumbled on the document.
WWII Animals Construction Auction DNA Pottery Artifacts Remains Mexico France Scotland Italy Prehistoric Humans Burial India Egyptian Greece Egypt Turkey Photography Cave Underwater Restoration Roman Dinosaurs Adolf Hitler Medieval Shipwreck Native American Temple Medicine Nazi China Maya Technology Extinct Animals Crime Bones Fossils Japan Germany Tomb Canada Science skeleton England Graves Art War
This is a blog about history. It is edited by me, Sevaan Franks, and features news articles and links to interesting anthropology, archaeology, geology, paleontology and other general history-related items from around the world. If you have a story you would like to see featured on this site, please drop me a line.
