A Dutch historian says he might have discovered the oldest surviving example of cartoons depicting conditions at Nazi-operated concentration camps, which were part of a World-War-II era effort to highlight violations perpetuated by the Nazis.
Titled "Nazi Death Parade," the 1944 comic shows realistic depictions, based on witness accounts, of people being transported in cattle cars, people being killed in gas chambers outfitted to look like showers, and the subsequent burning of the corpses in ovens.
Kees Ribbens, a professor at the Dutch NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told dpa on Thursday that he found the drawings being sold by a US-based internet merchant. A study of the item has begun.
The drawings were by August Maria Froehlich, a US emigree from Austria, who might have based his work on testimony from Soviet soldiers after they were freed from a concentration camp in Majdanek.
The comics were published in an attempt to turn public opinion against the Nazi regime. "When words don't get through, sometimes pictures do."
However, the artist did not depict the victims as Jewish, perhaps, Ribbens surmises, in an attempt to avoid an anti-Semitic reaction.
Reports filtered out of Europe during World War II about attempts to annihilate Jews, but many were not believed by the public at large. It was only when the reports emerged after Germany's defeat that reality set in.
Ribbens said there were other depictions of concentration camps and sadistic Nazis in 1940s comics, but many of these were cliched and did not demonstrate the systemic attempts to kill off Jews.
In later years, comics were used to highlight the horrors of the Holocaust, most famously with Art Spiegelman's 1980s-era "Maus," a graphic novel that tells the story of the Holocaust using mice to represent the Jews and cats to represent the Nazis.
