Netherlands: You come across probably the oldest comic about atrocities committed by the Nazis

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Excerpt from the US comic »Nazi Death Parade«

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Institute for Research into War, Holocaust and Genocide / dpa

The "Nazi Death Parade" showed a realistic depiction of mass murder in gas chambers as early as 1944: A Dutch historian discovered what is possibly the oldest comic book about the crimes of the Nazis in concentration camps.

The drawings were based on reports from eyewitnesses, said Professor Kees Ribbens of the Dutch Institute for the Study of War, Holocaust and Genocide in Amsterdam.

Ribbens discovered the drawings at an Internet retailer in the USA and has now published an investigation.

The six drawings are by US draftsman August Maria Froehlich, who himself emigrated from Austria.

He depicted the transport of people in cattle wagons, the murder in gas chambers disguised as showers, and also the cremation of corpses in ovens.

Froehlich may have read statements from Soviet soldiers after the liberation of the Majdanek extermination camp.

Draftsman did not portray victims as Jews

The comic was part of a political campaign against the Nazi regime.

The editors wanted to influence public opinion, says the historian.

"If words can't get through, then the pictures should." The artist did not depict the victims as Jews. The historian suspects that at the time they wanted to prevent anti-Semitic reactions.

There were reports of the persecution of Jews by Germany during the Second World War.

But reports of genocide were often not believed.

Only at the end of the war did the terrible reality slowly penetrate.

In the 1940s, concentration camps and sadistic Nazis had already been depicted in comics.

But according to the scientist, these were clichéd and did not show the systematic extermination of Jews.

Only years later was the Holocaust to be realistically thematized in comics.

From the 1980s onwards, the work "Mouse" by the US artist Art Spiegelman, whose parents both survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, played a decisive role.

bam / dpa