The Toll of "Rassenschande" on a Family  Like us on Facebook
You've heard the saying. "The death of one person is a tragedy.
The death of ten million people is a statistic." The death toll
of World War II is estimated at over 60 million people,
including six million Jews in the Holocaust. Each of those
deaths is a tragedy, because each has a family story.  This
photograph has been passed around and discussed because of the
one German in the crowd who did not perform the Nazi salute.
Some sources say the photograph was taken in 1936 at the
unveiling of the ship the Horst Wessel, at which Adolf Hitler
was present. However, Irene Landmesser recognized the man as her
father August Landmesser, who was sentenced to a labor camp in
1938, and worked in a shipyard as a prisoner, so the exact date
of the photograph may be in doubt.  The Landmesser family's
tragic history under the Nazi regime is chronicled in Irene
Messer's book A Family Torn Apart by "Rassenschande," of which a
large part is available online in Engli