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"Von Muenchhausen, whose Jewish mother died at
Auschwitz, met the former slave laborers by chance 12 years ago while he was on vacation
in Israel. He attended an Auschwitz Day ceremony in Tel Aviv, and there bumped into 21
women who still referred to themselves as »Union Girls«, after the firm where they had
helped manufacture artillery fuses. There also was a man who had worked at Union.
Von Muenchhausen was so touched by their stories
that, back home in Bremen, he turned his house into an archive documenting their lives,
and everything else he could get his hands on having to do with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's
vast ranks of slave laborers ...
They were marched back and forth from factory to
concentration camp, and regularly had to watch as co-workers deemed no longer fit to work
were selected to be gassed.
One plaintiff in the suit (to get compensation from
the German government), Sara Ehrenhalt, told Reuters in an interview earlier this fall
that as an incentive to work hard, a German officer promised her that she would be
given a bigger dose of poison gas when her turn came to be killed."
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