James Chaney (1943 - 1964)

James Earl Chaney was born in Meridian, Mississippi, the elder son of Fannie Lee and Ben Chaney, Sr. His brother Ben was nine years younger, born in 1952, and he had three sisters, Barbara, Janice, and Julia. His parents separated for a time when James was young. James attended Catholic school for the first nine grades. […]

Helen Brach (1911 - 1977)

Helen Brach was born on November 10, 1911 on a small farm in Unionport, Ohio. Helen married her high school sweetheart in 1928; the couple had divorced by the time she was 21. Brach found work at a country club in Palm Beach, where she met and married millionaire, Frank Brach. The couple built a […]

Nick Berg (1978 - 2004)

Nick Berg grew up in West Whiteland Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. He was referred to as a “religious Jew.” Berg graduated from Henderson High School in West Chester in 1996. In 1996, he was a student at Cornell University but later dropped out. He took classes at Drexel University in 1998, and in […]

Judith Barsi (1978 - 1988)

Judith Eva Barsi (June 6, 1978 – July 25, 1988) was an American child actress in the mid- to late 1980s. She began her career in television, making appearances in commercials and television shows, and later appeared in the films Jaws: The Revenge, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, supplying the […]

Travis Alexander (1977 - 2008)

On June 4, 2008, salesman Travis Victor Alexander (July 28, 1977 – June 4, 2008) was killed by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias (born July 9, 1980), in Alexander’s house in Mesa, Arizona. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013 and sentenced to natural life in state prison on April 13, 2015. At […]

Meredith Kercher (1985 - 2007)

Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher (born 28 December 1985 in Southwark, South London), known to her friends as “Mez”, lived in Coulsdon, South London. She had two older brothers, John and Lyle, and an older sister, Stephanie. Her father, also named John, is a freelance journalist, and her mother, Arline, is a housewife. Kercher attended the […]

Martha Needle (1864 - 1894)

Martha Needle was born near Morgan, South Australia in 1863. An attractive woman with a kindly disposition, she grew up in a violent and abusive household, and she showed signs of mental instability from an early age. At 17 she married Henry Needle at North Adelaide and in 1882 gave birth to a daughter, Mabel, […]

Tillie Klimek (1876 - 1936)

Ottilie “Tillie” Klimek (or Tillie Gburek) (1876 – 1936) was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. According to legend, she pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims, when in reality she was merely scheduling their deaths. Actually, while contemporary accounts tell her cheerfully telling her husbands […]

Lyda Southard (1892 - 1958)

Lyda Southard was born on October 16, 1892 in Keytesville, Missouri, sixty miles northeast of Kansas City and in the central flatlands of Missouri. Lyda Southard married Robert Dooley on March 17, 1912. The couple settled with his brother Ed Dooley on a ranch in Twin Falls, Idaho and had a daughter, Lorraine, in 1914. In […]

Nannie Doss (1904 - 1965)

Nannie Doss was born on November 4, 1905 in Blue Mountain, Alabama, now part of Anniston, as Nancy Hazel to Louisa “Lou” (née Holder) and James F. Hazel. Doss was one of five children; she had one brother and three sisters. Both Doss and her mother hated James, who was a controlling father and husband […]

Amy Archer-Gilligan (1868 - 1962)

Amy Archer-Gilligan was born in October 1873 to James Duggan and Mary Kennedy in Milton, Connecticut, the eighth of ten children. She was taught at the Milton School and went to the New Britain Normal School in 1890. Amy married James Archer in 1897. A daughter, Mary J. Archer, was born in December 1897. The Archers […]

Martha Wise (1882 - 1971)

Martha Wise was born in 1884 to Sophie Hasel and her husband, farmers in Hardscrabble, a town in Medina County, Ohio. Three brothers and a sister were also born to the family, although contemporary sources name only one, a brother named Fred. In 1906, Martha Hasel met the substantially older Albert Wise at a box […]

Fritz Klein (1888 - 1945)

Fritz Klein was born in Feketehalom, Austria-Hungary (now Codlea in central Romania). Klein was considered a Volksdeutscher, or ethnic German. He studied medicine at the University of Budapest and completed his military service in Romania, finishing his studies in Budapest after World War I. He lived as a doctor in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania). In 1939 as […]

Karl-Friedrich Höcker (1911 - 2000)

The youngest of six children, Karl-Friedrich Höcker was born in the village of Engershausen (now part of Preußisch Oldendorf), Germany. His father was a construction worker, who was later killed in action during World War I. Following an apprenticeship as bank teller he worked at a bank in Lübbecke before being made redundant. After having been […]

Arthur Liebehenschel (1901 - 1948)

Arthur Liebehenschel was born in Posen (now Poznań). He studied economics and public administration. Too young to serve in World War I, in 1919 he was in the Freikorps “Grenzschutz Ost”; he served as a sergeant major in the German Reichswehr afterwards. In 1932, he joined the Nazi Party (member number 39 254), and in […]

Hans Aumeier (1906 - 1948)

Hans Aumeier was born on 20 August 1906 in the small town of Amberg, Germany, where he attended elementary school for four years and then secondary school for just three years. In 1918 he left school without any qualifications to take up an apprenticeship as a turner and fitter in a local rifle factory, following […]

Otto Moll (1915 - 1946)

Otto Moll was an SS-Hauptscharführer and part of the staff at Auschwitz. Born in Hohen Schönberg, Germany on March 4, 1915 and was executed on May 28, 1946 in Landsberg am Lech. Moll joined the SS on May 1, 1935 (serial number 267670). He held various posts during his tenure at Auschwitz. From May 1941 until […]

Therese Brandl (1902 - 1948)

Born in Staudach-Egerndach, Bavaria, Therese Brandl entered Ravensbrück concentration camp in March 1940 to begin her training under SS-Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld. Sent to Auschwitz I during March 1942, Brandl worked in the laundry and soon rose through the ranks and became an Erstaufseherin (First Guard) directly under Margot Dreschel and Maria Mandl. In the summer […]

Ruth Neudeck (1920 - 1948)

Ruth Closius was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). She later married and was known as Ruth Neudeck or Ruth Closius-Neudeck. In July 1944, she arrived at the Ravensbrück concentration camp to begin her training to be a camp guard. Ruth Neudeck soon began impressing her superiors with her unbending brutality towards the women prisoners, […]

Herta Ehlert (1905 - 1997)

Herta Ehlert (née Liess; 26 March 1905, Berlin – 4 April 1997) was a female guard at many Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. On 15 November 1939, Ehlert was called for Schutzstaffel work by the Labor Exchange. She began work at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She stated, “… I had to see that civilian workers did […]

Herta Oberheuser (1911 - 1978)

Herta Oberheuser (15 May 1911 in Cologne, German Empire – 24 January 1978 in Linz am Rhein, West Germany) was a Nazi physician at the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps from 1940 until 1943. Herta Oberheuser worked at concentration camps under the supervision of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, participating in gruesome medical experiments (sulfanilamide as well as […]

Olga Lengyel (1908 - 2001)

Olga Lengyel (19 October 1908 – 15 April 2001) was a Hungarian prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who later wrote about her experiences in her book Five Chimneys. She was the only member of her family to survive. Olga Lengyel was a trained surgical assistant in Kolozsvár, Hungary (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania), working in the hospital […]

Josef Mengele (1911 - 1979)

Josef Mengele (German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈmɛŋələ] ( listen); 16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979) was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Mengele was a notorious member of the team of doctors responsible for the selection of victims to be killed in the gas chambers and for […]

Hermine Braunsteiner (1919 - 1999)

Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna, the youngest child in a strictly observant Roman Catholic working class family. Her father Friedrich Braunsteiner was a chauffeur for a brewery and/or a butcher. Hermine lacked the means to fulfill her aspiration to become a nurse, and worked as a maid. From 1937 to 1938 she worked in […]

Juana Bormann (1893 - 1945)

Juana Bormann (or Johana Borman) (10 September 1893 – 13 December 1945) was a prison guard at several Nazi concentration camps, and was executed as a war criminal at Hamelin after a trial in 1945. At her trial, Juana Bormann said she had joined the Auxiliary SS in 1938 “to earn more money”. She first served […]

Josef Kramer (1906 - 1945)

Josef Kramer joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1932. His SS training led him into work as a prison guard and, after the outbreak of war, as a concentration camp guard. In 1934, he was assigned as a guard at Dachau. His promotion was rapid, obtaining senior posts at Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen […]

Elisabeth Volkenrath (1919 - 1945)

Elisabeth Volkenrath (5 September 1919 – 13 December 1945) was a German supervisor at several Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Elisabeth Volkenrath, née Mühlan, was an ungelernte Hilfskraft (unskilled worker) when she volunteered for service in a concentration camp. She started in October 1941 at Ravensbrück concentration camp as a simple Aufseherin. In March […]

Maria Mandl (1912 - 1948)

Maria Mandl was born in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a shoemaker. After the Anschluss by Nazi Germany, Mandl moved to Munich, and on 15 October 1938 joined the camp staff as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg, an early Nazi concentration camp in the Province of Saxony where she worked with fifty […]

James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. James Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer’s […]

David Markson (1927 - 2010)

David Merrill Markson was born in Albany, New York, on December 20, 1927. Educated at Union College and Columbia University, Markson began his writing career as a journalist and book editor, periodically taking up work as a college instructor at Columbia University, Long Island University, and The New School. Though his first novel was published in […]