Michel, Ernest W., 1923-

Ernest W. Michel was born to a Jewish family in Mannheim, Germany in 1923. In November of 1938, Michel’s father was arrested during the deadly Kristallnacht pogrom. Michel’s family tried to get him out of Germany and into America, but without relatives in the United States, he couldn’t get the required affidavit of care needed to obtain a visa. In 1939 Michel was sent to the first in a series of 11 concentration and Nazi labor camps, among them Buchenwald, Birkenau, Dachau, and Auschwitz in which he spent the following six years. While in the camps, Michel met and became close friends with two other prisoners. Together, they managed to survive the selection process at the different camps to which they were sent. After almost six years as a slave laborer, Michel and his two friends were able to escape a forced march when the Berga camp in Germany was evacuated in advance of the Allied forces in 1945. Soon after the war ended, he learned that none of his family had survived.

After working briefly for the United States Military Government, he became a special correspondent for the German News Agency DANA at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. From less than 20 feet away, Michel watched as the heads of the Third Reich, including Herman Goering, were tried for war crimes. The byline on his articles, which were published in all the German newspapers, was Ernest Michel, Auschwitz Survivor # 104995 and he became known as the Holocaust Survivor Journalist.

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