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Many social media users have encountered posts about the claim that in May 1945, Auschwitz prisoner Franceska Mann seized the gun of an unnamed Nazi guard and shot him dead as he attempted to lead her to a gas chamber: Mann's story was most prominently reported in Filip Müller's 1979 book Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. An October 2016 text described Müller's testimony as the only bystander account of what has become a much-storied event in the intervening decades: In January 2015, Holocaust survivor David Wisnau provided an eyewitness account of Mann's act of rebellion to a Philadelphia news outlet in the course of a broader interview about his experience in the camps. Wisnau also provided a firm date for the incident: In 2012, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Revenge at Birkenau cited I Found It In The Archives' discovery of a corroborating document. Associated Press journalist and researcher of the National Archives Randy Herschaft reported on that find among documents declassified roughly two years prior (i.e., in 2010): The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) hosted transcripts and footage from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. The incident was mentioned in passing in June 1967 testimony at the war crimes trial of German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann: 00:03:35 Describes Schillinger as committing the worst atrocities in Birkenau. Schillinger was murdered by a woman in transport [Note: accounts of his death vary]. Eichmann was found guilty and subsequently hanged in Israel on 1 June 1962. The variability of accounts of Schillinger's death was highlighted in a 2010 book about sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust: The tale of Mann's defiant act made its way into a 2004 profile of University of Utah Professor Jacqueline Osherow. Osherow described her surprise at hearing Mann's story from a source other than her former father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who was unnamed in the piece: The same year, an account of Schillinger's death at the hands of an unnamed female prisoner was published in the book We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. Multiple accounts (at least three separate ones from male purported eyewitnesses) told the story of a woman (sometimes not identified by name) who shot and killed Schillinger as he led her to a gas chamber. The earliest of the accounts was gathered in May 1945 from a Polish timber merchant and witness after the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Discovered in the National Archives in 2012, it matched contemporary claims about Franceska Mann. Although many versions of the tale varied in detail or failed to provide Mann's name, numerous separate accounts exist that date as far back as 1945 and 1961. All of them indicated a female prisoner at Birkenau gained possession of a revolver (most likely Schillinger's) and shot him dead and wounded one other Nazi guard as she was led to her death in a gas chamber. In accounts where the woman is described by name, she was identified as Franceska Mann or Franciska Mann. Of the Holocaust records initially kept, many were destroyed at the end of the war to conceal crimes committed, and as such, details of eyewitness accounts were often difficult to firmly corroborate. But numerous men attested at different times and places to witnessing the death of Schillinger at the hands of a woman most frequently described as Mann. Descriptive elements of the incident (such as how the struggle began or how Mann obtained the gun) varied, but the basic details of the tale were consistent.
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