Our Mexican-origin surname, Gil, appears in the Holocaust archives! Yikes!
I had the occasion recently to learn of the Arolsen Archives, in Germany, the largest repository of documents concerning the millions of Jews and other people who were killed by Hitler’s Nazi government just for being who they were. Remember the gas ovens? Most were burned to get rid of their bodies.
Apparently, all these documents (see the types of documents below), were scooped up by our soldiers at the end of World War II, after we bombed the Nazi’s into oblivion. Our GI’s gathered the papers and they were stored and placed into this archive and research organization.
Since I like archives, I went into the online collection, just to check it out, and decided to put in our surname, doubting I’d find anything, because it’s not a name normally associated with the Hitler era.
In just a few minutes of searching, up came the name, Antonio Accolti Gil. It seems he was an Italian with our surname (I don’t know whether the Gil is patronymic or matronymic). See a registration document about him below. He was picked up for whatever reason on February 5, 1944, and imprisoned at the Mauthhausen Camp, one of many built to hold these unfortunate people. He may have survived because the Germans were losing the war by 1944.
I also searched with the word “Mexico,” and it produced about 50 results, to my surprise! These poor folks were Spaniards or Mexicans who had fought against the Nazis in Spain during its bloody and brutal civil war (about the time I was born) and the Germans picked them up and put them in the concentration camps, alongside the Jewish prisoners.
What does all this mean? 1) That the Holocaust (the genocidal elimination of millions of people by the German Nazis) was real, contrary to people who deny it today, unbelievably. The truth is hard to take, sometimes, and people can deny things all their lives. And, 2) it included many who were not Jews, like our Antonio Gil and the Mexicans and Spaniards mentioned.
Types of documents in the Arolsen Archive includes prisoner files of various sorts, documents about medical experiments on humans, testimonies from camp personnel and former prisoners, death registers, execution lists, deaths after liberation, Red Cross reports, and so on. Germans are expert record keepers, to this day.