Popular action hero star Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz on Wednesday to deliver the message to “eradicate prejudice once and for all.”
The former governor of California viewed the barracks, watchtowers, and remains of gas chambers as evidence of Nazi extermination of Jews and others during World War II.
He also met a woman who, as a 3-year-old child, was subjected to experiments by the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death and notorious for his gruesome experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz.
“It’s a story that has to stay alive, it’s a story that we have to tell over and over again,” he said after his visit to the extermination camp grounds in a former synagogue that now houses the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.
“Let’s fight prejudice together and end it once and for all,” Schwarzenegger said.
He stood next to Simon Bergson, who was born after the war to Auschwitz survivors. The Terminator actor said that he and Bergson, who are the same age, are united in their work to fight prejudice.
Popular action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, where he signed the guest book “I’ll be back”.
Actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today visited the former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau near Oswiecim, Poland
The former governor of California saw the barracks, watchtowers and remains of gas chambers as evidence of the Nazi extermination of Jews and other people during World War II
“Let’s fight prejudice together and just end it once and for all,” said the Terminator actor after his tour of the concentration camp
Schwarzenegger was alongside Simon Bergson (right), who was born after the war to Auschwitz survivors
Schwarzenegger signed the guest book with his immortal slogan “I’ll be back”.
Schwarzenegger, who is originally from Austria, also mentioned his own family history.
“I was the son of a man who fought in the Nazi war and was a soldier,” said the 75-year-old.
He has spoken openly in the past about his father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, being a Nazi soldier during the war.
Gustav Schwarzenegger (August 17, 1907 – December 13, 1972), father of Arnold
After his visit to Auschwitz, he swore it wouldn’t be his last and signed the guest book with his immortal phrase, “I’ll be back.”
His visit to the harrowing heart of the Nazi extermination of Jews and others during World War II in southern Poland was his first and came as part of his work with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, whose mission is to combat hatred through education.
In June, he received the foundation’s first Fighting Hatred award for his stance against hate on social media. He said he couldn’t attend in person at the time because he was filming a new action series in Canada and was in a “COVID bubble.”
He told Russians they were being lied to about the war in Ukraine in a video posted to social media in March and accused President Vladimir Putin of sacrificing Russian soldiers to his own ambitions.
In this video, he revived painful memories of how his own father was lied to in battle and how he returned to Austria a physically and emotionally broken man after being wounded in Leningrad.
He posted it to his 22.2 million Instagram followers and media outlet ATTN’s Facebook page, sharing his love for Russia and the Russian people, before making scathing remarks towards Putin and the Kremlin.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a direct appeal to the Russian President and the Russian people to shed light on the “truth” about the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
Describing himself as a “longtime friend” of the Russian people, he sends a direct message to Putin: “I say to President Putin, you started this war. You are fighting this war. You can end this war.”
He also asks Putin and his Kremlin counterparts: “Let me ask you why you would sacrifice these young men for your own ambitions?”
The nine-minute clip racked up over 250,000 views on Instagram and 120,000 on Facebook in an hour, with thousands supporting and praising the film star for his efforts to stop the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Historians estimate that around 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz during the war. About 1 million of them were Jews. About 75,000 Poles were killed there, as well as Roma, Russian prisoners of war and others.
Who was Josef Mengele, the angel of death?
Josef Mengele, the unspeakable angel of death in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during the Holocaust
Born in 1911 in Günzburg near Ulm, Germany, he received his medical degree in 1938 and joined the SS in the same year.
After being wounded as a field medic on the Easter Front in 1943, he was posted to Auschwitz as a camp doctor.
One of the main tasks of Dr. Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz death camp consisted of choosing who should be kept alive to work and who should be sent to the gas chambers when new prisoners arrived.
He got his nickname from his freezing cruel behavior on the ramp as newcomers came up and often showed up off-duty as well.
But he achieved terrible notoriety for his medical experiments on sets of twins, performing a wide range of torturous and often fatal experiments, most of which were children.
He also made a habit of collecting the eyes of his murdered victims, ostensibly for medicinal purposes.
A staunch supporter of Nazi ideology, he conducted barbaric experiments to prove the degeneration of Jews and Gypsies and their susceptibility to various diseases.
Many of his “test subjects” died as a result of the experiments or were murdered to facilitate autopsies.
After the war, he managed to evade war crimes charges and fled to South America, where he lived until he died in Brazil in 1979 at the age of 67.