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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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The history of the Holocaust represents one of the most effective, and most extensively documented subjects for a pedagogical examination of basic moral issues. A structured inquiry into Holocaust history yields critical lessons for an investigation of human behavior. A study of the Holocaust also addresses one of the central tenets of education which is to examine what it means to be a responsible citizen. Through a study of the Holocaust, students can come to realize that:
1. democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected;
2. silence and indifference to the suffering of others, or to the infringement of civil rights in any society can — however, unintentionally — serve to perpetuate the problems; and
3. the Holocaust was not an accident in history — it occurred because individuals, organizations, and governments made choices which not only legalized discrimination, but which allowed prejudice, hatred, and ultimately, mass murder to occur.
Because the objective of teaching any subject is to engage the intellectual curiosity of the student in order to inspire critical thought and personal growth, it is helpful to structure your lesson plan on the Holocaust by considering throughout, questions of rationale. Before addressing what and how to teach, we would recommend that you contemplate the following:
Among the various rationales offered by educators who have incorporated a study of the Holocaust into their various courses and disciplines are these:
When you, as an educator, take the time to consider the rationale for your lesson on the Holocaust, you will be more likely to select content that speaks to your students’ interests and which provides them with a clearer understanding of history Most students demonstrate a high level of interest in studying the Holocaust precisely because the subject raises questions of fairness, justice, individual identify, peer pressure, conformity, indifference, and obedience — issues which adolescents confront in their daily lives. Students are also struck by the magnitude of the Holocaust, and the fact that so many people acting as collaborators, perpetrators, and bystanders allowed this genocide to occur by failing to protest or resist.
1. Define what you mean by ‘Holocaust’.
The Holocaust refers to a specific event in 20th century history: The systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators, as an act of state, during World War II. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. Although Jews were the primary victims, up to one half million Gypsies and at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons were also victims of genocide. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe from 1933 to 1945, millions of other innocent people were persecuted and murdered. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their nationality. Poles, as well as other Slavs, were targeted for slave labor, and as a result of the Nazi terror, almost two million perished. Homosexuals and others deemed “anti-social” were also persecuted and often murdered. In addition thousands of political and religious dissidents such as communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs and behaviour and many of these individuals died as a result of maltreatment.
2. Avoid comparisons of pain
A study of the Holocaust should always highlight the different policies carried out by the Nazi regime towards various groups of people; however, these distinctions should not be presented as a basis for comparison between them. Avoid generalizations which suggest exclusivity, such as “the victims of the Holocaust suffered the most cruelty ever faced by a people in the history of humanity.” One cannot presume that the horror of an individual, family or community destroyed by the Nazis was any greater than that experienced by victims of other genocides.
3. Avoid simple answers to complex history
A study of the Holocaust raises difficult questions about human behaviour, and it often involves complicated answers as to why events occurred. Be wary of oversimplifications. Allow students to contemplate the various factors which contributed to the Holocaust; do not attempt to reduce Holocaust history to one or two catalysts in isolation from the other factors which came into play. For example, the Holocaust was not simply the logical and inevitable consequence of unbridled racism. Rather, racism, combined with centuries-old bigotry renewed by a nationalistic fervor which emerged in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century fueled by Germany’s defeat in World War I and its national humiliation following the Treaty of Versailles, exacerbated by worldwide economic hard times, the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic and international indifference, and catalyzed by the political charisma, militaristic inclusiveness and manipulative propaganda of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, conthbuted to the eventuality of the Holocaust.
4. Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it was inevitable
Too often, students have the simplistic impression that the Holocaust was inevitable. Just because an historical event took place, and it was documented in textbooks and on film, does not mean that it had to happen. This seemingly obvious concept is often overlooked by students and teachers alike. The Holocaust took place because individuals, groups, and nations made decisions to act or not to act. By focusing on those decisions, we gain insight into history and human nature, and we can better help our students to become critical thinkers.
5. Strive for precision of language
Any study of the Holocaust touches upon nuances of human behavior. Because of the complexity of the history there is a temptation to overgeneralize and thus to distort the facts (e.g., “all concentration camps were killing centers” or “all Germans were collaborators”). Rather, teachers must strive to help students distinguish between categories of behavior and relevant historical references; to clarify the differences between prejudice and discrimination, collaborators and bystanders, armed and spiritual resistance, direct orders and assumed orders, concentration camps and killing centers, and guilt and responsibility.
Words that describe human behaviour often have multiple meanings. Resistance, for example, usually refers to a physical act of armed revolt. During the Holocaust, it also meant partisan activism that ranged from smuggling messages, food, and weapons to actual military engagement. But, resistance also embraced willful disobedience: continuing to practice religious and cultural traditions in defiance of the files; creating fine art, music and poetry inside ghettos and concentration camps. For many, simply maintaining the will to remain alive in the face of abject brutality was the surest act of spiritual resistance.
¤ What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Nazi Germany and its accomplices strove to murder every Jew under their domination. Because Nazi discrimination against Jews began with Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, many historians consider this the start of the Holocaust era. The Jews were not the only victims of Hitler’s regime, but they were the only group that the Nazis sought to destroy entirely.
¤ Is the Holocaust a singular event in history?
There are other historical events similar to the Holocaust, but the Holocaust has characteristics that, in the opinion of many scholars, make it unique. Mass murder, sometimes on a scale of millions and targeting specific religious, ethnic, or social groups, has occurred in history. Governments other than that of Nazi Germany have used camp systems and technology to serve deadly plans, and the Jews have been persecuted throughout much of history However, the Holocaust may be considered unique for two main reasons: 1) unlike their policies toward other groups, the Nazis sought to murder every Jew everywhere, regardless of age, gender, beliefs, or actions, and they invoked a modem government bureaucracy to accomplish their goal; and 2) the Nazi leadership held that ridding the world of the Jewish presence would be beneficial to the German people and all mankind, although in reality the Jews posed no threat. Grounded in a spurious racist ideology that considered the Jews “the destructive race,” it was this idea, more than any other, that eventually led to the implementation of the murderous policy known as the Final Solution.
¤ How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust? How do we know? Do we have their names?
There is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The figure commonly used is the 6 million quoted by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Most research confirms that the number of victims was between five and six million. Early calculations range from 5.1 million (Professor Raul Hilberg) to 5.95 million (Jacob Leschinsky). More recent research, by Professor Yisrael Gutman and Dr. Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, estimates the Jewish losses at 5.59-5.86 million, and a study headed by Dr. Wolfgang Benz presents a range from 5.29 million to 6 million.
The main sources for these statistics are comparisons of pre-war census data with post-war census data and population estimates. Nazi documentation containing partial data on various deportations and murders is also used. Yad Vashem currently has somewhat more than 4 million names of victims that are accessible. This figure is based primarily on some 2 million Pages of Testimony, which often contain information about more than one Jew who perished in the Holocaust. As of early June 1999, over 1.6 million Pages of Testimony have been computerized. In addition, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has thousands of documents containing names from the Holocaust era, many of which are those of victims. This body of documentation has yet to be fully researched and added to our computerized database. Eventually the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum hope, through their computerization project, to provide as much information as possible about each victim.
¤ Who were other victims of Nazism? How was their fate similar to and different from the fate of the Jews?
Numerous people fell victim to the Nazi regime for political, social, or racial reasons. Germans were among the first victims persecuted because of their political activities. Many died in concentration camps, but most were released after their spirit was broken. Germans who suffered from mental or physical handicaps were killed under a “euthanasia” program. Other Germans were incarcerated for being homosexuals, criminals, or non-conformists; these people, although treated brutally, were never slated for utter annihilation as the Jews were.
Nazi policy toward Gypsies was inconsistent. In greater Germany, Gypsies who had integrated into society were seen as socially dangerous and eventually were murdered, whereas in the occupied Soviet Union, Gypsies who had integrated into society were not persecuted but those who retained a nomadic lifestyle were put to death.
The peoples of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria were also treated inconsistently although deemed racially inferior. Some Slovaks, Croacians, Bulgarians and Ukrainians were allies of the Nazis. But Bulgarians refused to deport their Jewish population when ordered to do so. Russian prisoners-of-war died from neglect or hard labour, or were murdered, because of the Nazis’ racism and loathing of Communism. The Nazi plans did not target the Poles for annihilation. But some Polish children who “looked German” were to be raised as Germans, and Polish intellectuals and leaders were murdered in order to prevent rebellion, while the rest were to be enslaved.
¤ When and How did the Nazis come to power?
Contrary to a common misconception, Hitler did not come to power through a terrorist coup against a democratically elected government. Nor was he voted into office by a clear-cut decision of the German electorate. Rather, he attained power because President Hindenburg appointed him as Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Until that fateful day, neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler personally had ever come close to winning the ballot. In the last democratic elections, on November 6, 1932, the Nazi Party, though the strongest, actually declined from the 37.3 percent of the total vote that it had earned in the previous elections, on July 31, 1932, to 33.1 percent.
Once in power, Hitler and his accomplices lost no time in broadening their base of power and dismantling the democratic constitution piece by piece. A crucial landmark was the so-called “Law of Empowerment,” which authorized the government to enact laws without recourse either to the parliament or to the president. The autonomy of the individual German States was abolished in a by-law passed on March 31, 1933. The Nazi seizure of power was completed, in a sense, with the “Law Against the Establishment of New Parties” on July 14, 1933, by which the Nazi Party became the only legal political party in Germany
¤ How did the Nazis treat the Jews for the first years after their accession?
The pre-war persecution of Jews in Germany took place under very different circumstances from that of the Nazis“ extermination campaign during Word War II. The operative aim of Nazi policy during the first years was not yet the physical annihilation of the Jews but rather their social and economic displacement and their removal from German soil. In pursuing these goals, the regime was still subject to internal and external constraints that restrained the brutality of its antisemitic measures. Most of the anti-Jewish campaign was carried out in the full glare of world publicity. Its typical manifestations were discriminatory legislation, economic deprivation, public defamation, administrative harassment, and social ostracism rather than physical torture and murder.
A distinctive feature of Nazi policy before the war was the confusing interplay between repression and normalcy the constant tightening and untightening of the antisemitic pressure. Spurts of intense antisemitic activity were buffered by prolonged periods of deceptive stabilization. By and large, the pre-war antisemitic campaign crested at three junctures:
1. The boycott of April 1, 1933 and the ensuing wave of racial legislation aimed at Jewish employees in the public services and the various professions.
2. The Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, which put the final seal on Jewish emancipation in Germany and defined Jewishness in racial terms.
3. The state-organized pogrom on the night of November 9-10, 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”).
¤ Why didn’t more Jews leave Europe before the war began?
The most straightforward answer is that they simply had nowhere to go. For the Jews of Europe, in Chaim Weizmann’s famous remark, the world, was divided into two: places where they could not live and places where they could not go. The restrictive immigration practices of the major overseas countries vis-à-vis Jewish refugees reflected a global climate of economic protectionism tinged with xenophobia and outright antisemitism. An international conference on refugees at Evian (France) in July 1938, initiated by United States President Franklin Roosevelt, proved to be a complete fiasco. None of the representatives of the 32 countries invited (including Canada) offered prospective Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria any hope whatsoever.
Another explanation is that the intermittent and uneven application of the antisemitic pressure during the Nazi regime’s first years sent confusing signals to the Jewish victims, lulling their sense of danger and allowing them to believe that the worst had already passed. A panic exodus of Jews from Nazi-dominated Europe ensued only after the spring of 1938, in the wake of the annexation of Austria in March of that year.
¤ Why didn’t more Jews go to Palestine before the war?
The basic reason was that control over immigration to Palestine between the world wars was held by the mandatory power, the British, who cited the formal criterion of “economic absorptive capacity” to regulate Jewish entry in accordance with their own imperial and strategic interests. In essence, there were three legal ways to immigrate to Palestine before the war:
1. “Capitalist” visas were issued to immigrants who possessed capital of at least 1,000 Palestine pounds. To put this in perspective, the annual wage of a policeman in 1933 was less than 50 pounds.
2. “Halutzim”, young Zionist pioneers who had undergone a period of vocational-mostly agricultural-training abroad could enter the country as labourers. The exact number of certificates granted to labourers was determined by the Palestine Government in six-month “schedules” reflecting the economic situation at the time, especially the level of unemployment.
3. “Dependents” — direct relatives of Palestine residents.
After 1937, in the wake of the Royal Commission report, Jewish immigration into Palestine was subjected to an overt political threshold.
The other side of the coin, however, was that the Zionist establishment, which was embodied in the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, constantly disputed the actual size of the “schedules” allocated by the Palestine Government, but never challenged the system in principle. Unrestricted and unimpeded immigration would have clashed with the Agency’s prevailing conception of Zionist fulfillment as a slow, organic process, in the course of which the economic, social, and cultural interests of the collective Zionist enterprise in Palestine should take precedence over the needs of the Jewish individual.
¤ When did the Nazis decide to murder the Jews?
The exact date of the Nazi policy decision to murder all the Jews is not entirely clear. No written order from Hitler to this effect has been found. However, the facts speak for themselves: The systematic murder of Jews began in June 1941 in the Soviet Union, and spread to Poland and the rest of Europe later that year and throughout 1942. Plans to murder the Jews in the Soviet Union were integral to the invasion plans. The first death camps were under construction by the autumn of 1941, and Reinhard Heydrich, second most powerful man in the SS, was well advanced in carrying out his assignment to lay the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” By the time the coordinating conference of senior government officials and 55 men convened in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, hundreds of thousands had already been murdered and the implementation of plans to murder all the Jews was well along. The absence of a written order from Hitler has been the source of a debate among historians over the date of the decision, but most agree it was issued verbally sometime in 1941. “Intentionalist” historians argue that Hitler and other Nazi leaders had planned to kill the Jews all along and were waiting for an opportune moment to begin the operation. “Functionalist” historians argue that Nazi racist antisemitism led to several other policies before Hitler ordered the murder of all the Jews.
¤ Who made the decision to murder the Jews?
German society in the 1930’s was permeated by antisemitism, racism, a utopian vision of humanity organized under German hegemony, and a deep-seated and basic callousness towards human life. All of these elements contributed to the form of warfare waged by Nazi Germany and were themselves reinforced by the war. Large and varied segments of this society accepted the basic tenet that the Jews had to disappear. Although the way to effect this disappearance was not clear, humanitarian considerations were in any case irrelevant.
In this atmosphere, the idea of encouraging Jews to emigrate evolved into a policy of deportation, then brutal deportation, and finally deportation for the purpose of murder. It is not clear whether Hitler instigated these developments or simply allowed them to happen, as his underlings on various levels took independent initiatives in order to interpret and carry out their superiors’ wishes. When the S5 and other agencies, including the army, efficiently murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler knew that the option of total annihilation had become feasible. Over the next half-year, plans for the construction of extermination camps were made and their implementation began. The origin of the idea of murdering all the Jews is not clear, even though passages in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, suggest that such an order might eventually be given. In view of the nature of the Nazi bureaucracy the order itself had to have come from Hitler, but its implementation was the handiwork of many tens of thousands, with the acquiescence of millions.
¤ What were the largest ghettos, how many Jews were in them, and when were they liquidated?
The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, which held up to 480,000 Jews and was liquidated in May 1943 after massive deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942 and two uprisings in January and April 1943. The Lodz ghetto contained 160,000 Jews at its peak. This ghetto was liquidated gradually: in a first wave of deportations to Chelmno between January and May of 1942, many subsequent deportations to Cheimno and other camps, and final liquidation on September 1, 1944. The Lvov ghetto contained nearly 150,000 Jews when it was established in November 1941; its last few thousand inhabitants were removed in June 1943 after the rest had been deported to their deaths in Belzec and Janowska. The Minsk ghetto held 100,000 Jews from this city and the surrounding towns and villages. The Minsk ghetto was liquidated on October 21, 1943 after most of the Jewish inhabitants had been shot or deported to their deaths in Sobibor. In Vilna, most of the 57,000 Jews who initially inhabited the ghetto were shot to death in the nearby pits of Ponar. In the wake of a failed Vilna ghetto uprising, the last few thousand Jews were sent to camps in Estonia on September 23, 1943. The Bialystok ghetto, which originally contained 50,000 Jews, was liquidated on August 16, 1943, following five days of fighting by the Jewish underground.
¤ What conditions prevailed in the ghettos?
During the Holocaust, ghettos were small and, in most cases, poor areas in cities and towns, to which the Jews were confined and from which non-Jews were generally barred. Many ghettos were surrounded by walls or fences in order to help enforce the Jews’ isolation and separation from their neighbours and the outside world. The ghettos were meant to serve as temporary, tightly controlled collection points, where the Jews’ labour potential would be exploited until a future German policy led to their removal.
Jews in the ghettos were kept under horrendous conditions. The Nazis confiscated nearly all their belongings and denied them access to most needs of daily life. Severe overcrowding, lack of hygiene, extreme starvation, and denial of basic medicines led to widespread epidemics in many ghettos. The harsh conditions and long hours of forced labor weakened the Jews further. In Warsaw, the largest of the ghettos, approximately 85,000 Jews (about 20 percent of the ghetto population) died from the conditions before the Nazis began to deport them to a death camp. Similar death rates were evident in other ghettos, and even where conditions were somewhat better, they were “narrow as the grave,” in the words of on Vilna ghetto diarist, Dr. Lazar Epstein.
¤ What was the first concentration camp? When did it start to function, what was its purpose and who was its commander?
The first concentration camp was established at Dachau on March 23, 1933, just two months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Its purpose was to spread fear among the populace, and it became an effective tool for silencing and breaking opposition to the Nazi regime. Dachau became the training ground for the SS. Its first commandant was Theodor Eicke, whose many precedents for brutality were followed throughout the expanding camp system.
¤ What was the first extermination* camp? When was it established? Who was its commander? When were the first Jews murdered there?
The first camp specifically established as a death camp was at Chelmno (Kulmhof), Poland. It began to function on December 8, 1941, when Jews from the surrounding area were brought there. At first, gas vans were used for the murder. Eventually, approximately 320,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered there. Hauptsurmfuehrer Herbert Lange commanded the camp until March 1942 and was succeeded by Hauptsurmfuehrer Hans Bothmann. The Nazis abandoned the camp on January 17, 1945.
In September 1941, several months before mass murder in Chelmno began, some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 other inmates were killed experimentally with Zykion B gas in Auschwitz. Auschwitz, however, did not take on the function of a death camp until the spring of 1942, after larger gas chambers were built in nearby Birkenau.
¤ How did the Nazis try to hide their atrocities?
The first method in camouflaging the murder of the Jews was the use of regulated euphemisms in many of their documents, such as “special treatment” for murder and “evacuation” for deportations. Even the term “Final Solution” is a code word for the policy of mass murder. Participants in the murder operation were sworn to secrecy. Jews were told various lies when ordered to prepare for deportation. Generally, they were told they were going to a “better place” where they would have to work but would be able to live. In June 1942 onward, a special operation, “Aktion 1005” was begun to destroy the physical evidence of the murder. Under SS Standartenfuehrer Paul Blobel, a special unit called Sonderkommando 1004 supervised the burning of the victims’ bodies in the death camps. From June 1943 on, the unit tried to obliterate the traces of mass graves in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union by incinerating the remains in huge pyres. Although they did not succeed in wiping out all traces of the murder, the Nazi trail of obfuscation and obliteration has made it much harder to determine the exact details and statistical magnitude of the crimes committed.
¤ When did the world learn about the Holocaust? How did information reach the free world?
A distinction should be made between reports on specific mass murder incidents and reports on genocide. Information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased with time. The early sources of information include German policy reports intercepted by British intelligence; local eyewitnesses and escaped Jews reporting to underground, Soviet, or neutral sources; and Hungarian soldiers on home leave, whose observations were reported by neutral sources. During 1942, reports of a Nazi plan to murder all the Jews, including details on methods, numbers, and locations, reached Allied and neutral leaders from many sources, such as the underground Jewish socialist Bund party in the Warsaw ghetto in May; Gerhard Riegner’s cable from Switzerland in August; the eyewimess account of Polish underground courier Jan Karski in November; and the eyewitness accounts of 69 Polish Jews who reached Palestine in a civilian prisoner exchange between Germany and Britain in November. On December 17, 1942, the Allies issued a declaration condemning the “extermination” of the Jewish people in Europe and vowing retribution against the perpetrators. Notwithstanding this, it remains unclear to what extent Allied and neutral leaders understood the full import of their information. The utter shock of senior Allied commanders who liberated camps at the end of the war may indicate that this understanding was not complete.
Up to one and a half million children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The overwhelming majority of them were Jewish. Thousands of Roma (Gypsy) children, disabled children, and Polish children were also among the victims.
The deaths of these children were not accidental. They were the deliberate result of actions taken by the German government under the leadership of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The children were killed in various ways. Many were shot; many more were asphyxiated with poisonous gas in concentration camps or subjected to lethal injections. Others perished from disease, starvation, exposure, torture, and/or severe physical exhaustion from slave labour. Still others died as a result of medical experiments conducted on them by German doctors in the camps.
During the Holocaust, children — ranging in age from infants to older teens — were, like their parents, persecuted and killed, but it was not for anything they had done. Rather, Hitler and the Nazi government believed that so-called “Aryan” Germans were a superior race. The Nazis labelled other people they considered inferior as “non-Aryans.” People belonging to nonAryan groups, including children, were targeted by the Nazis for elimination from German society The Nazis killed children to create a biologically pure society.
Even children who fit the Aryan stereotype suffered at the hand of the Nazis during World Was II. Non-Jewish children in occupied countries whose physical appearance fit the Nazi notion of a “Master Race” (fair skin, blond-haired, blue-eyed) were at times kidnapped from their homes and taken to Germany to be adopted by German families. As many as 50,000 Polish children alone may have been separated from their families in this manner. Some of these children were later rejected and sent to special children’s camps where they died of starvation or as a result of the terrible living conditions within the camps. Others were killed by lethal injections at the concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.
The experience of children who were victims of Nazi hatred varied widely. Factors such as age, gender, family wealth, and where a child lived affected their experience under German domination. Generally, babies and younger children deported to ghettos and camps had almost no chance of surviving. Children in their teens, or younger children who looked more mature than their years, had a better chance of survival since they might be selected for slave labour rather than for death. Some teens participated in resistance activities as well.
Children who were victims of the Holocaust came from all over Europe. They had different languages, customs, and religious beliefs. Some came from wealthy families; others from poor homes. Many ended their schooling early to work in a craft or trade; others looked forward to continuing their education at the university level. Still, whatever their differences, they shared one commonality: by the 1930s, with the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, they all became potential victims, and their lives were forever changed.
Soon after the Nazis gained power in Germany, Jewish children found life increasingly difficult. Due to legislation prohibiting Jews from engaging in various professions, their parents lost jobs and businesses. As a result, many families were left with little money. Jewish children were not allowed to participate in sports and social activities with their “Aryan” classmates and neighbours. They could not go to museums, movies, public playgrounds, or even swimming pools. Even when they were permitted to go to school, teachers often treated them with scorn and even encouraged their humiliation by other students. Frequently, Jewish students were subject to being taunted and teased, picked upon and beaten up. Eventually, Jewish and Gypsy children were expelled from German schools.
Gypsy children, like Jewish children, faced many hardships in Nazi Germany. Along with their parents, they were rounded up and forced to live behind barbed wire in special municipal internment camps under police guard. Beginning in 1938, Gypsy teenagers were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, life became much harder for children all over Europe. European children of all backgrounds suffered because of the war, experiencing displacement, inadequate diets, the absence of fathers and brothers, loss of family members, trauma, and confusion. However, only certain groups of children were singled out for “extinction.”
Wartime, Hitler suggested, “was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill.” Among the first victims of the Nazis were disabled persons, and children were not exempt. Many Germans, influenced by Nazi ideas, did not want to be reminded of individuals who did not measure up to their idealized concept of a “master race.” The physically and mentally handicapped were viewed by the Nazis as unproductive to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity, and ultimately, unworthy of life. Beginning almost simultaneously with the start of World War II, a “euthanasia” program was authorized personally by Adolf Hitler to systematically murder disabled Germans. Like disabled adults, children with disabilities were either injected with lethal drugs or asphyxiated by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes pumped into sealed mobile vans and gas chambers. Medical doctors cooperated in these so-called “mercy killings” in six institutions, and secretly at other centres, in Germany. Though some were Jewish, most of the children murdered in this fashion were non-Jewish Germans.
With the onset of war, Jewish children in Germany suffered increasing deprivations. Nazi government officials confiscated many items of value from Jewish homes, including radios, telephones, cameras, and cars. Even more importantly, food rations were curtailed for Jews as were clothing ration cards. Jewish children felt more and more isolated. Similarly, as Germany conquered various European countries in their war effort — from Poland and parts of the Soviet Union in the east, to Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France, and Holland in the west — more and more Jewish children came under German control, and with their parents, experienced persecution, forced separations, and very often, murder.
Throughout Eastern Europe, Jewish families were forced to give up their homes and relocate into ghettos — restricted areas set up by the Nazis as “Jewish residential districts.” Most of the ghettos were located in Nazi-occupied Poland; most were established in the poorer, more dilapidated sections of towns and cities. Ghettos were fenced in, typically with barbed wire or brick walls. Entry and exit were by permit or pass only; like a prison, armed guards stood at gates. Families inside the ghettos lived under horrid conditions. Typically, many families would be crowded into a few rooms where there was little if any heat, food, or privacy. It was difficult to keep clean. Many people in the ghettos perished from malnutrition, starvation, exposure, and epidemics. Typhus, a contagious disease spread by body lice, was common, as was typhoid, spread through contaminated drinking water.
Some children managed to escape deportation to ghettos by going into hiding with their families, or by hiding alone, aided by non-Jewish friends and neighbours. Children in hiding often took on a secret life, sometimes remaining in one room for months or even years. Some hid in woodpiles, attics, or barns; others were locked in cupboards or concealed closets, coming out infrequently and only at night. Boys had it more difficult, because they were circumcised and could therefore be identified.
Children were often forced to live lives independent of their families. Many children who found refuge with others outside the ghettos had to assume new identities and conform to local religious customs that were different from their own in order to survive. Some Jewish children managed to pass as Catholics and were hidden in Catholic schools, orphanages, and convents in countries across Europe.
Everyday, children became orphaned, and many had to take care of even younger children. In the ghettos of Warsaw and other cities, many orphans lived on the streets, begging for bread and food from others in the ghetto who likewise had little or none to spare. Exposed to severe weather, frostbite, disease, and starvation, these children did not survive for long. Many froze to death.
In order to survive, children had to be resourceful and make themselves useful. In Lodz, healthy children could survive by working. Small children in the largest ghetto in occupied Poland, Warsaw, sometimes helped smuggle food to their families and friends by crawling through narrow openings in the ghetto wall. They did so at considerable risk, as smugglers who were caught were severely punished.
The Nazis started emptying the ghettos in 1942, and deporting the victims to concentration camps. Children were often the target of special round-ups for deportation to the camps. The victims were told they were being resettled in the “East.” The journey to the camps was difficult for everyone. Jammed into rail cars until there was no room for anyone to move, young children were often thrown on top of other people. Suffocating heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter made the deportation journey even more brutal. During the trip, which often lasted several days, there was no food, except for what people managed to bring along. There was also no water or bathroom facilities and parents were powerless to defend their children.
Two concentration camps (AuschwitzBirkenau and Majdanek) and four other camps (Chelmno, Sobibor, Beizec, and Treblinka) functioned as “killing centres.” All were located near railroad lines in occupied Poland, and poison gas — either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B — was the primary weapon of murder. Upon arrival at these “death camps,” individuals were “selected” to live or to die. Stronger, healthier people were often selected for slave labour, forced to work eleven-hour shifts with minimum provisions for clothing, food, and shelter.
Arrival at a killing centre usually meant immediate death for babies and younger children. Children aged thirteen and older were frequently spared immediate gassing, and used instead for forced labour. Some who survived the camp “selection” process were used for medical experiments for German physicians.
The great majority of people deported to killing centres did not survive. For those who did survive the selection process, children and adults alike, life in the camps presented new challenges, humiliations, and deprivations. One became a prisoner: clothing and all possessions were removed. Hair was shaved off. Ill-fitting prison uniforms were distributed. One’s name was replaced with a number often tattooed on the arm. Many people scarcely recognized their own family members after they had been processed in the camps.
Camp “inmates” were crowded into barracks fitted with wooden bunk beds stacked three on top of each other, and several people had to fit per level on the plank beds which had neither mattresses nor blankets. Lice were everywhere and contributed to the spread of disease, which was an ever-present enemy. Standing in roll calls for extended periods in all kinds of weather and working long hours took its toll on everyone. Daily rations of food consisted of a small piece of bread and coffee or soup. As a result of these brutal living conditions, many people died. Few lasted more than a month or two. And, even among those that survived; one’s vulnerability to “selection” had not ended at the point of arrival. The sick, the feeble, and those too exhausted to work were periodically identified and selected for gassing.
Near the end of the war in 1945, the German concentration camps were liberated by Allied soldiers. By this time, many of the children who had entered camps as teenagers were now young adults. For most, the food and gestures of kindness offered by liberating soldiers were the link to life itself. Children who had survived in hiding now searched the camps trying to locate family members who might also have survived. Returning to hometowns, they had hopes that a former neighbour might know of other survivors.
It was rare for an entire family to survive the Holocaust. One or both parents were likely to have been killed; brothers and sisters had been lost; grandparents were dead. Anticipated reunions with family members gave surviving children some hope, but for many, the terrible reality was that they were now alone. Many found themselves sole survivors of once large extended families. A few were eventually able to locate missing family members.
Life as it had been before the Holocaust was forever altered. Though some individual survivors attempted to return to their former places of residence, Jewish and Gypsy communities no longer existed in most of Europe. Family homes had, in many instances, been taken over by others; personal possessions had been plundered. Because returning to one’s home in hopes of reclaiming what had been lost was fraught with extreme danger, many young survivors eventually ended up instead in children’s centres or displaced persons camps.
The future was as uncertain as the present was unstable. Many young people had had their schooling interrupted and could not easily resume their studies. Merely surviving took precedence over other concerns. Owning nothing and belonging nowhere, many children left Europe and, with assistance provided by immigrant aid societies or sponsorship from relatives abroad, they emigrated, usually to the United States, South Africa, and/or Palestine which, after 1948, became the State of Israel. There, in these newly adopted countries, they slowly developed new lives.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and their collaborators as a central act of state during World War II. In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. Although Jews were the primary victims, hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies) and at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons were also victims of Nazi genocide. Homosexuals and others deemed “anti-social” were also persecuted and often murdered. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe from 1933 to 1945, millions of other innocent people were persecuted and murdered. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their nationality Poles, as well as other Slavs, were targeted for slave labour, and as a result tens of thousands perished. In addition, thousands of political and religious dissidents such as communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs and behaviour and many of these individuals died as a result of maltreatment.
The concentration camp is most closely associated with the Holocaust and remains an enduring symbol of the Nazi regime. The first camps opened soon after the Nazis took power in January 1933; they continued as a basic part of Nazi rule until May 8, 1945, when the war, and the Nazi regime, ended.
The events of the Holocaust occurred in two main phases: 1933—1939 and 1939—1945.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor, appointed through the democratic process to the most powerful position in the German government, by the aged President Hindenburg who hoped Hitler could lead the nation out of its grave political and economic crisis. Hitler was the leader of the right-wing National Socialist German Workers Party (called the Nazi Party for short); it was, by 1933, one of the strongest parties in Germany, even though — reflecting the country’s multi-party system — the Nazis had only won a plurality of 33 percent of the votes in the 1932 elections to the German parliament (Reichstag).
Once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy. He convinced his cabinet to invoke emergency constitutional clauses, which permitted the suspension of individual freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly. Special security forces — the Special State Police (the Gestapo), the Storm Troopers (S.A.) and the Security Police (S.S.) — murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties (communists, socialists, and liberals). The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, forced through a Reichstag already purged of many political opponents, gave dictatorial powers to Hitler.
Also in 1933, the Nazis began to put into practice their racial ideology Echoing ideas popular in Germany as well as most other western nations well before the 1930’s, the Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and that there was a struggle for survival between them and “inferior races.” They saw Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and the handicapped as a serious biological threat to the purity of the “German (Aryan) Race,” what they called the “master race.”
Jews, who numbered around 500,000 in Germany (less then one percent of the total population in 1933), were the principal targets of Nazi hatred. The Nazis mistakenly identified Jews as a race and defined the Jewish race as “inferior.” They also spewed hate mongering propaganda, which unfairly blamed Jews for Germany’s economic depression and the country’s defeat in World War 1(1914-1918).
In 1933, new German laws forced Jews to quit their civil service jobs, university and law court positions, and other areas of public life. In April 1933, a boycott of Jewish businesses was instituted. In 1935, laws proclaimed at Nuremberg stripped German Jews of their citizenship even though they retained limited rights. These “Nuremberg Laws” defined Jews not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves but by the blood of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them: Jews could not attend public schools, go to theatres, cinemas, or vacation resorts, or reside, or even walk, in certain sections of German cities.
Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews were forced from Germany’s economic life: the Nazis either seized Jewish businesses and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. On November 9, 1938, this economic attack against German and Austrian2 Jews changed into the physical destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores, the arrest of Jewish men, the destruction of homes, and the murder of individuals. This centrally organized riot (pogrom) became known as Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), when synagogues were burned and Jewish businesses were smashed.
Although Jews were the main targets of Nazi hatred, the Nazis persecuted other groups they viewed as racially or genetically “inferior.” Nazi racial ideology was buttressed by scientists who advocated “selective breeding” (eugenics) to “improve the human race.” Laws passed between 1933 and 1935 aimed to reduce the future number of genetic “inferiors” through involuntary sterilization programs: about 500 children of mixed (African/German) racial backgrounds3 and 320,000 to 350,000 individuals judged physically or mentally handicapped were subjected to surgical or radiation procedures so they could not have children. Supporters of sterilization also argued that the handicapped burdened the community with the costs of their care. Many of Germany’s 30,000 Gypsies were also eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. New laws combined traditional prejudices with the new racism of the Nazis, which defined Gypsies by race and as “criminal and asocial.”
Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others the Nazis labelled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.” Many homosexuals, mostly male, were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps; under the 1935 Nazi-revised criminal code, the mere denunciation of an individual as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, since the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military Their literature was confiscated, and they lost jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, and all social welfare benefits. Many Witnesses were sent to prisons and concentration camps in Nazi Germany and their children were sent to juvenile detention homes and orphanages.
Between 1933 and 1936, thousands of people, mostly political prisoners and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were imprisoned in concentration camps while several thousand German Gypsies were confined in special municipal camps. The first systematic round-ups of German and Austhan Jews occurred after Kristallnacht, when approximately 30,000 Jewish women were deported to Dachau and other concentration camps and several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails. At the end of 1938, the waves of arrests also included several thousand German and Austrian Gypsies.
Between 1933 and 1939, about half the German Jewish population and more then two-thirds of Austrian Jews (1938-1939) fled Nazi persecution. They emigrated mainly to Palestine, the United States, Latin America, China (which required no visa for entry), and eastern and western Europe (where many would be caught again in the Nazi net during the war). Jews who remained under Nazi rule were either unwilling to uproot themselves, or unable to obtain visas, sponsors in host countries, or funds for emigration. Most foreign countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France, were unwilling to admit very large numbers of refugees.
1The term “Aryan” originally referred to people speaking Indo-European languages. The Nazis perverted its meaning to support racist ideas by viewing those of German background as prime examples of Aryan stock, which they considered racially superior. For the Nazis, the typical Aryan was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
2 On March 11, 1938, Hitler sent his army into Austria and on March 13 the incorporation (Anschluss) of Austria with the German empire (Reich) was proclaimed in Vienna. Most of the population welcomed the Anschluss and expressed their fervor in widespread riots and attacks against the Austrian Jews numbering 180,000 (90 percent of whom lived in Vienna).
3 These children, called “the Rhineland bastards” by Germans, were the offspring of German women and African soldiers from French colonies who were stationed in the 1920s in the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone the Allies established after World War I as a buffer between German and western Europe.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Within days, the Polish army was defeated and the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Polish culture and enslave the Polish people, whom they viewed as “subhuman.” Killing Polish leaders was the first step. German soldiers carried out massacres of university professors, artists, writers, politicians, and many Catholic priests. To create new living space for the “superior Germanic race.” Large segments of the Polish population were resettled, and German families moved into the emptied lands. Thousands of other Poles, including Jews, were imprisoned in concentration camps. The Nazis also “kidnapped” as many as 50,000 “Aryan-looking” Polish children from their parents and took them to Germany to be adopted by German families. Many of these children were later rejected as not capable of Germanization and sent to special children’s camps where some died of starvation, lethal injection, and disease.
As the war began in 1939, Hitler initialled an order to kill institutionalized handicapped patients deemed “incurable.” Special commissions of physicians reviewed questionnaires filled out by all state hospitals and then decided if a patient should be killed. The doomed were then transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where specially constructed gas chambers were used to kill them. After public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this euphemistically termed “euthanasia” program in secret. Babies, small children, and other victims were thereafter killed by lethal injection and pills or by forced starvation.
The “euthanasia” program contained all the elements later required for mass murder of European Jews and Gypsies in Nazi death camps: an articulated decision to kill, specially trained personnel, the apparatus for killing by gas, and the use of euphemistic language like “euthanasia” which psychologically distanced the murderers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the killings from the public.
In 1940 German forces continued their conquest of much of Europe, easily defeating Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, and by September was approaching Moscow In the meantime, Italy, Romania, and Hungary had joined the Axis powers led by Germany and opposed by the Allied Powers (British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and the Soviet Union).
In the months following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, communists, and many Gypsies were killed in mass executions. The overwhelming majority of those killed were Jews. These murders were carried out at improvised sites throughout the Soviet Union by members of mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) who followed in the wake of the invading German army. The most famous of these sited was Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jews, were murdered. German terror extended to institutionalized handicapped and psychiatric patients in the Soviet Union. It also resulted in the mass murder of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war.
World War II brought major changes to the concentration camp system. Large numbers of new prisoners, deported from all German-occupied countries, now flooded the camps. Often, entire groups were committed to the camps, such as members of underground resistance organizations who were rounded up in a sweep across western Europe under the 1941 “Night of Fog” decree. To accommodate the massive increase in the number of prisoners, hundreds of new camps were established in occupied territories of eastern and western Europe.
During the war, ghettos, transit camps, and forced labour camps, in addition to the concentration camps, were created by the Germans and their collaborators to imprison their victims of racial and ethnic hatred: Jews, Gypsies, as well as political opponents and resistance fighters. Following the invasion of Poland, three million Polish Jews were forced into approximately 400 newly established ghettos where they were segregated from the rest of the population. Large numbers of Jews were also deported from other cities and countries, including Germany, to ghettos in Poland and German-occupied territories further east.
In Polish cities under Nazi occupation, like Warsaw and Lodz, Jews were confined in sealed ghettos where starvation, overcrowding, exposure to cold, and contagious diseases killed tens of thousands of people. In Warsaw and elsewhere, ghettoized Jews made every effort, often at great risk, to maintain their culture, communal, and religious lives. The ghettos also provided a forced labour pool for Germans, and many forced labourers (who worked on road gangs, in construction, or other labour related to the German war effort) died from exhaustion or maltreatment.
Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans moved to eliminate the ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere, deporting ghetto residents to “extermination camps,” killing centres equipped with gassing facilities, located in Poland. After the meeting of senior German government officials in late January 1942 at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the decision to implement “the final solution of the Jewish question” became formal state policy and Jews from western Europe were sent to killing centres in the East.
The six killing sites were chosen because of their closeness to rail lines and their location in semi-rural areas, at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno was the first camp in which mass executions were carried out by gas, piped into mobile gas vans; 320,000 persons were killed between December 1941 and March 1943, and June to July 1944. A killing centre using gas vans and later gas chambers operated at Belzec where more then 600,000 persons were killed between May 1942 and August 1943. Sobibor opened in May 1942 and closed one day after a rebellion of the prisoners in October 14, 1943; up to 200,000 persons were killed by gassing. Treblinka opened in July 1942 and closed in November 1943; a revolt by the prisoners in early August 1943 destroyed much of the facility. At least 750,000 persons were killed at Treblinka, near Warsaw, physically the largest of the killing centres. Almost all of the victims of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were Jews; a few were Gypsies. Very few individuals survived these four killing centres, where most victims were murdered immediately after arrival.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Krakow, also served as a concentration camp and slave labour camp, and became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews and Gypsies were killed. After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 250 malnourished and ill Polish prisoners and 600 Russian POWs, mass murder became a daily routine. More than 1.25 million were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9 out of 10 were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners of all nationalities died in the gas chambers. Between May 14 and July 8, 1944, a total of 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 48 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust. A similar system was implemented in a suburb of Lublin at Majdanek, which also doubled as a concentration camp and where at least 275,000 persons were killed in the gas chambers or died from malnutrition, brutality, and disease.
The methods of murder were the same in all the killing centres which were operated by the S.S. The victims arrived in railroad freight cars and passenger trains, mostly from Polish ghettos and camps, but also from almost every other occupied eastern and western European country On arrival, men were separated from women and children. Prisoners were forced to undress and hand over all valuables. They were then driven naked into the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms, and either carbon monoxide or Zykion B (a form of crystalline prussic acid, also used as an insecticide in some camps) was used to asphyxiate them. The majority selected for forced labour were, after initial quarantine, vulnerable to malnutrition, exposure, epidemics, medial experiments, and brutality; many perished as a result.
The Germans carried out their systematic murderous activities with the active help of local collaborators in many countries and the acquiescence or indifference of millions of bystanders. However, there were instances of organized resistance. For example, in the fall of 1943, the Danish resistance, with the support of the local population, rescued nearly the entire Jewish community in Denmark from the threat of deportation to the East, by smuggling them via a dramatic boatlift to safety in neutral Sweden. Individuals in many other countries also risked their lives to save Jews and other individuals subjected to Nazi persecution. One of the most famous was Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who led a rescue effort which saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944.
Resistance movements existed in almost every concentration camp and ghetto of Europe. In addition to the armed revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka, Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto led to a courageous uprising in April-May, 1943, despite a predictable doomed outcome because of supenor German force. In general, rescue or aid to Holocaust victims was not a priority of resistance organizations whose principal goal was to fight the war against the Germans. Nonetheless, such groups and Jewish partisans (resistance fighters) sometimes cooperated with each other to save Jews. On April 19, 1943 for instance, members of the National Committee for the Defense of Jews in cooperation with Christian railroad workers and the general underground in Belgium, attacked a train leaving the Belgian transit camp of Malines headed for Auschwitz and succeeded in assisting several hundred Jewish deportees to escape.
After the war turned against Germany and the Allied armies approached German soil in late 1944, the S.S. decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps. The Germans tried to cover up the evidence of genocide and deported prisoners to camps inside Germany to prevent their liberation. Many inmates died during the long journeys on foot known as “death marches.” During the final days, in the spring of 1945, conditions in the remaining concentration camps exacted a terrible toll in human lives. Even concentration camps that were never intended for extermination, such as Bergen-Belsen, became death traps for thousands (including Anne Frank who died there of typhus in March 1945).
In May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed, the S.S. guards fled, and the camps ceased to exist as extermination, forced labour, or concentration camps. However, some of the concentration camps were turned into camps for displaced persons (DPs), which included former Holocaust victims. Nuthtion, sanitary conditions, and accommodations often were poor. DPs lived behind barbed wire, and were exposed to humiliating treatment, and, at times, to antisemitic attacks.
The Nazi legacy was a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation that had affected every country of occupied Europe. The toll in lives was enormous. The full magnitude, and the moral and ethical implications, of this tragic era are only now beginning to be understood more fully.
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