nazi ideology

and the holocaust

united states holocaust memorial museum

library of congress
cataloging-in-publication data

Nazi ideology and the Holocaust.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-89604-712-9
isbn-10: 0-89604-712-1
1. World War, 1939-1945—Atrocities.
2. Genocide—Germany—History—20th century.
3. National socialism. I. United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
d804.3.N43 2007
940.53’18—dc22
2007038045

Copyright © 2007
contents
 Maps:
Europe 1938, inside front cover
German Administration of Europe 1944, inside front cover
Europe Major Nazi Camps 1943–44, inside back cover
Euthanasia Centers, Germany 1940–45, inside back cover

9 Acknowledgments

11 nazi ideology

23 enemies of the regime:

Political Opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Homosexuals

53 territorial struggle in europe:

Polish and Soviet Civilians, and Soviet Prisoners of War

75 the quest for racial purity:

Germans with Mental and Physical Disabilities,
African Germans, and Roma

111 the holocaust:

The Destruction of European Jewry

159 epilogue | the aftermath of the holocaust:

Punishing and Preventing the Crime of Genocide

164 Further Reading and Additional Sources

This publication is made possible by a generous grant
from the Hess, Ein, and Lewin families in loving memory
of Charles and Ilse Hess.

research, writing, and editing

William F. Meinecke Jr., Historian
Alexandra Zapruder, Consultant
Timothy Kaiser, Project Director
Laura Glassman and Barbara Hart
of Publications Professionals, Copy Editors

review
Peter Black, Senior Historian
Sarah Ogilvie, Director of the National Institute
for Holocaust Education
Steven Luckert, Permanent Exhibition Curator
Susan Bachrach, Special Exhibitions Curator
Edward Phillips, Deputy Director of Exhibitions
Daniel Napolitano, Director of Education

design and production

Studio A, Alexandria, Va.

united states holocaust memorial museum

Fred Zeidman, Chairman
Joel M. Geiderman, Vice Chair
Sara J. Bloomfield, Director

The Museum also acknowledges the contribution of

the following individuals to the production of this book:

Victoria Barnett Andrea Lewis

Lea Caruso Wendy Ng
Amy Donovan Bruce Tapper
Stephen Feinberg

acknowledgments | 9
nazi ideology
 etween 1933 and 1945, germany’s government, led by adolf hitler and the
National Socialist (Nazi) party, carried out a deliberate, calculated attack on
European Jewry. Basing their actions on antisemitic ideology and using World
War II as a primary means to achieve their goals, they targeted Jews as their
main enemy, killing six million Jewish men, women, and children by the time
the war ended in 1945. This act of genocide is now known as the Holocaust. As part of
their wide-reaching efforts to remove from German territory all those whom they consi­
dered racially, biologically, or socially unfit, the Nazis terrorized many other groups as well,
including Roma (also known as Gypsies), Germans with mental and physical disabilities,
homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war. In the course of
this state-sponsored tyranny, the Nazis left countless lives shattered and millions dead.
Much has been written about what took place during the era of the Holocaust and
where, when, and how the Nazis carried out their murderous plans. To fully comprehend
the Nazis’ actions, however, one must consider and understand the theoretical underpin-
nings that led them to conceive of such plans in the first place. In other words, what did
the Nazis believe and how did they put their theories into practice?
Adolf Hitler formulated and articulated the ideas that came to be known as Nazi ideology.
Born in a small town in Austria, Hitler had failed as an art student before becoming
a corporal in the German army. Like many of his countrymen, he was embittered and
humiliated by Germany’s defeat in World War I and was further outraged by the terms of
the Versailles Treaty, which had been signed in 1918 and which required the vanquished
nation to give up vast territories and to pay heavy war debts.
Hitler joined the nascent Nazi party in the early 1920s, finding a political home among
others who despised Germany’s democratic Weimar government—established immediately
following Germany’s defeat in World War I—and who blamed Marxists and Jews for the
country’s problems. Hitler used his personal charisma to rise to the top of the radical,
militant party, soon becoming its leader. Amid economic crisis and social unrest throughout
Germany, the ranks of the Nazis swelled to 50,000 by 1923.
That same year, Hitler and the Nazi party attempted a coup, called the Beer-Hall
Putsch, but failed to seize control of the government. In the trial that followed, Hitler was
sentenced to five years in prison for treason. There, he wrote his political autobiography,
Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he outlined his vision of a new future for Germany. In
his book, Hitler stated that he first became an active antisemite during his formative years
in Vienna, where he became familiar with social Darwinism. That theory sought to apply
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human society, imagining all of human
history as a struggle for primacy between social groups, whether defined by race, ethnicity,

| 11
nation, or class. He also incorporated in his writing elements of Malthusian economics,
a theory suggesting that the earth’s finite ability to produce food, as well as its cycles of
disease and natural disaster, inherently limited population growth. Finally, Hitler combined
those theories with writing about the nationalist German notion of “blood and soil” (Blut
und Boden), which glorified peasant life and idealized the land. From this composite of
social, economic, historical, and mystical elements, Hitler adapted and skillfully propagated
an ideology that put the necessity of racial struggle at the center of human affairs.
Hitler was convinced that he had found the key to comprehending an extraordinarily
complex world. He believed that a person’s characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behavior
were determined by his or her so-called racial makeup. In Hitler’s view, all groups, races,
or peoples (he used those terms interchangeably) carried within them traits that were im-
mutably transmitted from one generation to the next. For better or for worse, no individual
could overcome the innate qualities of race.
Although most people accept the notion of an individual human impulse to survive,
Hitler, like other social Darwinists, believed that all members of a race or ethnic group
shared a collective instinct for survival. In his view, the continuation of a race primarily
depended on the ability of its members to pass on its innate characteristics to succeeding
generations. This notion translated to an abhorrence of intermingling between peoples,
because it would lead to the pollution of the distinguishing elements of the race and, in
turn, to the degeneration of its very nature. According to this thinking, this process could,
over time, threaten and potentially extinguish an entire race.
The second element in Hitler’s theory of survival involved the need to acquire “living
space” (Lebensraum). Each race, he asserted, was driven to struggle with others for room
in which to grow and for resources on which to thrive. “Every being strives for expansion,”
he said in a speech in Erlangen, Germany, in November 1930, “and every nation strives for
world domination.” Those who were successful in this territorial competition would con-
tinue to expand their numbers, thereby overwhelming the smaller populations around
them. The lesser races, weakened by a lack of living space, would eventually stagnate and
die out. In the end, he judged the success or failure of each race by the size of its population
and the area of territory it controlled: a great nation occupied a huge area of land; a weak
one held little or none. The road map to racial survival depended not on peaceful coexis-
tence with one’s neighbors but on defeating them in the quest for limited resources.
In Hitler’s mind, however, the struggle for survival was not a neutral contest in which
all races were different but equally entitled to supremacy. Instead, he believed in a hier-
archy of racial groups in which some were inherently gifted—possessed of traits such as
integrity, intelligence, and beauty—whereas others were fundamentally flawed by nature

12 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

and were devious, stupid, or ugly. Because he held that all racial groups shared the same
drive for collective survival (competing against one another for finite resources and space
in which to grow), and because he thought that racial mixing diluted good characteristics
and spread bad ones, Hitler viewed those races at the top of the hierarchy as being at risk
of infiltration and destruction by those at the bottom. To survive, a superior race must not
only separate itself from lesser ones but also continue to suppress and dominate those
who would threaten to overtake it.
Hitler imagined himself as a savior, applying his theoretical construct of racial struggle
to the specific case of Germany. He condemned the democratic Weimar Republic as weak
and ineffectual. Moreover, he felt the country’s leaders had led the nation dangerously
astray and had corrupted the German soul by overemphasizing the intrinsic worth of the
individual. To Hitler, individuality was an egoistic and culture-corroding value because it
duped people into forgetting about and thereby relinquishing their role in the collective
group, which he called “race-consciousness.”
Hitler was not alone in his beliefs. Nationalist political movements in Germany and
Austria tended to view the state as a collective entity, describing it as a “National Commu-
nity” (Volksgemeinschaft). More-extreme racist nationalists saw the state as a “community
of the people” (völkische Gemeinschaft), by which they meant not just a national but a racial
group imbued with a mystical sense of shared blood and common fate. In such a frame-
work, which Hitler wholeheartedly adopted, a person mattered only for the role he or she
played in serving the racial community. Hitler planned to use his power to reeducate the
people along those lines by suppressing any political or spiritual loyalty beyond that to the
race-nation. He would thus reclaim for Germany its place among the nations and would
ensure its collective survival.
The stakes of this racial “survival of the fittest” mentality were particularly high for
Hitler and for those who adopted his views, because they believed themselves to be at the
top of the hierarchy but threatened with infiltration and corruption by inferior peoples.
They called themselves “Aryans,” although the term, in fact, refers to the language spoken
by Indo-Germanic settlers from Persia and India who migrated over centuries into Europe.
The Nazis perverted the word’s meaning to support racist ideas by viewing those of Ger-
manic background as prime examples of “Aryan” stock, which they considered racially
superior; the typical “Aryan” in the Nazi view was blond, blue-eyed, and tall. Additionally,
for Hitler and the Nazis, a racial hierarchy existed even among so-called Aryan peoples,
and they dubbed those of Nordic descent, especially “Aryan” Germans, as the ultimate
“Master Race,” gifted above all others by virtue of innate superiority. As such, the Nazis
believed they were destined to rule a vast empire they called Das Dritte Reich, or the Third Reich

nazi ideology | 13
(the Nazis used this term to emphasize historical continuity—First Reich: the Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation, 962–1806; Second Reich: Hohenzollern empire, 1871–1918;
and the Third Reich, which would begin when the Nazi Party came to power).
Hitler painted for his countrymen a terrifying picture of this great race of “Aryan”
Germans threatened with imminent danger because of the Weimar Republic’s misguided
leadership following World War I. By opening the doors of the nation to members of
those races that the Nazis considered innately inferior and by granting them equal rights
as German citizens, Hitler argued that the republic and its predecessors had encouraged
intermarriage between “Aryan” Germans and inferior foreigners. This racial intermixing,
in turn, produced offspring whose undesirable racial traits contaminated the purity of the
“Aryan” bloodline and who were unlikely, because of their race, to be loyal to Germany.
To make matters worse, the republic had also permitted the unlimited reproduction of
people whom Hitler considered biologically flawed, degenerate, or a negative influence on
the health of the race as a whole. This reckless lack of respect for the law of nature, Hitler
argued, posed a dire threat to the purity of the “Aryan” German race and, consequently,
to its very existence. “By mating again and again with other races,” Hitler wrote in Mein
Kampf, “we may raise these races from their previous cultural level to a higher stage, but
we will descend forever from our own high level.”
Hitler and the Nazi party outlined in clear and unequivocal terms their racial enemies.
Those races included Roma (Gypsies), Slavs, African Germans, and especially Jews. Like-
wise, people with physical and mental disabilities, viewed as “hereditarily unfit” Germans,
were deemed a biological threat to the health of the nation. As the Nazis framed it, the
particular threat each so-called enemy posed to the collective whole was slightly different,
but the essence was the same. Building on age-old prejudice and suspicion, Nazi rhetoric
made a case for the segregation and exclusion of those whom they considered a danger
to their racial purity.
In Hitler’s mind, no group was more dangerous and more threatening than the Jews.
Because he defined them as a race, he argued that they were instinctively driven to increase
their numbers and dominate others. At the same time, he insisted that their methods of
expansion were fundamentally suspect. Because Hitler tied racial continuation to territo-
rial acquisition, he believed the Jews, who had no land of their own, should not exist at
all. In fact, he theorized that when the Romans expelled the Jewish people from Israel
more than 2,000 years ago and scattered them across the empire in what has come to be
called the Diaspora, the Jews should have begun a long decline, ending ultimately in
extinction. So why did they continue to exist and even thrive? Hitler concluded that they
must have adapted to their landless environment and cultivated traits—such as cunning,

14 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

deviousness, and deceitfulness—that would ensure their survival. In so doing, their very
existence in his view ran counter to nature and defied the intended course of human history.
Specifically, Hitler believed that the Jews escaped extinction by migrating and attaching
themselves to existing states or communities, always pushing their own interests and
exploiting the native people whose territory they entered. According to Hitler, the Jewish
nature was the opposite of the “Aryan” Germans’ nature. Whereas the Nazis prized racial
hierarchies and purity of bloodlines, the Jews, in his view, sought race-mixing, assimila-
tion, and equality; whereas the Germans valued national strength and loyalty, the Jews
weakened states by cultivating international businesses and financial institutions that
fostered interdependence among nations. Hitler presented Jews as parasites, who used
devious means, such as financial profiteering, media control, and race-mixing, to weaken
the “host” nation, dull its race-consciousness, and reduce its capacity to defend itself. He
voiced his view in a speech in Nuremberg in January 1923: “The internal expurgation of
the Jewish spirit is not possible in any Platonic way, for the Jewish spirit is the product of
the Jewish person. Unless we expel the Jewish people soon, they will have Judaized our
people within a very short time.”
Hitler believed that the Soviet Union was the first country in which the Jews had tri-
umphed and that the Jews were using the Communist state to enslave the Slavic population.
Like other Nazi leaders and right-wing nationalist politicians, he imagined that Jews were
creating conditions necessary for a Soviet revolutionary takeover in Germany: massive
unemployment, hunger, and homelessness. In his view, then, rather than a legitimate
political and economic structure, communism was a tool devised by Jews to disguise their
dominance and control of the Slav and so-called Asiatic peoples of eastern Europe and
Eurasia. In the fact that two of every three European Jews lived in eastern Europe, Hitler
found further corroboration for his view that the region had been infiltrated and taken
over by the Jewish people.
Anti-Jewish paranoia was not original to Hitler or the Nazis. A fabricated publication
called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—first published in Russia in 1905—pur-
ported to document the secret plans of Jewish leaders who were conspiring to take over
the world by, among other methods, controlling the international economy and the media.
That work, conclusively dismissed as “clumsy plagiarism” by the London Times in 1921,
nevertheless continued to circulate throughout Europe and the United States, thus pro-
viding support for worldwide antisemitic political movements. For Hitler, this distorted
image of Jews as aggressors, quietly plotting to destabilize the state and secretly mani­
pulating the forces that guide the government, justified and allowed preemptive action
against them. As he expressed it in Mein Kampf, the threat was dire: “If, with the help of

nazi ideology | 15
the Marxist creed, the Jew conquers the nations of the world, his crown will become the
funeral wreath of humanity, and once again, this planet, empty of mankind, will move
through the ether as it did thousands of years ago.”

Cover of a German antisemitic children’s book (left), Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), first
published in Germany in 1935. This printing appeared in 1938. Even elementary schools became
forums of political indoctrination and racial hatred. Nazi propaganda taught Germans to think
in racist terms. germany, 1938. ushmm collection

This view of Jews as Communists who had used their cunning to take over vast areas of
eastern Europe fit neatly within Hitler’s theories of territorial acquisition and population
expansion. He contended that Germany was facing a dangerously low birth rate, largely
because the lack of living space physically restricted the nation’s growth. He and many
other Germans blamed those problems on the Versailles Treaty, which forced Germany to
give up thousands of square miles of valuable land to its neighbors, above all to Poland in
the east and to France in the west. The result, as the Nazis saw it, was that Germany was
losing the competition for land and population to the inferior Slavs, who occupied huge
parts of the continent to the east.
To survive, Hitler argued, Germany must go to war, break the encirclement of the
country by its enemies, reconquer the territory lost after World War I, and create a vast
empire in the east. Despite the costs of war, the increased living space would provide Ger-
many with the lands needed to expand its population and with the resources necessary to
elevate it to world-power status. In the threatening and urgent language so characteristic
of Nazism, Hitler warned that the opportunity was almost lost. If “Aryan” Germans did

nazi ideology | 17
not act decisively, they would come under the control of the Communist Jews and, in turn,
be swept away by the masses of barbaric, uncivilized Slavs to the east.
For Hitler, German conquest would also destroy—once and for all time—the enemy of
all peoples: the Jews. Hitler preached a simple tautology: on the one hand, the destruction
of the Jews would weaken the Soviet state and facilitate the conquest of new living space
for Germany; on the other hand, the realization of Germany’s natural claim to territory in
the east would deal a decisive defeat to international Jewry. In the context of this ideological
war against the Soviet Union, the Nazis planned and implemented the Holocaust.
Hitler’s theories led to the persecution of so-called inferior races inside Germany and,
following the onset of war, the subjugation of various groups throughout the new German
empire. The successful realization of his ideas, however, depended on the complete coo­p­
e­ra­tion and unity of the National Community, which was to be made up of race-conscious
“Aryan” Germans who accepted, obeyed, and conformed with Nazi ideology and social
norms. Hitler and the Nazis demanded the public’s unconditional obedience, tolerating
no criticism or dissent. Indeed, they saw it as their duty to conduct a perpetual “self-purge”
of society, rooting out those who failed to support their views and help realize their vision.
For this reason, those who rejected Nazi ideology, even if they were considered racially pure
“Aryan” Germans, found themselves in grave danger.

A German Jewish schoolboy (right) wears the compulsory yellow Star of David. berlin, germany,
1942. ushmm, courtesy of yad vashem photo archives

For Adolf Hitler and those who adopted his theories and embraced his views, a race-
conscious government naturally needed to tend to its survival imperatives: to identify

18 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 German conquest, for Hitler,

would also destroy those he perceived

to be the enemy of all peoples: the Jews.

and segregate races, to subdue so-called inferior peoples and promote the reproduction
of superior ones, and to go to war to seize territory from neighboring nations. Moral and
legal considerations were irrelevant, Hitler cautioned, for the iron law of nature dictated
that the strong take from the weak. By virtue of their racial superiority, Germans had the
right—indeed the duty—to suppress and eliminate the racial threats in their midst and
to seize territory from the Slavs and to repopulate it with “Aryan” Germans. By doing so,
Hitler insisted, they were following their own natural instincts and serving the progress
of humanity. In the end, Hitler’s program of war and genocide stemmed from what he
saw as a hard equation of survival: “Aryan” Germans would have to expand and dominate,
a process requiring the elimination of all racial threats—especially the Jews—or else they
would face extinction themselves.

20 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

enemies of the regime:
Political Opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Homosexuals
 dolf hitler, the onetime struggling leader of the radical fringe nazi
movement, was appointed Reich Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von
Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. The decision came as a surprise to the nation,
especially because the president was under no obligation to put Hitler in power.
The Nazis—although Germany’s largest political party in the national elections
of 1932—did not command a majority in parliament (called the Reichstag) and, therefore,
did not have the votes to form a government on their own. Furthermore, President von
Hindenburg disliked Hitler personally and had in the past resisted naming him chan-
cellor for fear that the move would result in a one-party dictatorship. At the same time,
Hindenburg was exhausted by Germany’s seemingly endless and unresolved political,
economic, and constitutional crises.
Advancing in age, Hindenburg was ready to become an elder statesman, freed from
the daily responsibility of governing the country. His advisers, who were close to the Ger-
man Nationalist People’s Party, told him that by appointing Hitler chancellor he would
create a Nazi–Nationalist coalition, which would effectively end Hitler’s career as a radical
outsider and vocal critic of the Weimar government, stabilizing it in the process. Hinden-
burg was further reassured that conservative and nationalist elements in the Reichstag
would use their political savvy to keep the Nazi party in check. Despite deep misgivings,
the president took the fateful step, persuaded that Hitler could be controlled.
Hindenburg’s advisers could not have been more wrong. Hitler and the Nazis had
no intention of being managed by the president or anyone else. Indeed, with his role
as chancellor secured, Hitler saw his way clear to take the troubled nation in hand.
Recalling a key element of his campaign platform, he triumphantly declared the estab-
lishment of the National Community (Volksgemeinschaft), which the Nazis envisioned as
a unified race of “Aryan” Germans under their leadership. Hitler then moved carefully—
operating both inside and outside the legal framework of the constitution—to organize
the police power necessary to enforce his long-term policies of racial purification and
European conquest.
As a first step, the Nazis set out to crush political opposition inside Germany. In
1933, the priority enemies were the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, politi-
cians, and trade union leaders. The Nazis began by identifying individual political
opponents; branding them enemies of the German nation and dangerous obstacles
to its recovery; and systematically attacking, persecuting, and suppressing them in the
name of national peace.
In addition to political opponents, the Nazis identified and targeted spiritual resisters
(Jehovah’s Witnesses) and so-called social deviants (especially homosexuals). Nazi theory

| 23
held that those people, insofar as they were “Aryan” Germans, were worthwhile mem-
bers of the social order who had lost their sense of their intrinsic racial value and, in
consequence, had drifted away from the National Community. German society would
welcome them back, provided they embraced Nazi ideology and accepted the roles and
responsibilities that came with their racial status. Although in practice the Nazis moved
harshly and often with lethal outcome against activist leaders and others who resisted
their authority, they expected, in accordance with their racist view, that the rank and
file—perhaps after time in a concentration camp—would see the light and fall in with
the collective. Those who persistently refused to be reformed were to be further terro­
rized and punished as a warning to other recalcitrant offenders, and, if necessary, to be
removed from society.

Communists being held at gunpoint (right) by a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA) after a mass
arrest of political opponents of the Nazi regime. berlin, germany, march 6, 1933. with permission
of the bundesarchiv

political opponents
Hitler inaugurated his regime with a wave of public violence against political opponents.
The brutality was carried out by members of the Nazi paramilitary formations, namely
the SA (Sturmabteilung) also known as storm troopers, and the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite
guard of the Nazi party. On February 22, 1933, Hitler’s second in command, Hermann
Göring, inducted members of the SA and the SS into the police as auxiliaries, giving them

24 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 As a first step, the Nazis set out to crush

political opposition inside Germany.

license to arbitrarily beat or kill people whom they deemed to be opponents. In response
to expected protests over the Nazi takeover, Göring ordered the police to shoot to kill
all Communist demonstrators. In individual spontaneous acts of violence or in locally
organized waves of persecution, Nazi party faithful assaulted those whom they perceived
to be enemies of the regime. Street battles, such as “Bloody Sunday” in February 1933, left
one Communist dead and hundreds wounded. A few months later, during a violent spree
that came to be called the “Week of Blood,” Nazi thugs killed dozens of political opponents
in Berlin alone.
On the night of February 27–28, 1933, 24-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, an unem-
ployed bricklayer and recent arrival in Germany from Holland, set fire to the Reichstag,
the German parliament building, in protest against Nazi persecution of the Communists.
Although he acted on his own, van der Lubbe had been a member of the Communist
youth movement. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Nazi party district leader (Gauleiter) of
Berlin, seized the opportunity to portray the incident as being a signal for an armed Com-
munist uprising against the state. That very night, German police arrested and detained
4,000 Communists and Social Democrats.
The following day, under the pretext of national security, Hitler—counting on the
support of his Nationalist coalition partners—persuaded President von Hindenburg
to issue a decree that suspended German constitutional provisions guaranteeing basic
individual rights, including freedom of speech, assembly, and the press. The new law also
permitted dramatically increased state and police intervention into private life, allowing
officials to censor mail, listen in on phone conversations, and search private homes with-
out either a warrant or the need to show reasonable cause. Most important, under the
state of emergency established by the decree, the Nazi regime could arrest and detain
people without cause and without limits on the length of incarceration. Within a few
months, the German police had arrested and incarcerated more than 20,000 people
in Prussia alone.
The decree provided a legal basis to intimidate, persecute, and pass discriminatory
legislation against political opponents (especially those in the Communist and the Social
Democratic Parties), and it offered a pretext for targeting politically active Jews. With
all of the Communist representatives under arrest and after intense intimidation and
bullying by the Nazis, the remaining parties represented in the Reichstag passed the
Enabling Act in late March 1933. That measure gave the Nazi government the autho­
rity to pass laws and issue decrees without parliamentary consent. By divesting itself of
legislative authority, the Reichstag effectively legalized a dictatorship and became a
rubber stamp for the Nazi regime. By mid-July, a scant four and a half months later, the

26 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Nazis were the only political party left in Germany. The others either had been outlawed
by the government or had dissolved themselves under pressure. The government also
abolished all trade unions, long the traditional supporters of leftist parties, thus forcing
workers, employees, and employers instead to join the German Labor Front under Nazi
leader Robert Ley.
In the months after the Nazis seized power, officials of the Secret State Police (Gestapo),
often accompanied by members of the SA and SS, went from door to door looking for
political opponents. They arrested and in some cases killed Socialists, Communists, trade
union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi party. Within six months,
nearly all openly organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy in
Germany was dead.
Leaders and members of the German Communist and the Social Democratic Parties and
the left-wing trade unions were among the first to organize active underground resistance.
Although those two parties had been rivals during the elections of the Weimar Republic,
many of their members cooperated closely after the Nazis seized power. They were joined
by individuals who had not been politically active before 1933 but who held socialist con-
victions or simply shared a desire to resist the Nazis.
Even though most of the German Communist Party leaders fled abroad or were im-
prisoned in 1933, remaining members met secretly and distributed illegal newspapers
and leaflets produced on secret presses in Germany or smuggled in from neighbor-
ing countries. By 1935, the Gestapo had infiltrated most of the larger political opposi-
tion groups; mass arrests and trials as well as killings followed. By 1936, the regime had
crushed virtually all organized left-wing opposition, including both large-scale operations
and smaller resistance cells. Still, some Communist and Socialist activists continued their
efforts, sabotaging the Nazis where they could and spreading their own ideals at great
risk. In the end, however, they were no match for the overwhelming power of the Nazis:
they never generated widespread support from the German population, nor did they seri-
ously threaten the stability of the regime.
As part of its campaign to eliminate all potential political opponents, the Nazi
regime also targeted Freemasons, made up of a variety of fraternal organizations with a
long history as secret societies cultivating international connections. Using the tools of
the masonry trade (the square and the compasses) to symbolize their moral and ethical
ideals, many Masonic organizations had traditionally valued equality and freedom. To the
Nazis, Freemasons warranted suspicion both because of their international connections
(which the Nazis linked to a Jewish conspiracy) and because of their emotional ties to
the French and American revolutionary movements (which also lauded both equality

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 27

before the law and respect for personal freedom). Not all Masonic lodges in Germany
opposed Nazi rule, however; some sought—and failed—to survive by being accommodating
to the regime.
In 1935, the practice of Freemasonry was abolished, and individual Freemasons were
dismissed from the civil service. Then, in April 1938, Hitler gave them partial amnesty,
and in September, low-ranking Freemasons were readmitted to the civil service. Neverthe-
less, the Nazis continued to harass Freemasons who participated in meetings and went
to lodges. Most notably, during “The Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), the attack
on Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses on November 9–10, 1938, SA men were
encouraged to paint anti-Masonic slogans on damaged shops and synagogues. Some
Freemasons perceived by the Gestapo to be engaging in subversive political activity were
imprisoned in concentration camps. With only 70,000 Freemasons in Germany in 1933,
they were a small minority and did not pose any real threat to the government. Still, the
Nazis insisted on targeting any group—no matter how small, neutral, or benign—that
espoused views contrary to those of the regime.

In the name of Germany’s Communist party, I call on all class comrades, even if you have not yet
joined us. If you hate fascism and love freedom, join us in the common fight. If we, the workers and
working class youth, whose hands create all value, stand together, shoulder to shoulder, if we fight
together, we are unbeatable. If we fight together, we will sweep up with us in the united front against
fascism millions of poor farmers in the countryside, and millions of employees, civil servants, and
members of the middle classes from the cities!
Ernst Thälmann in Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung on February 27, 1933

On March 3, 1933, just five days after publishing those lines, Ernst Thälmann (right) was arrested
in Berlin. As the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 and a one-time candidate for
the German presidency, Thälmann was targeted as part of the anti-Communist crackdown that
followed the Reichstag fire. He spent most of the following 11 years held in isolation in prisons
and concentration camps. On Hitler’s orders, the SS transferred him to Buchenwald concentration
camp, where he was murdered in August 1944. germany, 1932–33. with permission of the sued-
deutscher verlag bilderdienst

28 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 ... Nazis insisted on targeting any group—

no matter how small, neutral, or benign­—

that espoused views contrary to those of the regime.

 The German authorities began establishing concentration camps soon after Hitler’s
appointment as chancellor in January 1933. Housed in hundreds of empty warehouses,
factories, and other makeshifts sites, the facilities were portrayed as temporary detention
centers for the reeducation of political opponents. The reality, however, belied such
euphemistic language. Individuals were imprisoned without trial or legal recourse and
held for indefinite lengths of time under conditions of exceptional cruelty. Even so,
the first camps should not be confused with either the wartime concentration camps
and forced labor camps, which were created to exploit the labor of their inmates, or
the killing centers, which were established to mechanize mass murder. Among the
original concentration camps were Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near
Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. By the end of
July 1933, almost 27,000 people—virtually all of them political prisoners—were detained
throughout Germany.
By the close of 1934, the German authorities disbanded most of those makeshift
faci­lities. In their place, the SS established a centrally organized concentration camp
system. The first of the SS-run camps was established on March 20, 1933, in an aban-
doned World War I munitions factory outside Dachau, which is located near Munich
in southeastern Germany. Dachau served as the model for what was to become a vast
SS-run organization that eventually included both labor camps and the killing center at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. By 1939, the system consisted of six large concentration camps:
Dachau (1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen
(1938), and Ravensbrück (1939). The latter was to house women prisoners.
Nazi persecution of political opponents exacted a terrible price in human suffering.
Between 1933 and 1939, the criminal courts, run by the Ministry of Justice, sentenced
tens of thousands of Germans for so-called political crimes. Gestapo officials often seized
people upon their release from prison after serving their sentences and incarcerated them
in concentration camps for indefinite periods as potential enemies of the state. In Nazi
Germany, once targeted by the authorities, a suspected political opponent would find no
protection from the judicial system. Guilt was determined by association and suspicion,
rather than by evidence and proof; likewise, once convicted, the fate of an outcast was
sealed without possibility of appeal.
After 1939, as the Nazis initiated new territorial conquests and had to manage larger
and more diverse groups of prisoners, they rapidly expanded the camp system both in the
number of inmates and in geographic locations. Concentration camps increasingly became
sites where the SS killed targeted groups of real or perceived enemies of Nazi Germany.
Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 non-Jewish inmates died in the concentration camp

30 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

system between 1933 and 1945. The majority of them were classified by the Gestapo as
political prisoners. Like other prisoners, they were deployed at forced labor in service of
state-owned, SS-owned, and private German industries. They died directly at the hands of
the SS authorities or indirectly of starvation, disease, mistreatment, or accident as a result
of the conditions under which they were forced to work.

jehovah’s witnesses
The Nazis targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany because they placed their loyalty to
God and to their faith above any allegiance to Hitler or the state. They saw themselves
as citizens of a spiritual realm, the Kingdom of Jehovah, and their faith forbade them to
swear allegiance to any worldly government. In the Nazis’ view, those beliefs constituted
an intolerable rejection of the National Community. Few in number, the Witnesses never
posed a real threat to the stability of the Nazi government. But their dedication only to God
and their refusal to abandon their beliefs made them dangerous in the eyes of a regime
that tolerated no rivals. For the sake of their faith, Jehovah’s Witnesses faced harassment,
imprisonment, and the threat of death in Nazi Germany.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses (before 1931 known primarily as the International Bible Stu-
dents) were first organized as a Bible study group in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1872 by
Charles Taze Russell. The group sent missionaries abroad to seek converts in the 1890s
and opened its first branch office in Germany in 1902. Their numbers grew rapidly;
by 1926, more than 22,000 Germans followed the movement, the largest association
of Witnesses outside the United States. By the early 1930s, as many as 35,000 Germans
(of a population of 67 million) were members or interested sympathizers of this
Christian denomination.
Despite their small numbers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were relatively visible in German
society. A number of their beliefs and activities—namely, door-to-door evangelizing and
distribution of religious tracts—made them stand out as nonconforming outsiders.
The mainstream German Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches identified the Wit-
nesses as heretics, and many people opposed the group’s efforts to win converts. Even
before Hitler’s rise to power, some German states and local authorities had periodically
sought to limit the group’s proselytizing by charging its members with illegal peddling
or disturbing the peace. Local German authorities had also, from time to time, banned
the denomination’s religious literature, which included the booklets The Watch Tower
and The Golden Age. In the early 1930s, even before assuming power in Germany, Nazi
party and SA fanatics, acting outside the law, disrupted Bible study meetings and beat up
individual Witnesses.

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 31

The last photo of the entire Kusserow family (left). Standing from left to right are Siegfried,

Karl-Heinz, Wolfgang, parents franz and Hilda, Annemarie, Waltraud, Wilhelm, and Hildegard.

Seated are Paul-Gerhard, Magdalena, Hans-Werner, and Elisabeth.

Franz and Hilda Kusserow were practicing Lutherans during the early years of their marriage,
but after World War I, they became Jehovah’s Witnesses and raised their 11 children in their
adopted faith. After 1931, the family moved to the small town of Bad Lippspringe in western
Germany, where their home became the headquarters of a new congregation.
The Kusserows endured close scrutiny by the German secret police who repeatedly searched
their home and confiscated their religious literature. Firm in their conviction that their highest
allegiance was to God, the family members did not bend under the pressure of harassment and
intimidation. They continued to carry out their missionary work, hosting secret Bible study meet-
ings in their home, circulating religious material, and offering refuge to fellow Witnesses.
In 1936, Hilda was arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. Not long after her return home,
Franz was detained. He would spend much of the next nine years in prisons and concentration
camps. In 1939, the German police took away the three youngest Kusserow children—on the
grounds that their moral welfare was being threatened by their family’s faith—and put them in
foster homes for so-called reeducation.
The eldest child, Wilhelm (named for German Emperor Wilhelm II) refused to join the
German army after the onset of World War II, adhering to the commandment against killing. For
this civil disobedience, he was tried and sentenced to death and was shot by a firing squad in
Münster prison on April 27, 1940. In July of the same year, his brother Karl-Heinz was arrested
by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen and then Dachau. Younger brother Wolfgang also
refused to be inducted into the German army. He was apprehended in December 1941 and spent
months in prison before being tried and convicted. On the night before his execution, he wrote
to his family, assuring them of his devotion to God. Wolfgang was beheaded by guillotine in
Brandenburg prison on March 28, 1942. He was 20 years old.
Hilda, Franz, and two of their daughters, Hildegard and Magdalena, were arrested in April
1941. After serving their respective prison terms, Hilda and Magdalena were each given the
opportunity to return home if they signed a statement repudiating their beliefs; they refused.
They eventually found each other and Hildegard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where
they all remained until April 1945. On a forced march from the camp, they were liberated by the
Soviets. The surviving family members were reunited after the war, but Karl-Heinz, who had
been imprisoned for five years, died in 1945 as a result of maltreatment during his incarceration.
bad lippspringe, germany, circa 1935. ushmm, courtesy of waltraud and annemarie kusserow

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 33

 From the outset of the Nazi regime, most Witnesses openly refused to conform. They
would not raise their arms in the “Heil, Hitler!” salute; they ignored Nazi organizations
such as the German Labor Front, which all German salaried workers had been compelled
to join after the dissolution of the labor unions; and they failed to vote in elections or
plebiscites sanctioning Hitler’s government. In April 1933, four months after Hitler became
chancellor, the Nazi government in Bavaria banned the regional Jehovah’s Witnesses
organizations. By that summer, most other German states had made it illegal for the
Jehovah’s Witnesses to practice their faith and to produce and distribute their literature.
Twice during 1933, police occupied the Witnesses’ offices and printing site in Magdeburg
and confiscated religious literature. Witnesses defied Nazi prohibitions by continuing to
meet and distribute their literature, often covertly. They made and shared copies of booklets
smuggled into Germany, mainly from Switzerland.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses came under Nazi scrutiny not only for rejecting the regime’s
authority but also for their alleged ties to the United States where the religion had been
founded. The Nazis took their suspicions even further, linking Jehovah’s Witnesses to
“international Jewry,” citing Witnesses’ refusal to remove references to the Hebrew Bible
from their publications. Although the Nazis had grievances with many of the smaller
Protestant denominations on similar issues, the Witnesses were the only group that refused
to swear loyalty to the state or to bear arms for its cause. Their very real resistance to the
government’s authority, compounded by their perceived connections to sworn enemies of
the German state, made them visible targets in Nazi Germany.
Initially, the group’s leaders sought to avoid a standoff with the government, sending
a letter in October 1934 that explained their core beliefs and reiterated their absolute
loyalty to God. They stated that Jehovah’s Witnesses “have no interest in political
affairs, but are wholly devoted to God’s Kingdom under Christ His King.” At the same
time, the leaders did not shy away from firmly rejecting Nazi authority, writing
the following:

There is a direct conflict between your law and God’s law, and, following the lead of the faithful
apostles, we ought to obey God rather than men, and this we will do (Acts 5:29). Therefore this
is to advise you that at any cost we will obey God’s commandments, will meet together for the
study of His Word, and will worship and serve Him as He has commanded. If your government
or officers do violence to us because we are obeying God, then our blood will be upon you and you
will answer to Almighty God.

34 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 German authorities responded with economic and political harassment. From that
date forward, Witnesses who continued to proselytize or who refused to participate in
Nazi organizations lost their jobs and their unemployment and social welfare benefits;
some were arrested.
The children of Jehovah’s Witnesses also suffered. In some cases, teachers publicly
humiliated them for refusing to give the “Heil, Hitler!” salute or to sing patriotic songs.
Classmates shunned or even assaulted them, and in other instances, principals expelled
them from schools. Witnesses’ families were at risk because the state was empowered
to judge whether parents were instilling the proper moral values in their children. The
German courts ruled that it was the “task of the parents to provide their children with
an upbringing that does not alienate them from German ways, raising their children in
German customs and beliefs that morally and intellectually reveal the spirit of National
socialism in the service of the people (Volk) and the National Community.” German judges
sometimes harshly applied a portion of the 1931 German Civil Code, which stated that child
endangerment could be proven if, under parental influence, a young person behaved (or
was likely to behave) in an immoral or dishonorable fashion.
Under the terms of the law, a teenager who refused to comply with Nazi norms of
education, such as enrollment in the Hitler Youth, could unwittingly trigger an investi-
gation of his or her parents. Social welfare bureaucrats could remove children from the
custody of their parents on the grounds that their moral well-being was being jeopar-
dized. In many cases, the authorities would put children in the homes of families whose
beliefs reflected Nazi values; in other instances, young people were delivered into juvenile
homes or correctional facilities despite having committed no crime. Parents who were
Jehovah’s Witnesses were forced either to inculcate in their children the beliefs that ran
counter to their religious teachings or to risk losing them to the Nazi state. For their
part, children found themselves facing a distinctly adult dilemma: what choice should
they make when caught between love for their families and fear of punishment by the
authorities? For many families, the price of remaining true to their beliefs and loyal to
each other was high. From 1935 to 1938, more than 860 children were taken from their
families on these grounds.
In April 1935, when the Nazi regime reintroduced military conscription, many Witnesses
refused to serve or to perform war-related work. Furthermore, they tried to persuade others
to ignore the summons. Although not pacifists, Jehovah’s Witnesses saw themselves as
soldiers in God’s army and, therefore, would not bear arms for any nation. They had
refused to fight in World War I, and they had been generally indifferent to the conse-
quences of the lost war for Germany. Indeed, public memory of their passivity contributed

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 35

to hostility against them in a country still wounded by defeat and determined to reclaim
its previous world stature. In response to Witnesses’ disregard for the draft, the Nazi state
dismissed all Jehovah’s Witnesses from civil service jobs and made arrests across Germany.
More than 200 men were tried by the Reich Military Court and executed for refusing
military service or for undermining the integrity of the armed forces.

Franz Wohlfahrt (left) was born into a Catholic family in 1920 in Köstenberg-Velden, Austria.
Disillusioned with Catholicism, his parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses during Franz’s child-
hood and raised their children in their new faith.

Like other Jehovah’s Witnesses, I refused to swear an oath to Hitler or to give the Hitler salute. Neigh-
bors reported me to the police, but my boss protected me from arrest by saying that my work was
needed. When the war began in September 1939, my father was arrested for opposing military service.
He was executed in December. Following my twentieth birthday, I refused to be inducted into the
German army. In front of hundreds of recruits and officers, I refused to salute the Nazi flag. I was
arrested on March 14, 1940, and imprisoned. Later that year, I was sent to a penal camp in Germany.
A new commander felt sorry for me; three times he saved me from execution between 1943 and
1945. He was impressed that I was willing to die rather than to break God’s command to love our
neighbor and not kill.

Franz remained in Camp Rollwald Rodgau 2 until March 24, 1945. He was liberated by U.S. forces
and returned to his home in Austria. no date or place given. ushmm, courtesy of franz and
maria wohlfahrt

From 1935 onward, Jehovah’s Witnesses faced renewed and intensified official dis-
crimination. On April 1, 1935, the German government issued a national law banning the
organization in Germany. In 1936, a special unit of the Gestapo began compiling a reg-
istry of all persons believed to be Jehovah’s Witnesses, and informants began infiltrating
Bible study meetings. In response to Nazi attacks against Witnesses, the International Society
publicly supported the efforts of its brethren. At an international convention held in Lucerne,
Switzerland, in September 1936, delegates from all over the world passed a resolution

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 37

condemning the Nazi regime. In that text and other literature brought into Germany, writ-
ers broadly indicted the Third Reich by denouncing its oppression of Jews, Communists,
and Social Democrats; criticizing its remilitarization of Germany and the nazification of
its schools and universities; and condemning its assault on organized religion.
By 1939, the Nazis had incarcerated an estimated 6,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses (including
those from incorporated Austrian and Czech lands). In the camps, where all prisoners
wore identifying badges of various shapes and colors, Witnesses were marked by purple
triangular patches. Even there, they continued to meet, pray, and seek converts. They
clandestinely held study groups, met for prayers, and gave lectures to other prisoners.
In Buchenwald, they set up an underground printing press and distributed religious tracts.
Witnesses regularly smuggled editions of their publication The Watchtower into the Neuen-
gamme concentration camp in northern Germany. SS guards shot at least one Jehovah’s
Witness after he was caught reading The Watchtower and refused to denounce his beliefs.
In keeping with their overall approach toward regime offenders who were perceived as
racially valuable, the Nazi authorities promised freedom from personal harm in exchange
for reconciliation with the National Community. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, this offer meant
renouncing their loyalty to God and swearing loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime. In
some cases, the Nazis used negative pressure by badgering or even torturing the victim; in
others, they offered incentives, promising release from prison or concentration camps for
those who signed a document rejecting their own teachings. The declaration read:

I have come to know that the International Bible Students Association is proclaiming erroneous
teachings and under the cloak of religion follows purposes hostile to the State. I have therefore left
the organization entirely and made myself absolutely free from the teachings of this sect.… I will
in the future esteem the laws of the State, especially in the event of war will I, with weapon in
hand, defend the fatherland, and join in every way the community of the people.

The vast majority of Jehovah’s Witnesses won the respect of their contemporaries for
refusing to repudiate their beliefs.
Conditions in Nazi camps were generally harsh for all inmates, but Witnesses were
uniquely sustained by the support they gave each other and by their belief that their strug-
gle was part of their work for God. They generally earned the high regard of their fellow
inmates by their dedication and by their efforts to alleviate the sufferings of those even
worse off. Individual Witnesses astounded their guards with their refusal to conform to

38 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

military-type routines like roll call or the preparation of bandages for soldiers at the front.
Instead, Jehovah’s Witnesses sang hymns, preached to the guards, and continued to meet
as best they could to sustain their emotional and spiritual strength.
Nazi persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses was not limited to Germany. Nazis targeted
Witnesses throughout Europe during the course of World War II, arresting them in Ger-
man-occupied Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland
(some of them refugees from Germany) and deporting them to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,
Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other concen-
tration camps. At least 1,900 and possibly as many as 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses are
known to have been killed during the Nazi period. Until the liberation of the camps, those
who survived continued their work among the survivors, winning converts.

homosexuals
The Nazis’ persecution of homosexual men was directly linked to their population policy
and the role that they believed “Aryan” German men were to fulfill in the destiny of the
Third Reich. Placing great importance on high birth rates that would expand the “Aryan”
German race, the Nazis viewed men who fathered children as acting in the best interest
of the National Community. Homosexual men, in contrast, were seen as degenerates whose
conduct was responsible for declining birth rates in Germany. In a speech in 1937, SS
leader Heinrich Himmler explicitly linked homosexuality to the fate of the nation,
saying, “A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.”
In general, the Nazis viewed homosexuality not as a biological trait but as a behavioral
choice that could be rejected or overcome. In most cases, they were prepared to accept men
suspected of homosexual activity into the National Community provided that they gave up
their so-called degeneracy and embraced their role as racially conscious “Aryan” Germans.
Legal sanctions against homosexuals were neither new nor unique to Nazi Germany.
Since the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, sexual relations between men
had been against the law. Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code declared “unnatural
indecency” between men to be punishable by imprisonment of up to two years. The law
did not define indecency or refer to sexual relationships between women. By the turn
of the twentieth century, however, the nature of homosexuality and its inclusion in the
criminal code had become a topic of medical, cultural, and political debate in Germany.
Paragraph 175, reformers argued, was an unwarranted intrusion of the state into private
relationships between consenting adults.
After Germany’s defeat in World War I and the establishment of the democratic Weimar
Republic, the social, cultural, and political climate of the country placed a greater emphasis

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 39

on individual rights and personal freedom. Berlin, the nation’s capital and largest city,
became a center of cultural and artistic experimentation. An increased openness toward
the subject of human sexuality served to make homosexuals more visible, at least in some
of the larger, more cosmopolitan urban areas. By the end of the 1920s, some 350,000
homosexual men and women lived in Berlin. Scores of same-sex “friendship leagues,”
clubs, cafés, and dance halls provided both support and community for homosexuals.
New constitutional protections such as free speech permitted an increase in advocacy for
homosexual rights and publications serving their community.

Karl Gorath (right) was born on December 12, 1912, in Bad Zwischenahn, Germany. His father
was a sailor, and his mother was a nurse in a local hospital. At the age of 20, Karl became a
deacon in his parish church.

I was 26 when my jealous lover denounced me and I was arrested at my house under Paragraph 175
of the criminal code, which defined homosexuality as an “unnatural” act. Though this law had been
on the books for years, the Nazis had broadened its scope and used it as grounds to make mass arrests
of homosexuals. I was imprisoned at Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg where the
“175ers” had to wear a pink triangle.

Having been trained as a nurse, he was sent from Neuengamme to work in a prisoner hospital at
Wittenburg. He refused to carry out an order to decrease the food rations of Polish prisoners of
war and, as a consequence, was deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. He was liberated
from Auschwitz in 1945. no date or place given. ushmm, courtesy of karl gorath

As a direct result of the broadening of traditional notions of acceptable sexuality and

the increasing liberalization of German society, a number of activists began to work for
legal reform. Liberal and left-wing human rights advocates campaigned to promote the
civil rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the
founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, for example, was a vocal critic of
Paragraph 175, arguing that homosexuality was neither an illness nor a crime but a natural
variation of human sexuality. Under his leadership, the institute became a symbol of the
campaign for homosexual rights and legal reform in that area.

40 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 In the years of the Weimar Republic, however, some viewed the increasing civil rights
for homosexuals not as progress but as evidence that German society was deserting its
traditional values. They feared a cresting wave of decadence and moral abandon and re-
sponded with growing disapproval and hostility. Conservative nationalists and radical
right-wing parties capitalized on this undercurrent by blaming the homosexual com-
munity for weakening established moral values and by presenting their integration into
society as proof of the decadence of the Weimar Republic. As one Nazi party deputy to
parliament argued in 1927, “These homosexuals should be prosecuted with all severity,
because such vices will lead to the downfall of the German nation.”

Identification pictures (mug shots) of a medical doctor (right) arrested as a homosexual under
Paragraph 175 and deported to Auschwitz. He arrived in the camp on October 10, 1941, and died
there on October 15, 1941. auschwitz, poland, october 10, 1941. with permission of the national
museum of auschwitz-birkenau

After the Nazis took power in January 1933, they instituted a broad attack on so-called
public indecency and moral degeneracy, capitalizing on long-standing disapproval of
same-sex relationships to secure acceptance for their measures. Although the persecu-
tion of homosexual men had always had its roots in population policy, the Nazis primarily
framed it for the public in eugenic terms, presenting homosexuality as a personal defect,
a social vice, and a carrier of decadence that posed a threat to the well-being of the nation.
They portrayed homosexuality as an infection that could become an epidemic, especially
within all-male societies like the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth, and the armed forces. The
Nazis also linked homosexuality to subversive political behavior. This public message was
illustrated in June 1934, when Hitler ordered the arrest and summary execution of known
homosexual SA commander Ernest Röhm, together with 80 other high-ranking SA officers,

42 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 The Nazis portrayed homosexuality

as an infection that could become an epidemic.

They also linked homosexuality

to subversive political behavior.

on the false accusation that they were part of a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the gov-
ernment. Although Röhm’s homosexuality, which Hitler had tolerated for more than a
decade, was not the reason for his murder, Himmler and others focused on Röhm’s sexual
preference as the basis for his actions, and they used the episode to justify further attacks
against homosexuals throughout Germany.
In contrast, Nazi leaders did not generally regard lesbians as a threat to their racial
policies. This attitude stemmed in part from the Nazi belief that women not only were
inferior to men but also were by nature dependent on them. According to this reasoning,
lesbians were not particularly threatening to the regime and thus did not merit significant
police attention. Furthermore, the Nazis considered that any woman, regardless of her
sexual preference, could fulfill her primary role of giving birth to as many German babies
as possible. Simply by becoming a mother, every woman could serve the Nazi state. Most
lesbians in Germany were, therefore, able to live relatively quiet lives and were generally
undisturbed by the police.
Some exceptions existed, however. Because the police in Nazi Germany regarded
lesbians as antisocial—that is, as individuals who failed to conform to the norms of the
state—lesbians could be arrested or sent to concentration camps. Once there, they were
assigned the black triangle reserved for asocial prisoners. Although few lesbians were
imprisoned as a result of their sexuality alone, the threat of persecution made living in
an open same-sex relationship dangerous. Many lesbians broke off contacts with their
circles of friends, and some moved to new cities where they would be unknown. Others
sought the protection of outward conformity, entering marriages of convenience with
male homosexual friends. Although many lesbians experienced hardships during the
Third Reich, those who remained discreet and inconspicuous or who otherwise appeared
to meet social expectations were generally left alone.
The Nazi crackdown on the male homosexual community began with the closing of
same-sex bars and clubs and other gathering places in early 1933. Authorities soon banned
their publications and closed down organizations that advocated acceptance of same-sex
relationships. On May 6, 1933, Nazi student groups and sympathizers occupied the offices
of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Much of the institute’s library and research
archives were destroyed in the public burning of books in Berlin four days later. The Nazis
denounced Magnus Hirschfeld, who was in Paris at the time and who was both homosexual
and a Jew, as “the Apostle of Indecency.”
Prior to 1934, criminal proceedings against homosexuals had required proof that a
narrowly defined sexual act had occurred. In February 1934, however, the police stepped
up the surveillance of men who might be expected to violate Paragraph 175. In October,

44 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

local law enforcement departments were ordered to submit to the Criminal Police (Krimi-
nalpolizei, or Kripo) lists of men suspected of homosexual activity.
In June 1935, the Ministry of Justice revised Paragraph 175 as part of a massive rewrit-
ing of the criminal code. New language added as Paragraph 175a specifically imposed up
to ten years of hard labor for “indecency” committed under coercion or with adolescents
under the age of 21 or both, and for male prostitution. Moreover, ministry officials and
court decisions expanded the category of “criminally indecent activities between men” to
include any act that could be construed as sexual. The courts later decided that a violation
of Paragraph 175 did not require a physical act; intent or thought alone sufficed for convic-
tion. The result was a radical increase in prosecutions as the law prohibited virtually all
interaction between men that was deemed sexual in nature.
Enforcement of Paragraph 175 fell to the Criminal Police. If a particular investigation
had political ramifications (such as the investigation of a homosexual-rights activist for a
left-wing party), the Gestapo might become involved. The police departments worked in
tandem, occasionally conducting massive sweeps that primarily trapped victims from the
working class. Less able to afford private apartments or homes, they found partners in
semi-public places that put them at greater risk of discovery.
More often, however, the work of tracking down suspected homosexuals and arresting
them depended on denunciations from ordinary citizens. Nazi propaganda that labeled
homosexuals as “antisocial parasites” and “enemies of the state” inflamed already existing
prejudices. Citizens turned in men, often on the flimsiest evidence, for as many reasons
as there were accusations. Acting on the basis of those informants, the Gestapo and Crim-
inal Police arbitrarily seized and questioned suspects, as well as possible corroborating
witnesses. Those denounced were often forced to give up names of friends and acquain-
tances, thereby becoming informants themselves.
On October 26, 1936, Himmler formed the Reich Central Office for Combating
Homosexuality and Abortion within the Security Police. The Nazis linked homosexu-
ality to abortion because they believed that both obstructed the population growth that
was so central to their ideology and goals. Indeed, for the Nazis, the termination of
a pregnancy that might yield an “Aryan” German child was a crime equal to the refusal
to father an “Aryan” German in the first place. After 1936, the Nazis instituted one nat-
ional police registry for all sexual matters that they believed prevented the expansion of
the “Aryan” race.
From early 1937 to mid-1939, the persecution of homosexual men in the court system
reached its peak. Imprisonment was the most common punishment, but the length and
type varied with the act involved and the individual’s prior history. For many, incarceration

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 45

meant hard labor, part of the Nazis’ so-called reeducation program. All were subjected to
brutal mistreatment at the hands of police, interrogators, and guards. As word spread of
the arrests and the brutal conditions in German prisons, an atmosphere of fear enveloped
the homosexual community.
Despite Nazi fears that homosexuality would spread through the all-male military, the
German code of military conduct did not bar homosexuals from the armed forces. With
the onset of World War II, homosexuals who had been persecuted and deprived of civil
rights, including some who had been convicted and imprisoned, were, nevertheless, ex-
pected to fight for their country. Homosexual conduct within the German armed forces
was still prosecuted under Paragraph 175, and some 7,000 soldiers were arrested and
found guilty under the law. Though sentenced to prison, those who were convicted could
petition to serve in a so-called punishment battalion. During the last years of the war,
German military commanders often deployed those “penal” units as cannon-fodder on
hopeless combat missions.

Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim (left) was born on April 27, 1906, in Lübeck, Germany. He was 11
when his father was killed in World War I. After his mother died, he and his sister, Ina, were raised
by two elderly aunts. After graduating from school, Friedrich-Paul trained to be a merchant.

In January 1937, the SS arrested 230 men in Lübeck under the Nazi-revised criminal code’s Paragraph
175, which outlawed homosexuality, and I was imprisoned for 10 months.… In 1938, I was rearrested,
humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released me, but only on the condition that I agree to be
castrated. Because of the nature of my operation, I was rejected as “physically unfit” when I came up
for military service in 1940. In 1943, I was arrested again, this time for being a monarchist, a supporter
of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Nazis imprisoned me as a political prisoner in an annex of the
Neuengamme concentration camp at Lübeck.

Friedrich-Paul survived his imprisonment and settled in Hamburg after the war. no date or place
given. ushmm, courtesy of friedrich-paul von groszheim

The Nazis used the war as a pretext to intensify discriminatory measures against homo-
sexual men. In July 1940, Himmler directed officers of the Criminal Police that “in [the]

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 47

future, after their release from prison, all homosexuals who have seduced more than one
partner are to be placed in preventive detention at a concentration camp.” This radical
step, intended to stop the homosexual “contagion,” meant that thousands of homosexual
men convicted under Paragraph 175 whose police histories recorded multiple partners
faced indefinite incarceration in the camps. Furthermore, in September 1942, the Nazi
Minister of Justice agreed to transfer “habitual criminals” from ministry-run prisons to
the SS-run concentration camps. Those prisoners included repeat offenders of Paragraph
175. By mutual agreement between the SS and the Ministry of Justice, the prisoners were
to be subject to a process explicitly called “extermination through work.”
During World War II, approximately 5,000–15,000 homosexuals were interned in
SS-run concentration camps; some were required to wear a pink triangle on their prison
uniforms. In addition to the extreme privations of camp existence, homosexuals in the
camps were targeted in specific ways. They were often assigned to the most dangerous
tasks, especially as laborers in quarries and brickyards. Attached to punishment battalions
and working long hours with few breaks and often on reduced rations, many such prisoners
lost their lives from exertion and from the brutality of the SS guards. Homosexual prisoners
were singled out and bore especially vicious physical abuse; at the same time, they were
socially shunned and sometimes abused by their fellow prisoners. They were generally
isolated, occupying nearly the lowest rung in the camp prisoner hierarchy.
At the behest of German authorities, particularly the SS, physicians and scientists
sought so-called medical solutions to homosexuality. Considerable disagreement existed
among the professional establishment about the causes and, therefore, a recommended
treatment for homosexual behavior. Some doctors considered it a genetic trait, seeking
its origins within an individual’s family lineage. Others believed it to be physical, but not
necessarily genetic, and looked at disorders of the central nervous system or hormone
levels as possible causes. And still others saw it as a mental defect brought on by a failure
of character or a negative environment. Regardless of the cause, the goal throughout all
the medical research into homosexuality was to find a way to “cure” it. When that failed,
outright suppression of homosexual behavior became the norm.
The avenues of so-called medical inquiry, along with the underlying beliefs that gave
rise to them, resulted in a chilling array of “treatments.” The courts were anything but
consistent: they convicted some individuals for acts deemed a result of uncontrollable
compulsion, thereby forcibly committing the homosexuals to hospitals. They found
others to be guilty as a result of diminished capacity or “weak-mindedness,” sending
those men to mental institutions and, in hundreds of cases, castrating them to suppress
their sex drive. Among the men committed to psychiatric clinics, some were murdered

48 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

as part of the T-4 program, which sought to rid Germany of people with physical and
mental disabilities.
Homosexual concentration camp prisoners were sometimes subjected to medical
experiments. For example, in late 1943, Heinrich Himmler authorized a Danish physician,
SS Major Dr. Carl Vaernet, to carry out such experiments on homosexual prisoners in
Buchenwald. Dr. Vaernet implanted hormone capsules in 12 male prisoners, of whom at
least 10 were homosexuals. Two men died from complications of the surgery; the fates of
the others are unknown.
Brutal treatment notwithstanding, the Nazi regime did not set out to kill all German
homosexuals. Rather, it aimed to pressure them into changing their behavior or, if that
failed, to isolate them from society and to control their supposed contagion of degeneracy.
In reality, however, the Nazi state simply terrorized German homosexuals into sexual and
social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more.
Using their extraordinary authority, German police arrested more than 100,000 men
on suspicion of homosexual behavior. Using broad interpretations of Paragraph 175, the
authorities convicted and sentenced to prison terms about 50,000 of those arrested. An
unknown number of homosexual men were forced into mental hospitals or castrated
rather than imprisoned. Fragmentary records indicate that at least 5,000 – 15,000 homo-
sexual men were sent to concentration camps, a great many of whom died from starvation,
disease, exhaustion, or beatings or were murdered outright.
The defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945 brought neither reparation nor tolerance
to homosexuals in Germany. The Allied Military Government of Germany, which was
established in 1945 by the victorious powers to replace the central German government,
repealed many decrees that had underpinned the racist and eugenic vision of the Nazis.
However, the occupation authorities did not regard Paragraph 175 as a Nazi law and so left
it in force after stripping it of the provisions added by the Nazis. The Allied occupation
forces required some homosexuals to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless
of time spent in concentration camps. The pre-1933 version of Paragraph 175 was incor-
porated into the legal structure of the Federal Republic of Germany (then West Germany)
and remained on the books until the decriminalization of homosexual relations between
consenting adult men in 1969. The German Democratic Republic (then East Germany)
reversed the law against sexual relations between men one year earlier, in 1968.
In the postwar era, German officials refused to recognize homosexuals as victims
of Nazi persecution. In June 1956, West Germany declared that an individual incarcerated in a
concentration camp for homosexual acts was not eligible to apply for compensation. Those
homosexuals who were killed during the Nazi regime received neither commemoration

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals | 49

nor public acknowledgment until 1985, when, in a speech marking the 40th anniversary
of the end of World War II in Europe, West German president Richard von Weizsäcker
explicitly mentioned the suffering and death of homosexuals under the Nazi regime. In
1994, four years after the reunification of Germany, Paragraph 175 was formally abolished
from the nation’s criminal code. In May 2002, the German parliament passed legislation
pardoning all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era.

50 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

territorial struggle in europe:
Polish and Soviet Civilians, and Soviet Prisoners of War
 hen hitler looked eastward from germany, he saw vast territory
and a wealth of resources vital to the survival of the “Aryan” German race.
That land was populated mainly by Slavs (defined as Poles, Russians, Belo-
russians, Ukrainians), so-called Asiatics (people of Turkic, Tartar, and other
Central Asian ethnic groups), and Jews—all of whom Hitler regarded as in-
nately inferior to Germans. In his mind, it was in keeping with the natural course of his-
tory for the biologically superior “Aryan” German race to seize that land and to exploit its
resources and manpower to build the German Empire.
Hitler viewed Slavs as a barbaric, uncivilized horde on the verge of winning the peren-
nial struggle for living space in Europe. He regarded the Soviet Union as a particular threat,
because he viewed it as a state run by Jews who planned to take over Europe by means of a
Communist revolution. For Hitler and those who shared his obsession with racial struggle,
Germany had no choice but to prepare for an aggressive war to seize the territory in the east.
From a strategic standpoint, it made sense to rebuild the nation’s strength, first taking
over areas that were heavily populated by so-called ethnic Germans, meaning people who
were culturally German but who lived outside the territorial boundaries of the Reich. Hitler
began with two areas bordering on France: first occupying the Saarland, in 1935, after an
election in accordance with the Versailles Treaty, and then occupying the Rhineland, in
1936, in violation of the treaty. Germany incorporated Austria in March 1938 and occupied
the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) in October of the same year.
Throughout the 1930s, the major European powers appeased Hitler, in large part because
they were not prepared for another world war. Publicly, they justified their actions by
arguing that Nazi demands—though increasingly threatening—were aimed at regaining
areas to which Germany had at least a demographic claim. The Munich Agreement of
September 29, 1938, by which Italy, France, and Britain awarded to Nazi Germany the
Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, was the epitome of this appeasement policy.
In March 1939, the Germans invaded and partitioned the rest of Czechoslovakia: they
established a protectorate over the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, set up Slovakia as
a dependent state, and permitted Hungary to annex territory in the south and east of the
country. Bohemia-Moravia had not been a historical part of Germany nor was it home
to large numbers of ethnic Germans. Because the invasion was a direct violation of the
Munich Agreement, Britain and France realized that Hitler’s plans were far more sinister
than they had at first appeared. Those countries resolved to go to war if Nazi Germany at-
tacked another eastern European nation. Correctly predicting the identity of Hitler’s next
target, the Western powers offered a territorial guarantee to Poland within weeks of the
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

| 53
 In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union stunned the world by signing a
nonaggression agreement (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) which, in a secret addendum,
called for the partition of Poland and the division of the Baltic region (including Estonia,
Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania) and the eastern Balkans (Romania and Bulgaria) into re-
spective spheres of influence. The agreement, surprising in view of Hitler’s loathing for
Soviet Russia, was a tactical maneuver that gave Germany the opportunity to attack and
occupy much of Poland without fearing a two-front war. Furthermore, the pact called for
the repatriation and settling of ethnic Germans in the new areas of the Reich, while at the
same time expelling Poles from those same territories. This strategy was part and parcel
of Nazi efforts to create German settlements throughout the occupied eastern territories.

the german invasion of poland

Assured of Soviet neutrality, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939,
catapulting Europe into war. Although Polish troops fought hard against vastly better
equipped German forces, the contest was not equal. After defending Warsaw fiercely and
running out of food, water, and space into which to retreat, the surviving Polish units
surrendered on September 27. Fighting ended in early October.
Germany directly annexed most of western Poland, where large numbers of ethnic
Germans lived. The Germans formed the central and southern regions of the dismembered
Polish state into a political entity called the General Government with Nazi party veteran
and administrator Hans Frank as the top civilian authority.
The Soviet Union annexed the eastern provinces of Poland and, in 1940, drawing on
further agreement with the Germans, incorporated all three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania) and the two eastern provinces of Romania: Bukovina and Bessarabia.

German forces hold Polish civilians (right) at gunpoint during the invasion of Poland, September 1939.
poland, september 1939. ushmm, courtesy of dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen widerstandes

54 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 For Hitler and those who shared

his obsession with racial struggle,

Germany had no choice

but to prepare for an aggressive war

to seize the territory in the east.

 This partition of Poland was a prelude to a massive reengineering of the population in
the areas that the Germans controlled. Like Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Protector-
ate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazis regarded most of western Poland as an extension
of Germany itself. Thus, their goal for this area was complete “Germanization,” thereby
assimilating the new provinces politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the
Reich. Above all, they envisioned a strictly German population. SS leader Heinrich Himler
described the aim explicitly in the foreword to the June/July 1942 issues of the magazine
Deutsche Arbeit, “It is not our task to Germanize in the old sense, that is, to teach the
people there the German language and German law, but to see to it that only people of
purely German, Germanic blood live in the East.”
In contrast, the Nazis conceived of the General Government as a giant reservation for
the Polish civilian population, who were to be suppressed, enslaved, and exploited for the
benefit of the Germans. Kraków became the capital city because the Germans planned to
turn Warsaw into a backwater town. In a top secret memorandum of May 1940 titled The
“ Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East,” Himmler outlined the sinister plans for this part
of Poland:

After a systematic implementation of these measures in the course of the next ten years, the
population of the General Government will inevitably consist of a remaining inferior popula-
tion, supplemented by those deported from the eastern provinces [the Polish territories annexed
to Germany] and from all parts of the German Reich, who have the same racial and human
characteristics.… This population will be at our disposal as leaderless laborers, and will furnish
Germany annually with migrant workers and labor for special tasks (roads, quarries, construc-
tion of buildings).

The Germans wasted no time implementing their plans. Beginning in October 1939,
SS and police units began to expel Poles and Jews from the German-occupied parts of
Poland to the General Government. By March 1941, German authorities had evicted
465,000 people (365,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews) without warning and had plundered
their property and belongings. Many elderly people and children died en route or in make-
shift transit camps. The SS and police had to halt the deportations in March 1941 because
the trains they were using were needed to transport soldiers and supplies to the front in
preparation for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and because Governor General
Frank refused to accept any more deportees.

56 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Meanwhile, as planned, the German authorities in collaboration with Soviet leaders
relocated ethnic Germans who had resided in the Baltic states, Bukovina, and Bessarabia
into the homes and farms of the ousted Poles and Jews. The aim, as always, was to allow
for the growth of the German population while simultaneously banishing, enslaving, or
eliminating altogether so-called racial enemies and inferiors.
In addition to shifting the population in ways that suited the ideological goals of the
Nazi regime, the leadership set out to dominate and exploit the Polish civilian population.
To eliminate any potential for organized resistance, the Germans targeted Poland’s middle
and upper classes for annihilation: the intelligentsia, educated professionals, entrepreneurs,
landowners, clergy, and activists in nationalist organizations. Behind the invading German
troops, the SS and police deployed special action units called Mobile Killing Squads (Ein-
satzgruppen), who arrested or killed outright civilians who resisted the Germans or who
were considered capable of doing so because of their position and social status.
When necessary, the SS could count on active support from units of the German army.
Tens of thousands of wealthy landowners, clergymen, and members of the intelligentsia—
government officials, teachers, doctors, dentists, officers, journalists, and others (both
Poles and Jews)—were either shot en masse or sent to prisons and concentration camps.
Army units and so-called self-defense forces composed of ethnic Germans also killed
thousands of civilians. In many instances, the Germans perpetrated those murders as
reprisal actions for the killing of individual Germans, for which entire communities were
held responsible.
During the summer of 1940, SS and police units initiated a new roundup aimed at
members of the Polish intelligentsia in the General Government. Within the framework
of the euphemistically named Extraordinary Pacification Operation, they shot several
thousand university professors, teachers, priests, and others. In Warsaw, the Germans
perpetrated those murders in the Pawiak prison, outside the city in the Kampinos Forest
near Palmiry, and in other locations.
The German conquerors targeted representatives of the Roman Catholic Church be-
cause it was a symbol of Polish nationalism (as a result of its association with the move-
ment to reestablish the Polish state during the nineteenth century). Between 1939 and
1945, the Germans killed an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy in the General
Government. In those areas of Poland annexed to Germany, the Germans systematically
closed houses of worship and deported, imprisoned, or killed hundreds of priests. They
also shut down seminaries and convents as they persecuted monks and nuns.
The Nazis also sought to destroy Polish culture in order to keep the masses unedu-
cated, ignorant, and, therefore, paralyzed. The Germans closed or destroyed universities,

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 57

schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories. They demolished hundreds of
monuments to Polish national heroes. German officials decreed that the education of
Polish children must end after a few years of elementary school. Himmler put the policy
succinctly in his May 1940 memorandum:

For the non-German population of the East, there cannot be schooling beyond the fourth grade
of elementary school. The sole goal of this basic schooling is: simple arithmetic to the number
500 at most; writing one’s name; and the doctrine that it is divine commandment to obey the
Germans.… I do not consider reading to be necessary.

Those policies dovetailed with the German occupiers’ view that the Poles were valuable
only as a reservoir of inexpensive manual labor. The Nazis exploited Poland’s peasants and
industrial workers as unskilled laborers, uprooting them from their homes and sending
them—almost always against their will—to farms, factories, and labor camps throughout
the Reich. There they worked for little or no wage, were subjected to humiliating measures
to maintain racial segregation, and were punished brutally for perceived violations of
labor discipline or fraternization with the “Aryan” German population.
In the General Government, in conjunction with an effort to “Germanize” Zamość
province in 1942–43, the SS and police rounded up 110,000 Poles from 300 villages in
this region. Families were torn apart when teens and adults were taken for forced labor and
when elderly, young, and disabled people were moved to other localities. Tens of thousands
of Poles were incarcerated in the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps. Over the
course of the war, the Germans deported more than a million and a half Poles, many of
whom were teenagers, to work as forced laborers in the Reich.
Although Germany also used forced laborers from western Europe, the authorities
imposed especially harsh discriminatory measures on Poles and, later, on civilians deported
from the occupied Soviet Union. Regulations required Poles to wear identifying purple Ps
sewn to their clothing and to observe a curfew; those laws forbade them the use of public
transportation. Although enforcement depended on the resolve of the individual employer,
Polish laborers as a rule were compelled to work longer hours for lower wages than west
Europeans, and in many cities they lived in segregated barracks behind barbed wire. Social
interaction with Germans outside work was strictly forbidden, and sexual relations with
them constituted a crime that was punishable by death. During the war, German authorities
executed hundreds of Polish men for actual and alleged sexual affairs with German women.

58 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Poles were prisoners in nearly every concentration camp throughout German-occupied
Poland and the Reich. Until 1942, Poles made up the overwhelming majority of prisoners
at Auschwitz concentration camp. Whereas German political prisoners were incarcerated
as punishment for nonconformity and could sometimes regain their freedom, Poles had
no such status or power with which to bargain. They were rounded up, summarily im-
prisoned, and put to work. Unlike policy toward other “racial” enemies, such as Jews and
Roma (Gypsies), the Nazis did not intend to systematically annihilate the entire Polish
population, though they did seek to eliminate the leadership classes. Rather, they planned
to use the Poles as a labor force and to allow the natural course of time and events—helped
along by meager food rations and abysmal living conditions—to result in their gradual but
inevitable demise as an independent people carrying a national culture. Malnutrition,
exhaustion, and mistreatment led to an extremely high rate of death by attrition, in turn
making more room for Germans to populate the region.
German authorities also executed thousands of Poles who had been “convicted” of minor
offenses or violations of labor discipline; in concentration camps and some medical insti-
tutes, those authorities subjected Poles to cruel and lethal medical experiments.
In addition to German suppression of potential resisters and exploitation of the rest of
the population, a cornerstone of German policy in the east was to seek and win new blood
for the “Aryan” race. Himmler described it as follows in a May 1940 top secret memo on
the treatment of racial aliens in the east:

Obviously in such a mixture of peoples, there will always be some racially good types. Therefore,
I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment,
if necessary by robbing, or stealing them. Either we win over any good blood that we can use for
ourselves and give it a place in our people, or … we destroy that blood.

According to Nazi thinking, adults could not be adopted into the race (even if they had
the requisite Nordic “Aryan” blood) because they had been hopelessly Slavicized by their
extended immersion in Polish culture and language. Their children, in contrast, were
young, impressionable, and easily molded: to the Nazis, those Polish children represented
the potential for new members of the “Master Race.”
In the service of this program, Himmler planned “an annual screening of all children,
ages 6 to 10, in the General Government to separate racially valuable and nonvaluable
juveniles.” The SS seized thousands of Polish children and considered them for possible

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 59

adoption by German parents. “If a child is recognized to be of our blood,” Himmler went
on, “the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to school in Germany and will
remain permanently in Germany.…” As promised, children who were deemed “valuable” by
the Nazis were promptly taken from their parents and homes, assigned German names,
forbidden to speak Polish, and sent away to be reeducated in SS or other Nazi institutions.
Some of them ultimately died of hunger or disease, and few of the children who survived
ever saw their parents again.

A group of Polish babies, (left) considered by the Nazis to be racially valuable because of their
“German Aryan” features. They were forcibly taken from their mothers to be adopted into ethnic
German families. poland, 1941–43. ushmm, courtesy of lydia chagoll

Many more children were taken from home but ultimately rejected as unsuitable for
Germanization after failing to measure up to the criteria established by SS “race experts.”
Those unfortunate castaways were not returned to their parents but were sent to children’s
homes or killed, some of them by phenol injection at Auschwitz. The Germans kidnapped
an estimated 50,000 children, the majority of whom were taken from orphanages and
foster homes in the annexed lands. They also abducted and Germanized infants born to
Polish women working at forced labor on farms and in factories in the Reich. In contrast,
if an examination of an expectant mother and the father of her unborn baby suggested
that a “nonvaluable” child would result from the union, the German authorities generally
forced the mother to undergo an abortion.
Within months of the Polish surrender in 1939, former soldiers and second-rank
nationalist leaders, many of whom were unknown to the Germans, formed an active
resistance movement whose ranks were swelled by the brutality of the occupation. Despite
German efforts to quell organized opposition, the Polish resistance was one of the largest
in occupied Europe: it was a virtual underground state apparatus, with more than 300
political and military groups working to subvert and sabotage the Germans. In the face of
military defeat, the Polish government refused to surrender, establishing a government-
in-exile in London in 1940.

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 61

 Inside Poland itself, resistance groups established courts for trying collaborators and
others, and they organized clandestine schools in response to the closing of educational
institutions. In addition, the universities of Warsaw, Kraków, and Lwów (present-day L’viv,
Ukraine) all operated underground. In December 1942, members of the Polish resistance
.
in Warsaw formed Zegota, an organization that provided refuge, money, forged papers,
.
and other means of support to Polish Jews. During the war, Zegota saved about 3,000
Jewish people, many of them children.

Julian Noga (right) in his camp uniform, with the identifying prisoner patch bearing a P for Pole
on the upper right of his jacket at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Julian was born to a Polish
Catholic family in Skrzynka, Poland, on July 31, 1921. During the German occupation, Julian hid a
rifle belonging to a Polish soldier but was betrayed and sent for forced labor as a farmhand for a
wealthy Austrian family. He fell in love with their second-youngest daughter, Frieda, but Reich law
strictly forbade romance between Germans and Poles. Julian persisted in seeing Frieda, despite
repeated warnings; in September 1941, the German police arrested him and deported him to
Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was deployed at forced labor in the stone quarry.

There [were] just so many, so many bad things happening in Flossenbürg. The life, daily life was ter-
rible. You get up 4:30 ... quick, quick, quick, quick, and go to the quarry, work twelve hours, six days a
week, twelve hours a day. Sunday ... Sunday before noon we do the chores, so-called, you know. Clean
out your lockers, clean out the barrack, clean up yourselves, and everything. Then we had inspection,
you know. If you had [a] button missing or something like that, you [were] punished for that.

Julian was liberated on April 23, 1945, while on a forced march from Flossenbürg. Frieda also
survived, having spent two years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. The two were reunited,
and they married in 1946 and emigrated to the United States. flossenbürg, germany; august
1942–april 1945. ushmm, courtesy of julian and frieda noga

The Polish military also continued to fight on after the country was occupied. Officers
of the regular Polish armed forces headed the underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa),
in which they trained recruits, stockpiled weapons, and engaged in partisan operations. In

62 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

addition, the smaller Polish Communist movement organized the People’s Army (Armia
Ludowa), which also conducted partisan strikes. After the massive expulsions from the
General Government in late 1942 and 1943, both Communist and non-Communist mem-
bers of Polish partisan units—whose ranks were filled with terrorized peasants—attacked
ethnic German settlers. The price was a heavy one, because the Germans carried out reprisals
in the form of mass killings of Polish civilians. Throughout the occupation, the Germans
applied a ruthless retaliation policy, destroying dozens of villages and killing men, women,
and children. In the cities, public hangings and shootings were an almost daily occurrence
as the Germans sought to deter Poles from engaging in further resistance.
As Soviet troops reached the east bank of the Vistula River opposite Warsaw on
August 1, 1944, the Home Army launched an uprising in the capital city. After 63 days of
bitter fighting (with little aid from the Soviet army), the leaders of the insurrection were
forced to surrender to the Germans. Although they treated the leaders of the uprising as
prisoners of war, the Germans killed or deported thousands of civilians. Acting on Hitler’s
orders, German forces reduced Warsaw to rubble.
Reliable statistics for the total number of Poles who died as a result of German poli-
cies do not exist; documentation on this subject is fragmentary. Most scholars estimate
that close to two million non-Jewish Polish civilians lost their lives as a direct result of
German occupation policies and military or antipartisan operations. Among them were
Poles who were murdered in executions or who died as a result of being incarcerated in
prisons, becoming part of forced labor, and being placed in concentration camps. Still oth-
ers lost their lives in military battles, including an estimated 50,000 civilians killed during
the German conquest of Poland in 1939; 225,000 civilians killed during the 1944 Home
Army uprising in Warsaw; and an undetermined number killed in 1944–45 during the
Soviet military campaign that drove the Germans out of Poland. It is important to men-
tion, too, that the figure of nearly two million civilians does not include Poles who were
victims of the 1939–41 Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and of deportations to Central
Asia and Siberia. Records on that subject are incomplete, and the Soviet control of Poland
for 50 years after the war has impeded independent scholarship in this area.

the german attack on the soviet union

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an attack on the Soviet Union
that violated the nonaggression pact the two countries had signed less than two years
before. Within weeks, German divisions swept through the eastern part of Poland and
conquered Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In September, the Germans laid siege to Len-
ingrad; by the end of October, they had captured Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Odesa (Odessa),

64 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

and Kharkov (present-day Kharkiv). After pacifying most of the Crimean peninsula, the
Germans had besieged Sevastopol. Millions of Soviet soldiers were encircled, cut off from
supplies and reinforcements, and forced to surrender.
For Nazi Germany, this attack was not an ordinary military operation; it was the next
step in the Nazi plan to destroy Soviet Russia (and the Jewish-Communist threat Nazis
believed it contained) and to colonize eastern Europe for the expansion of the “Aryan”
German race. It was the long-awaited final battle between German national socialism
and Soviet communism—the decisive racial war between the Nordic peoples, led by the
“Aryan” Germans, on the one hand, and the Slavs and Jews on the other hand. General
Erich Hoepner, the commander of the 4th Panzer Army, outlined clearly the fundamental
principles of the Nazi crusade in a memorandum dated May 1941. “The war against Russia
is the inevitable result of a struggle for existence that has been forced upon us,” he wrote.

It is the old fight of Germanic peoples against the Slavic peoples, the defense of European culture
against the Muscovite-Asiatic flood, and the defense against Jewish Bolshevism. This war must
have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia and must therefore be waged with unprecedented
harshness. In conception and execution, every battle must be guided by the iron will to completely
and mercilessly annihilate the enemy. In particular, the sponsors of the current Russian-Bolshevik
system are not to be spared.

The Nazis approached the Soviet civilian population in much the same way as they
had regarded the Poles nearly two years earlier. Their ideological position regarding both
groups was fundamentally the same: Slavs were seen as Untermenschen, which roughly
translates as “subhumans.” In keeping with the Nazis’ hierarchical view of racial groups,
they regarded the Slavs as nothing more than useless bodies occupying land and resources
that rightly belonged to the “Aryan” German race. As such, Soviet state and Communist
Party officials were to be killed to prevent resistance and to stop the spread of what the
Nazis considered to be “Jewish” Bolshevism.
Insofar as possible, the Germans would exploit the masses for labor; otherwise the
Germans would eliminate them to make room for German settlement or expel them farther
eastward, denying them essential food and shelter to survive the Russian winters. In
bringing those plans to partial fruition, the Germans killed or directly caused the death
of millions of Soviet civilians, deported millions more for forced labor in Germany, and
enslaved still more millions in the occupied Soviet Union.

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 65

 One of Germany’s major war aims in the Soviet Union was the ruthless plunder of
economic resources, especially agricultural produce. Hitler remembered the food shortages
in Germany at the end of World War I and the resulting riots in Berlin, and he blamed
them for the collapse of domestic morale. Along with other right-wing politicians, he saw
a direct link between those events and Germany’s eventual capitulation. In fighting his
war, Hitler was determined to maintain civilian confidence, averting any internal crises
that could lead to a repeat of those events in 1918. German planners were well aware that
the spoliation of Soviet resources would inevitably result in drastic food shortages for the
native population—in fact, they counted on it. In their determination to keep the German
population well fed at home, Nazi leaders calculated and accepted that—as a result of this
policy—as many as 30 million Soviet civilians would die of starvation.
As in Poland, the Germans crushed any show of opposition by the Soviets without
mercy. Hitler’s directive for the attack on the Soviet Union was specific on this point:
he called on his troops to react to any type of resistance by shooting. In retaliation for
partisan attacks, German forces burned whole villages and shot the rural populations of
entire districts. At the same time, German military authorities made it clear that crimes
committed by their soldiers were not to be punished if they were ideologically motivated.
This policy was an open invitation for soldiers to behave brutally toward civilians, and it
gave them not only the license but also the obligation to terrorize the population to secure
the occupation and to guarantee the long-term German future.
The deeply ideological nature of the Germans’ fight against the Soviet Union was reflected
in the “Commissar Order” issued by the German Armed Forces High Command on June 6,
1941. Political commissars were Soviet Communist Party officials who oversaw its military units
and reported directly to party leaders. Operating as they did outside the military hierarchy,
commissars acted as a conduit from the party to the ranks of ordinary soldiers, transmitting
political propaganda and preventing dissension. To the Germans, they represented the true
“pillars of opposition,” the link between the Bolshevik ideologies and the minions in the
military who the Nazis believed fought blindly on Bolshevism’s behalf. For that reason,
German soldiers were ordered to shoot any political commissars who were taken prisoner.
The Commissar Order read: “The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare
are the political commissars.… Therefore, when captured either in battle or offering re-
sistance, they are to be shot on principle.” During the initial attack on the Soviet Union
throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, the German armed forces generally com-
plied with this order. In May 1942, however, the Commissar Order was rescinded at the
urging of German field commanders, who came up against much stronger resistance
when the routine shooting of the commissars became known to Soviet soldiers.

66 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Just as the Nazis targeted political commissars as agents of the Soviet Communist
Party, they regarded Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) as an integral part of the so-called
Bolshevik menace. The Germans killed POWs in massive numbers, not as a result of
military operations but as a part of Nazi racial policy. Indeed, the German treatment of
Soviet POWs differed significantly from policy toward POWs from Britain and the United
States, countries the Nazis regarded as racial equals of the Germans. Of the 231,000 Brit-
ish and American prisoners held by the Germans during the war, about 8,300 died in
German custody. Even Polish POWs fared better; provided they were neither Jewish nor
leaders of nationalist organizations, they were generally released.
The treatment of Soviet POWs by the Germans violated every standard of warfare. The
Nazi regime claimed that it was under no obligation to provide for their humane care be-
cause the Soviet Union had neither ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of
War, nor specifically declared its commitment to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Rules
of War. Technically, both nations, therefore, were bound only by the general international
standard of waging war as it had developed in modern times. Yet even by that measure,
prisoners of war were guaranteed certain protections. With the Soviets, however, the Nazis
dropped those as well.
From the outset in August 1941, the Germans implemented a policy of mass starva-
tion, setting a ration of just 2,200 calories per day for captured Soviet soldiers deployed at
forced labor. This amount was not enough to sustain life for long, but the reality proved
even worse because prisoners typically received much less than the official ration. Many
prisoners received at most a ration of 700 calories a day. They were often provided as food,
for example, only special “Russian” bread made from sugar beet husks and straw flour.
Within a short period of time, the result of this “subsistence” ration, as the German army
termed it, was death by starvation. Numerous accounts from the late summer and fall of
1941 report that the desperate POWs, suffering from malnutrition and wild with hunger,
tried to ease their craving for food by eating grass and leaves.
The prisoners’ suffering from starvation was compounded by a lack of decent shelter
and clothing. In the makeshift camps established by the Germans, many prisoners had
to dig holes in the ground to improvise shelter from the elements. In October 1941 alone,
almost 5,000 Soviet soldiers died each day; by the end of the year, the prisoner population
was ravaged by epidemics of typhoid and dysentery. The onset of winter accelerated the
mass death because so many victims had little or no protection from the cold. POWs held
in camps in the General Government were left to linger for months in trenches, dugouts,
or sod houses; in occupied Belorussia (present-day Belarus), the Germans provided only
pavilions (structures with roofs but no walls) to house them. Throughout the unusually

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 67

cold winter of 1941–42, starvation and disease resulted in death of staggering proportions.
Between the summer of 1941 and February 1942, more than two million Soviet soldiers
died as victims of the Nazi racial policy.

A column of Soviet prisoners of war under German guard (left) marches to an internment camp.
kharkov, [ukraine] ussr, circa 1941. ushmm, courtesy of national archives and records administration

Many captured Soviet soldiers—especially the wounded—were scheduled to arrive at

transit camps and collection centers, but instead died on the way as a result of gross neglect
and inadequate provisions. Most of the prisoners caught in 1941 had to march west behind
the German lines across hundreds of miles; those who were too exhausted to continue
were shot where they collapsed. When the Armed Forces High Command permitted
POWs to be transported by train, it provided only open freight cars and allowed days to
go by without any distribution of rations. According to army reports, between 25 percent
and 70 percent of the prisoners on those transports died en route to POW camps in Ger-
many and the General Government.
The Germans not only allowed POWs to die as a result of deliberate neglect, but also shot
them outright in some cases, especially those who had been wounded, because their deaths
freed the German army of their care. At the urging of the German leadership, military per-
sonnel issued a directive on September 8, 1941, urging “energetic and ruthless action … to
wipe out any trace of resistance” from prisoners. Thus, they should shoot without warn-
ing any who attempted to escape. Moreover, a decree issued on September 8, 1941, stated
that the use of arms against Soviet POWs was, “as a rule, to be regarded as legal,” thereby
providing a clear invitation for German soldiers to kill Soviet POWs with impunity.
In cooperation with the SS-led Security Police and Security Service (SD), the German army
also engaged in more direct, systematic, and selective killing of groups of Soviet soldiers in
the pow camps. In mid-July 1941, just weeks after the German invasion, General Hermann
Reinecke, the officer in charge of prisoner-of-war affairs in the Armed Forces High Command,
ordered that all Soviet POWs be screened for “politically and racially intolerable elements.”

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war | 69

 After determining through interrogation those who were “important” state and Soviet
Communist Party members, intellectuals, devoted Communists, and Jews, the German
camp authorities transferred those prisoners to the custody of the Security Police and SD.
Once in the hands of the SS, such prisoners were shot. The SS did not carry out the killings
in the POW camps or the immediate vicinity, but rather in a secure area such as a concen-
tration camp. As many as 500,000 Soviet soldiers were shot by the Security Police and the
SD by 1942. Even after the direct killing operations ceased, Soviet POWs who had been
transferred to concentration camps continued to suffer under extreme and brutal oppres-
sion; the SS murdered more than 55,000 Soviet POWs in various concentration camps.

Emaciated and half-dressed outside in the winter of 1942, Soviet prisoners of war (right) stand
for a picture in the Mauthausen concentration camp. mauthausen, austria, january 1942. ushmm,
courtesy of dokumentationsarchiv des oesterreichischen widerstandes

In September 1941, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp,

conducted the first experiments of mass murder by gassing, using Zyklon B, or hydrogen
cyanide, in a gas chamber constructed in Auschwitz specifically for that purpose. Höss
used 600 Soviet POWs and 250 Polish civilians as victims. Beginning in the autumn of
1939, the Germans had been using carbon monoxide gas as a killing agent on people
whom they considered to be disabled and who were institutionalized in Germany and
Austria (see chapter 4). In those operations, the Germans found that they could kill large
numbers of people in an assembly-line fashion with minimal effort and personnel. Ulti-
mately, they would apply this technique to murder millions of European Jews.
The killing of Soviet POWs would likely have continued had the fortunes of war not
changed in the winter of 1941–42. Hitler and his military planners, victims of their own
ethnic and racial stereotypes, had expected a quick campaign against the Soviet Union.
They viewed Slavs as dull and incompetent and believed that the Soviet Union was in the

70 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

The treatment of Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis

violated every standard of warfare.

grip of Jews, whom they regarded as cowardly and perfidious. As a result, the Germans
severely miscalculated the strength and conviction of their military opponents and failed
to prepare for a protracted campaign, part of which would be fought during the brutal
Russian winter. The impressive initial successes of the German army only added to the
German’s sense of overconfidence. But as the invasion slowed and the army grew exhausted
from months of campaigning, the German forces found themselves overextended, because
they lacked winter clothing and equipment and had outrun their desperately needed supply
lines. The Soviets began to resist more bitterly than expected, and they proved to be far
better equipped than the Germans for the cold weather.
In December 1941, the Soviet Union launched a major counterattack, driving the Ger-
mans back from Moscow in chaos. Only after several weeks and tremendous losses in
soldiers and equipment were the Germans able to stabilize the front east of Smolensk.
Nevertheless, Hitler and the German leadership understood that the war would last much
longer than anticipated. The economic requirements of a longer war and the critical labor
shortage in the German economy created a desperate need for labor. In that context, the
Nazi leadership realized that using Soviet POWs as laborers for the war effort was more
practical than killing them. Beginning in 1942, therefore, Hitler authorized better treat-
ment and slightly increased rations for Soviet POWs so they would have the strength to
work. Although the enormous death rate among the Soviet POWs declined, it neverthe-
less remained higher than that among other groups of POWs. In 1943 and 1944, however,
the death rates soared again as a result of starvation and disease. In total over the course
of the war, the German army captured more than five and a half million Soviet POWs. Of
those, more than three million died or were killed in German custody.
After the war, the ordeal of Soviet POWs who survived German captivity did not end.
Soviet authorities, often without justification, tended to view returning POWs as collabo-
rators or even traitors, because they had “allowed” themselves to be captured. After their
repatriation, most POWs underwent a debriefing in which they had to justify the circum-
stances under which they had been caught. Some who had been liberated by British or
U.S. forces had to convince the Soviet authorities that they were not Western intelligence
agents. Others faced prolonged interrogation, arrest, and trial in Soviet courts. Thousands
were convicted of collaboration or treason and were either executed or sentenced to con-
finement in a forced labor camp. Most of those who were imprisoned remained so until
the death of Josef Stalin in 1953.

72 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

the quest for racial purity:
Germans with Mental and Physical Disabilities,
African Germans, and Roma
 rom the moment that hitler took power in germany, he began implementing
his vision for a new Germany—one that elevated “Aryan” Germans to the top of the
Nazis’ racial hierarchy and that ranked all other groups along a spectrum of relative
inferiority. Nazi leaders wasted no time conceiving and adopting measures that
would safeguard the “Aryan” German race, thereby ensuring that future genera-
tions would be—in their eyes—racially pure, genetically healthy, and socially productive
and loyal to the state. This goal meant, above all, stigmatizing, discriminating against,
and ultimately killing those whom the Nazis identified as being biologically and racially
flawed. In such a context, especially Jews (see chapter 5), but also Roma (Gypsies), people
with mental and physical disabilities, and African Germans, faced direct and immediate
danger at the hands of the Nazis.
In time, the Nazi decision to go to war would advance those long-term goals in pre-
viously unimaginable ways. Territorial acquisition went hand in hand with population
engineering as the Nazis sought to increase the number of “Aryan” Germans while simul-
taneously thinning the ranks of those they considered inferior by virtue of race or biology.
The state of national emergency created by the war would eventually provide the pretext
and cover for increasingly radical steps.
Nazi racial persecution was unique, for there was no escape—not even for those who
were German by birth—from the harsh verdict of inferiority. For those who were targeted,
national loyalty or communal solidarity were of no consequence: only “Aryans” who met
the racial and biological standards of the Nazis could claim membership in the National
Community (Volksgemeinschaft).

people with mental and physical disabilities

The assault on mentally and physically disabled people was a central component of the
Nazi quest to purify the “Aryan” race. As Hitler described it, Germany was facing “death
of the race” (Volkstod) caused by the unchecked increase in hereditary illnesses and dis-
abilities among the population. He presented the German people as a formerly healthy,
vital race that was gradually being weakened by the ill and infirm among the populace.
In the Nazi mindset, those elements within Germany’s racial makeup threatened the
nation’s health both physically by contaminating the gene pool and economically by add-
ing to the country’s financial burdens. Using the individual human body as a metaphor
for Germany, the Nazis argued that drastic measures were needed to restore the nation’s
racial purity, strengthen its health, and increase its productivity.
As in other arenas, the Nazis built upon strains of accepted scientific, medical, and
sociological thinking, as well as contemporary prejudice, fear, and beliefs, to carry their

| 75
ideology into practice. The persecution of people with disabilities had its roots in eugenics,
a sociobiological theory that gained currency in the United States and Europe in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eugenicists believed that the human race could
be improved by controlled breeding and, conversely, that it could be harmed if those who
were considered hereditarily impaired were permitted to reproduce. Some eugenicists
feared that the genetic contamination of the human race would prevent its advancement
in a host of areas, ultimately leading to the increasing degeneration of human civilization.
After World War I, such ideas had been reinforced by many social planners, health care
professionals, and public welfare administrators who believed that people with disabilities
placed an intolerable social and economic burden on a post–World War I society in crisis.
Just as the Nazis pressured the healthy to have many children (and terrorized homosexual
men in an effort to force them to father “Aryan” babies), they blamed people with disabili-
ties for contaminating the population by having too many offspring. This two-pronged
view of the racial crisis in Germany was clearly articulated in the commentary to the
first law, in 1933, which affected the mentally and physically ill: “Whereas the hereditarily
healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children,
countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are repro-
ducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community.”

In 1934, this 19-year-old shop clerk, (right) identified only as “Gerda D,” was diagnosed as schizophrenic
and sterilized at the Moabite Hospital. In 1939, she was repeatedly refused a marriage certificate
because of her sterilization. berlin, 1933–45. with permission of the vivantes netzwerk fuer gesundheit

With this justification in place and backed by scientists who legitimized their ideas,
the Nazis enacted on July 14, 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Off-
spring. The law categorically stated that people with certain congenital (present at birth)

76 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 ... Nazis pressured the healthy to have many children

... [and] blamed people with disabilities

for contaminating the population

by having too many offspring.

conditions were by definition “hereditarily diseased” and must be sterilized, although no
scientific data proved that all of those ailments were inherited or transmitted across genera-
tions. The list of conditions included mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression),
retardation (“congenital feeblemindedness”), severe physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness,
deafness, chronic alcoholism, and Huntington’s chorea (a fatal condition that causes loss
of brain function and bodily control).
The specific language of the law was unequivocal: “Anyone who is hereditarily diseased
can be made infertile through surgical interventions (sterilization) if, after scientific medi-
cal evaluations, it is to be expected that the offspring will suffer severe congenital bodily
or mental damage.” Thus, the Nazis removed from the hands of certain individuals the
most basic instinct and right of human beings—to decide whether and when to have
children—and placed it firmly within the scope of state authority.
Nazi Germany was not the first or only country to sterilize people while using alleged
hereditary traits as a justification. Between 1907 and 1930, as a result of laws passed in a
number of individual states in the United States, more than 15,000 people were sterilized
on eugenic grounds. In many cases, those operations were performed on prisoners or
clients residing in mental institutions, people who neither knew nor gave their consent.
Sterilization was also approved as an appropriate punishment in criminal cases after a
U.S. Supreme Court decision upheld the practice in 1927. Moreover, sterilization gained
support beyond eugenics circles as a means of reducing costs for institutional care and
welfare for the poor.
With the onset of the Depression in 1929, sterilization rates climbed in some U.S.
states. By 1939, more than 30,000 people had been sterilized in the United States, most
of them in public mental hospitals or homes for “feebleminded” persons where the insti-
tution’s superintendent supported the measure. Abroad, legislatures in Finland, Norway,
and Sweden passed new laws permitting sterilization during the interwar years. In Great
Britain, Catholic opposition blocked a proposed law.
In Germany, the massive scale of the Nazis’ sterilization program far surpassed that
of any other country, even as elsewhere the eugenics theories began to lose scientific sup-
port and as use of the practice peaked and began to decline. Beginning in January 1934,
after the Nazis cut off scientific and social debate on the topic, German doctors carried out
the compulsory sterilization of 300,000 to 400,000 people. In most cases, doctors gave
“feeblemindedness”—a condition that was vague enough to include a host of mental
illnesses and disabilities—as the justification for the procedure. That so many received
such a generalized, unscientific diagnosis reflects the underlying fear, ignorance, and
prejudice that drove this aspect of Nazi policy.

78 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Schizophrenia and epilepsy were also commonly cited as reasons for sterilization. In
1935, the Nazis amended the law to allow for abortions in cases where the mother or father
was determined to be the carrier of hereditary disease. Whereas Nazi authorities strictly
prohibited abortions for healthy “Aryan” German women, they permitted and often re-
quired pregnancy terminations for those whose medical history raised concerns that a
child would be born with a congenital illness or disability.
By the mid-1930s, Nazi policy grew to include within the concept of “feeblemindedness”
a wide variety of behaviors that were looked down on as social ills. No longer using even
the pretext of a physiological disorder, German doctors diagnosed a condition they called
“moral feeblemindedness” by examining the patient’s lifestyle. They assessed men and
women regarding their behavior in the workplace or in public spaces. Furthermore, they
judged women by their sexuality, and their real and perceived habits and practices regard-
ing housework and child-rearing. Those Germans who failed to conform to the Nazi ideal
of health and productivity—which reflected the social prejudices and mores of middle-class,
suburban, and small-town German society—risked being “treated” for this subjective condition.
Sixty percent of those sterilized for “moral feeblemindedness” were women.
Many of the people targeted by the 1933 law and its amendments were patients
in mental hospitals and other institutions, either public or church run if they were
poor, or private clinics if they were affluent. Still others lived at home, and their family
doctors, social workers, and schoolteachers or directors identified them. Most were “Aryan”
Germans. Doctors sterilized men by vasectomy and women through tubal ligation.
In a small number of cases, physicians used X rays or radium to render their patients
infertile. Of the several thousand people who died as a consequence of sterilization,
women were disproportionately high among the victims because of the risks of tubal
ligation surgery.
The law permitted forced sterilization under certain specific conditions, but its imple-
mentation was often arbitrary. German authorities established more than 200 so-called
hereditary health courts—each with two physicians and one district judge—across Germany
and later in territories annexed directly to the country. As in other areas of the German
judiciary under Nazi rule, the courts provided only a pretext of due process; in fact, they
tended to render routine judgments, usually without examining the patient. Most of the
medical and legal community was implicated in those acts: nearly all well-known geneti-
cists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists remaining in Germany sat on such courts at one
time or another. In addition, ordinary physicians and family doctors became involved
because they were required to register every known case of hereditary disease. Although
courts of appeal existed, they seldom reversed decisions: occasionally, appeals courts

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 79
granted exemptions to people who were deemed mentally ill but who made their livings
in the creative arts and other intellectual pursuits.
The sterilization law was followed by the Marriage Law of 1935, which required that
applicants for a marriage license provide ancestry and medical documentation to ensure
that neither of the partners had a congenital disease or disability and that no disabled
offspring would result from the union. Only those who could secure a “marriage fitness
certificate” were permitted to wed. The sterilization and marriage laws worked in tandem
to restrict the rights of people with mental and physical disabilities. For example, in 1934,
a 19-year-old shop clerk, identified only as “Gerda D,” was diagnosed as schizophrenic
and sterilized at the Moabite Hospital in Berlin. Five years later, in 1939, German health
authorities repeatedly refused to grant her a marriage certificate because her sterilization
offered supposed proof that she had a hereditary disease.
Sterilization was not widely opposed in Germany, and only the Roman Catholic
Church consistently criticized it. Most German Protestant churches, in contrast, accepted
and often cooperated with the policy, allowing the nurses, doctors, and caregivers in their
facilities to notify authorities of cases to which the law might apply. In particular, some
Lutheran leaders greeted the sterilization law with enthusiasm, seeing in it the hope for
improving the morals and ethical standards of future generations.
Not much time passed before Nazi efforts to prevent future hereditary disease escalated
to attempts to eliminate it from German society altogether. In support of radicalizing their
policy, Nazi leaders could cite a theoretical work titled “The Permission to Destroy Life
Unworthy of Life,” which was written by two German professors and published in 1920.
Authors Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding argued for the validity of “euthanasia,” literally
“mercy death,” for those who suffered from such extreme psychiatric problems or brain
injury that they could be considered mentally dead. For such patients, they contended, it
was both medically ethical and morally compassionate to free them from a reductive and
limited existence. At the same time, they offered a binary view of the healthy versus the
sick, suggesting that the existence of one was inextricably linked to the other:

If one thinks of a battlefield [in World War I] covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts
this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for their living patients—then
one would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable
possession of humanity on one side and on the other the greatest care of beings who are not only
worthless but even manifest negative value.

80 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 The Nazis adapted the concept of “euthanasia” as put forward by Hoche and Binding
and then carried it to the furthest extreme. In keeping with their absolute commitment
to the National Community and their disregard of individuals’ rights if those rights con-
flicted with the collective’s rights, the Nazis pitted the well-being of the state against that
of the victim. Quite simply, they saw “euthanasia” as a means of improving German society
as a whole—biologically by eliminating hereditary disease and economically by freeing
the nation of caring for those who were not “productive.” At the same time, the Nazis were
well aware that a policy of killing those with disabilities—a policy justified on such shaky
ethical ground—would not find sufficient consensus among the German people. Relying
on the traditional definition of euthanasia—the inducement with the permission and, if
possible, the participation of the patient in a painless death for the terminally ill—the
Nazis framed their actions as acts of mercy and compassion. Despite the fact that the in-
terests of the mentally and physically ill were never of concern to the Nazis, the prevailing
understanding of “mercy death” served their purposes by alleviating doubt and guilt in
the minds of the German public.
The Nazis used propaganda to build public support for their policies. Popular films
were especially effective in this regard. The most infamous, I Accuse (Ich Klage an), which
appeared in 1941, depicts a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis who begs her husband,
a medical doctor, to end her life by poisoning her. He does and is then tried for murder.
Throughout the film, the central act—ending the life of a terminally ill and suffering
person—is portrayed as a noble sacrifice and a quasi-humanitarian act.
At the same time, the Nazis worked to instill in the public mind the idea that the nation
should not bear responsibility for people who were not productive. They stigmatized the
mentally and physically ill, introducing terms such as “useless eaters” and “life unworthy
of life.” School mathematics books posed questions such as, “The construction of a lunatic
asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been
built for that amount?”
In reality, the Nazi propaganda campaign was contradictory: on the one hand mercy
killing was a painful personal sacrifice undertaken in the interest of the patient; while on
the other hand it was a necessary act to safeguard the economic health of the nation and
biological well-being of the “Aryan” race. The Nazis sought to exploit both impulses, cul-
tivating the human desire to protect itself at any cost to justify the killings, and alleviating
potential guilt by allowing the public to see the act as a merciful one.
Those efforts notwithstanding, Nazi leaders understood that public acceptance of
such killings would require the heightened consciousness of national emergency that
only a war could evoke and, even then, an elaborate secrecy to conceal from and mislead

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 81
a distracted population from what the regime actually intended to do. As early as 1935,
Hitler had declared, when asked on one occasion, that “in the event of war, [he] would
take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it” because “such a problem would be
more easily solved” during wartime. Hitler expected that the upheaval of international
conflict and the diminished value of human life in time of war would temper, if not mute,
any opposition to “euthanasia” policy. Nevertheless, outright killings of this kind violated
existing German laws against murder and assisted suicide. It also raised concerns among
those in the medical profession who were essential to the entire operation.
To circumvent the legal implications and to ensure the personal protection of those
who would instigate and carry out the murders, Hitler signed a secret authorization order
in October 1939. Despite its secret nature, this authorization, written as it was for the
future, had to convey the impression that this killing was not only compassionate for the
patient but also essential for the nation, which, now that it was at war, had to conserve
resources and protect its economy. Hence, the order was backdated to September 1, 1939,
the day Germany invaded Poland and unleashed World War II. Indeed, many Germans
who might have opposed such “mercy deaths” in peacetime came to support them, or at
least to acquiesce in the need for them as a wartime measure.
In the spring and summer of 1939, with Hitler’s operational order for the invasion of
Poland already in place, key Nazi officials, along with numerous German medical, legal,
and health care authorities, developed detailed plans for the systematic murder of people
who had mental and physical disabilities and were living in institutions. As a first priority,
the conspirators ironed out the details for murdering German newborns and children. In
August 1939, they established the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Seri-
ous Hereditary and Congenital Diseases, often called simply the Reich Committee. Under
the pretext of studying hereditary disease, the Reich Committee was designed to identify
and locate children deemed by medical professionals to be unworthy of life. On August
18, the Reich Ministry of the Interior ordered midwives and physicians to fill out detailed
questionnaires regarding the medical condition of all children who were up to three years
of age, who resided in institutions, and who appeared to have serious congenital illnesses.
Within a year, officials expanded the scope of the information they required to include de-
tails of the patient’s family history and other information that could be used to determine
whether the child would be a long-term burden on the state.
The murder of the institutionalized children began in October 1939 after Hitler signed
the previously mentioned authorization. Despite the added leeway offered by the wartime
atmosphere, doctors and other health care officials, finding the strictest secrecy necessary,
concocted seemingly plausible stories to deceive the children’s families. For the children

82 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

marked for death, they fabricated illnesses that required “treatment” and warned parents
that their children might need risky but important medical procedures. They created—at
least on paper—“Reich Committee Institutions” as a front for “euthanasia” killings, pre-
senting them as special hospitals for the care and treatment of the very ill and notifying
parents that their children had been transferred there for therapy. In fact, no such facili-
ties existed; children who were slated to be murdered were sent to special wards in regular
pediatric hospitals. To further support the charade, children usually remained for several
weeks in their new surroundings, allegedly undergoing treatment. In this way, health
care professionals, and state and local authorities laid the psychological groundwork for
parents to accept news of the death of their children.
In the hospital, doctors usually administered barbiturates by mouth over several days
until the child fell into a deep sleep and died, or doctors injected the drug directly, causing
pneumonia and then death. In some cases, they simply allowed the child to die of starva-
tion. Over the years of the program (which continued in various forms throughout World
War II), authorities incrementally broadened the scope of those who were to be killed.
Older children, those with relatively minor health problems, and eventually youngsters
deemed delinquents were simply put to death. From 1939 to 1945, between 5,000 and
8,000 infants, children, and adolescents were murdered in some 30 children’s wards
established at state hospitals and clinics throughout Germany.
In summer 1939, concurrent with the concluding stages of planning for the so-
called child euthanasia operation, Hitler authorized Führer Chancellery chief Philip
Bouhler to develop concrete procedures for the murder of institutionalized adults with
disabilities, an operation with the code name T-4 in reference to the street address—
Tiergartenstrasse 4—of its coordinating office in Berlin. Physicians were integral to the
success of the program: a significant number of them had advocated the killing solution
camouflaged as “mercy killing.” Now physicians and other health care professionals
organized and carried out nearly all aspects of the T-4 program. They targeted adult patients
in private and state mental institutions, and later in government or church-run sanatoria,
psychiatric clinics, nursing and old-age homes, and public residence facilities for those with
disabilities. Following the pattern of the child-killing operation, authorities ordered doctors
and administrators to fill in questionnaires regarding a patient’s health and capacity for
work. The forms were designed to mislead the doctors who were providing the information;
the abbreviated format and questions asked made respondents think the data would be used
in a statistical survey.
The completed forms were, in turn, sent to three medical doctors who were expected
to use them to assess the patient. No ambiguity existed about the purpose of the review.

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 83
Doctors marked each name with a red “+,” meaning death, a blue “–,” meaning life, or “?”
for cases needing additional assessment. Those medical experts rarely examined any of
the patients and typically made their decisions on the basis of the questionnaires alone.
Medical authorities involved in those decisions over life and death were neither encouraged
nor expected to agonize over decisions; they received huge numbers of cases to process,
and short-term deadlines clearly implied that when in doubt, they should recommend
the “mercy death.” In this context, individuals who were determined to be “unproductive”
were particularly vulnerable.

Helene Melanie Lebel (right) was born on September 15, 1911, in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish
father and a Catholic mother. The elder of two daughters, Helene was raised as a Catholic in
Vienna. Known affectionately as Helly, Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After finishing
her secondary education, she entered law school.
At age 19, Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened during 1934,
and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. After suffering a
major breakdown, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and placed in Vienna’s Steinhof Psychiatric
Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany.
Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed to go home even though her condi-
tion had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be released. Instead,
Helene’s mother was informed in August 1938 that Helene had been transferred to a hospital
in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted
prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was put to death by carbon monoxide poisoning as
part of the Nazi regime’s policy of killing those with mental and physical disabilities.
Helene was one of almost 1,000 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg “euthanasia”
center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of “acute schizophrenic excitement.” vienna,
austria; no date given. ushmm.

At every step along the way, Nazi officials and members of the medical establishment
carried out elaborate subterfuges to deceive the victims, their families, and the general
public. Their method was to camouflage the killing operations by making each step in the
process appear legitimate. Officials of the Charitable Foundation for the Transport of
Patients Inc. (the organization created to transfer patients to killing facilities) sent lists of
patients to be collected and issued instructions regarding the orderly transfer of people,
medical records, and possessions. SS and police officers dressed up as doctors and nurses

84 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Nazi officials and members of the medical establishment

carried out elaborate subterfuges to deceive

the victims, their families, and the general public.

in white coats and rode along in the buses to assuage the anxieties of those on board. To keep
the public from seeing too much and raising questions, the bus windows were blacked
out or covered with curtains. With such precautionary measures in place, T-4 personnel
transported patients to the sanatoria where they would be put to death in gas chambers.
Within the framework of T-4, German health care officials and administrators, assisted
by experts from the Criminal Police Technical Institute, established gassing installations
at six existing facilities: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and
Sonnenstein. When the victims arrived, health care workers explained to them that they
would undergo a physical evaluation and take a disinfecting shower. Lulled into a false
sense of security by the seemingly routine measures, the individuals were crowded into
gas chambers (disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles) and suffocated by car-
bon monoxide gas. Orderlies then removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold
teeth, and burned the bodies in adjacent crematoria. Many elements of those facilities and
procedures would serve as prototypes for the massive killing operations that took place in
occupied Poland later in the war.
The Nazis carefully crafted their efforts to cover up the real nature of the killings,
but the secrecy surrounding T-4 inevitably broke down. The German authorities could
not explain away the sudden death of thousands of institutionalized but often otherwise
physically healthy people, and the disturbing similarities of cause, place, and day of death
in official certificates further heightened public suspicion. Frequent missteps contributed
to the growing general awareness: facility workers filled urns with ashes to give to the vic-
tims’ families, but hairpins turned up in the remains of male relatives; physicians falsified
death certificates (and sent letters of condolences to relatives), but the cause of death was
listed as appendicitis when the patient had undergone an appendectomy years before.
Word leaked out in other ways, as well: some “euthanasia” center personnel were indis-
creet while drinking in local pubs after work, and, in the town of Hadamar, thick smoke
coming from the hospital incinerator was said to be visible every day. School pupils in
Hadamar called the gray transport buses “killing crates” and threatened each other with
the taunt, “You’ll end up in the Hadamar ovens!” Eventually, the “euthanasia” program
became an open secret.
A handful of leaders who were in the German judicial, medical, and clerical establish-
ments and who learned of the murders from frightened and angry parents and relatives of
the victims protested overtly. Judge Lothar Kreyssig, a judge on the Orphans Court in the
city of Brandenburg and legal guardian to several people with disabilities, became aware
of the systematic killings when a disturbing number of his wards suddenly died shortly
after transfer from facilities in his jurisdiction. Suspicion turned to outrage after the judge

86 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

learned of the “euthanasia” program when he consulted with certain government officials.
Thereupon, Kreyssig forbade the transfer of patients out of his jurisdiction and filed a
criminal complaint for murder against the T-4 managers with the public prosecutor in
Potsdam. Despite receiving assurances from the Justice Minister that Hitler himself had
authorized the killings, Kreyssig refused to withdraw the criminal complaint and continued
to forbid the transfer of his wards to the “euthanasia” killing centers. Finally, the regime
retaliated by sending him into premature retirement.
Likewise, Karl Bonhöffer, a leading psychiatrist, and his son Dietrich, a Protestant
minister who actively opposed the regime, urged churches to pressure church-administered
institutions that were for people with disabilities not to release their patients to T-4 authorities.
On Sunday, August 3, 1941, Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster delivered
a sermon denouncing the murder of patients with mental illness. He referred openly
and explicitly to the killings, informing his listeners that he himself had brought formal
charges against the police in Münster for their part in this operation. He went on to decry
the regime, saying,

[T]hose unfortunate patients must die … because they have become “worthless life” in the opinion
of some office, based on the expert report of some commission, because according to this expert
report they belong to the “unproductive national comrades.”… But have they for that reason
forfeited the right to life? Have you, have I the right to live only so long as we are productive, so
long as we are recognized by others to be productive?

Galen’s impassioned speech caught the attention of Hitler and the Nazi leadership
and encouraged other clerics to speak out. Reluctant to punish Galen directly, for fear of
turning him into a martyr, the German authorities did act against several clerics who fol-
lowed his example, arresting them and sending them to concentration camps. As part of
a more general program to appease Catholic leaders, Hitler ordered a halt to the gassing
program on August 24, 1941. Although Galen’s sermon, as well as growing public unrest
about the killings, embarrassed Hitler and may have contributed to the order, the reason
for the halt of the killing-center gassings was more likely that the Germans had met their
initial targets. By the summer of 1941, German health care authorities had killed more
than 70,000 innocent residents of institutions in the T-4 program.
The public stop order was meant to quell the fears and discomfort of the German
citizenry. Even though the T-4 program had all but ended and most of its management

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 87
and leadership had moved to other projects, including the mass murder of the European
Jews, Hitler’s order did not bring an end to the systematized murder that the regime
labeled “euthanasia.” Instead, German authorities continued to kill in a more decentralized
process, thus involving a larger number of institutions.
The second phase of the Nazi “euthanasia” operation continued from late 1941 through
the end of the war. Because of its lack of apparent centralized organization and standardized
transfer and killing procedures, this phase is sometimes called “wild euthanasia.” The
murder of infants and small children—who had never been gassed—continued without
interruption. Within months of Hitler’s order, the authorities resumed killing insti­
tutionalized adults with disabilities, using lethal injections or drug overdoses at clinics
throughout Germany and Austria. Many of those institutions also murdered both adults
and children by deliberately starving them to death.
The Nazis would have had the German public believe that they were providing a painless
death to those afflicted with incurable diseases. Yet, inside the hospitals and institutions,
patients experienced neglect, abuse, and physical and psychological trauma at the hands
of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers. Medical doctors brought misery to those
who could have lived long lives; those same doctors failed to relieve—indeed, often exacer-
bated and prolonged—the agony of others who were in pain. Accounts of survivors of the
killing institutions testify to just how profoundly the German doctors twisted the concept
of “mercy death” and perverted the traditional medical oath to “first do no harm.”
Beginning in mid-1941 and continuing until the winter of 1944–45, the Germans
implemented another killing program, known under the code name Operation 14 f 13. It
was, in fact, an extension of the T-4 program into the concentration camp system, which
was constantly absorbing new prisoners from each German conquest. As the numbers
of those unable to work increased, in part as a result of the appalling living and working
conditions in the camps, SS authorities weeded them out and killed them under
Operation 14 f 13. Experienced physicians from the T-4 operation were sent to perform
superficial medical screenings and to review registration forms filled out by camp
authorities. They then designated prisoners of all nationalities and types to be sent to
the killing centers at Bernburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein, where the authorities had
not dismantled the gas chambers. Although illness was the supposed determining
factor for selection, doctors often judged prisoners on the basis of their so-called crime,
racial status, and anti- or pro-German sentiment. The German authorities killed nearly
13,000 people in Operation 14 f 13.
As a general rule, the Germans were indifferent to the fate of people with disabilities in
the lands they occupied. Moreover, they did not intend to feed residents of institutions and

88 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

often needed the buildings and grounds for other purposes. As a result, military, SS, and
police units killed tens of thousands of people who had mental and physical disabilities
and who resided in institutions throughout occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. In just
over one month in the fall of 1939, German SS and police shot about 3,700 institutionalized
patients with mental disabilities in the region of Bydgoszcz, Poland, alone. Although regular
army units did not, as a matter of policy, participate in such killing operations in Poland, some
instances of their involvement have been documented. In the occupied Soviet Union,
however, military units did participate in murdering institutionalized people with disabilities.
Insufficient documentation exists to determine the total number of institutionalized people
with disabilities whom the Germans killed in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet
Union. At a minimum, however, the victims number in the tens of thousands.
By carrying out their “euthanasia” program, German authorities got their first practical
experience in using gas chambers for mass murder. Both the engineers who designed the
chambers and many of the T-4 personnel who operated them were transferred to occupied
Poland in the autumn of 1941 to construct killing centers. Many would later play a key role
in the implementation of the mass murder of the Jews. Among those perpetrators were
police officers, physicians, and other health care workers, including the former operations
supervisor at Hartheim, Criminal Police Captain Christian Wirth; his colleague and suc-
cessor, Franz Reichleitner, and Reichleitner’s deputy, Franz Stangl; Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the
chief of the Brandenburg killing center; and Gottlieb Hering, the supervisor of the gassing
operations at Bernburg and Hadamar. Those infamous Nazi commandants were intimately
.
involved in the creation and daily operations of the killing centers at Belzec, Chelmno,
Sobibór, and Treblinka.
The “euthanasia” murders continued until the last days of World War II and, indeed,
expanded to include an ever-wider range of victims, including so-called asocials, geriatric
patients, bombing victims, foreign forced laborers, and even permanently disabled German
soldiers. Throughout, the Nazi regime continued to publicize the message that people
with mental disabilities and certain physical ailments were “useless eaters” because they
could not produce in the terms defined by the state. The authorities continued the killings
until the last possible moment; in some of Germany’s institutions, medical personnel
carried on even after Allied troops had occupied surrounding areas. From 1939 to 1945,
an estimated 200,000 Germans deemed “unworthy of life” were killed in the various
“euthanasia” programs.
Some of the perpetrators, such as Wirth and Reichleitner, did not survive the war, and
others, such as Eberl and Bouhler, committed suicide. A few, namely Viktor Brack and
Dietrich Allers, were brought to trial after the war. However, the overwhelming majority of

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 89
scientists, physicians, nurses, academics, and other health care professionals who advocated,
implemented, and legitimized Nazi racial hygiene policies—even those who were directly
involved in the killing—were neither indicted nor brought to a legal accounting for their
actions. Many continued their professional careers in Germany after the war.

african germans
Germans of African descent are little-known victims of Nazi persecution, in part because
of their small numbers and in part because the Nazis did not develop and carry out an
organized program of annihilation against them. Consistent with attitudes toward all
those whom they viewed as racially inferior, the Nazis ostracized, isolated, and, in many
cases, physically harmed African Germans in an effort to segregate them from the “Aryan”
population. Because the Nazis regarded anyone with “non-Aryan” blood as inferior and a
threat to the purity of the race, they considered blacks—like Jews and Roma—to be less
than fully human. In segregating and persecuting Germans of African descent, the Nazi
leadership could draw on broad acquiescence from the German population.
Nazi attitudes toward black Africans were shaped in large measure by centuries of
European colonial rule in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The colonists shared faith in
the superiority of Western civilization and in the right of white settlers to dominate in-
digenous peoples and cultures. The Germans’ perceptions of blacks had an historical
precedent in the oppression and murder of the Herero people under German colonial
rule. In 1884, Germany declared a protectorate over the lands of the Herero, who were
cattle herders in Southwest Africa (known today as Namibia). Calling on the rights they
claimed under colonial rule, German settlers systematically seized the cattle on which
the Herero depended for their livelihood. In 1903, the Herero people rose in revolt; in
response, Germany sent a military force commanded by General Lothar von Trotha. With
the full intention of crushing the resistance by ruthlessly annihilating the Herero people,
Trotha ordered his soldiers to kill the men and to drive the women and children into the
Kalahari Desert without supplies. Tens of thousands of Herero died.
When news of this order and its consequences reached Germany, Trotha was recalled,
but not before the surviving Herero launched a full-scale counterattack. The German mili-
tary forced the remaining Herero into detention camps, where they were used as forced
laborers, a common practice under European colonial rule. Many died from overwork,
malnutrition, and disease. During the years of the uprising, German forces and their native
auxiliaries killed more than 60,000 Herero.
In the period between the world wars, an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people of African
descent lived in Germany. Among them were immigrants from Germany’s former African

90 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

colonies, including low-level indigenous officials who had worked as tax collectors and
soldiers who had rendered auxiliary security service to German colonial administrations
before World War I. In addition, some Africans had come to Germany during the interwar
years as diplomats; businessmen; demobilized seamen; students; artisans; and entertainers,
including jazz musicians, dancers, singers, and actors. This latter group of artists included
a small number of African American émigrés seeking to escape harsh segregationist laws
and practices in the United States. Finally, some former members of French or British
colonial units who had been captured by the Germans had opted to remain in Germany
after the war.
Perhaps the most visible minority group in Germany lived in western parts of the
country (specifically, areas known as the Rhineland and the Ruhr). They were primarily
the offspring of German women and North and Sub-Saharan African men whose liaisons
were made possible by the deployment of colonial troops as occupation forces following
the defeat of Germany in World War I. The Allied powers not only demilitarized the region
but also occupied it for more than a decade. Most Germans, like most Europeans, harbored
antiblack racist beliefs, and officials of the Weimar Republic condoned and promoted
such feelings toward those colonial troops as a way of protesting the occupation. Building
on existing prejudice, propaganda in the republic depicted black soldiers as carriers of
venereal and other diseases and portrayed them as rapists of white German women. Never-
theless, despite all efforts at segregation, hundreds of relationships developed. Regardless
of whether the partners married, children born from these liaisons were called “Rhineland
Bastards.” Between 500 and 800 children were born as a result of relations between
Colonial soldiers and German women.
When the Nazis came to power, they named African Germans among those groups
identified as a danger to “Aryan” German racial purity. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had com-
plained that the “Jews … bring the Negroes into the Rhineland always with the … clear aim of
ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization.…” Most Germans
had no direct contact with black people, and few approved of their integration into main-
stream society. Because of the extent of existing popular prejudice and the ability to identify
Africans and most African Germans by sight, the Nazis did not have to work very hard to
convince Germans to cooperate in excluding and persecuting them. The small, isolated
black minority was both vulnerable and exposed.
The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 codified and defined racial groups in Germany:
those with “Aryan” blood were protected by the law while those with so-called alien blood
were relegated to second-class citizenship. Although blacks were not enumerated in the
decree itself, the onslaught of restrictions against Jews that followed also applied to blacks

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 91
and other racial minorities. The laws served to reinforce and escalate their social and economic
isolation. Some African Germans lost their jobs and their citizenship. German authorities
excluded them from many career opportunities, including service in the military, and pre-
vented them from attending universities. Eventually, German authorities interned many
of them in prisons and concentration camps. There, they were often treated more harshly
than other inmates; in some cases, they were subjected to medical experiments.

Hilarius (Lari) Gilges (left), an African German dancer in Düsseldorf, Germany, was the son of
a black man who stoked coal on a Rhine River steamship and of a white woman who worked
in a textile mill. Like other African Germans born to racially mixed couples, Gilges experienced
racism and prejudice from white Germans. He was politically active, joining the German Com-
munist Youth Organization in 1926 and organizing anti-Nazi demonstrations. He also founded a
political theater group in Düsseldorf and performed in cafés and bars and in the open air.
Just months after the Nazis took power in Germany in June 1933, the SS arrested Gilges,
ostensibly because of his political activities. The following day, the body of 24-year-old Gilges was
found under a bridge. His family was told he had been shot while trying to escape. On December 23,
2003, the city of Düsseldorf named a plaza after him, the Hilarius-Gilges-Platz in the old quarter,
in honor of the first victim of the Nazis in the city. düsseldorf, germany, 1929–32. with permission
of the mahn und gedenkstaette duesseldorf

The children of African soldiers and German women in the Rhineland were specifically
targeted by the regime. Nazi measures against them were fueled not only by racial preju-
dice but also by the fact that the “Rhineland Bastards” were a visible symbol and painful
reminder of Germany’s defeat in World War I. The Gestapo created Special Commission
No. 3, whose task was to locate, identify, and secretly sterilize the “mixed race” offspring
of occupation forces in Germany. By 1937, the Gestapo had rounded up many of those
children, who were by then teenagers, and had supervised their sterilization. According
to available documents, at least 385 Rhineland children residing in and around the cities
of Bonn and Köln were sterilized between 1935 and 1937. Typically, the order for the steri­
lization concluded that the measure was necessary because “the descendants of the child
would retain the colored blood alien to the [German ‘Aryan’] race.” Some of the Rhineland
children were also subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously disappeared.
Not surprisingly, blacks residing in countries conquered and occupied by the Germans

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 93
during World War II also suffered intense persecution. Little research has been done as
to the particulars of these cases; however, a few known cases illustrate the scope of Nazi
policy. Valaida Snow, a black American female jazz musician and singer, was interned in
occupied Denmark and released to the United States in 1942, possibly in exchange for
someone in U.S. custody whom the Germans wanted.
Josef Nassy, a black Surinamese, moved to the United States as a teenager and obtained
a U.S. passport to travel to Europe in 1929. Eventually moving to Belgium, Nassy remained
after the Germans occupied the country and was eventually arrested in 1942 as an enemy
national after the United States entered the war. Incarcerated for seven months in a transit
camp in occupied Belgium, he was transferred to Germany and interned in the camps
Laufen and Tittmoning in upper Bavaria, where he survived the war.
Lionel Romney, a black American sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was imprisoned
in Mauthausen; his fate is unknown. Bayume Muhammed Hussein (also known as Mohamed
Husen), a native of German East Africa, worked in the film industry as an actor in pro-
paganda films with German colonial themes until his arrest on a false charge of “illegal”
sexual relations with a German woman. Taken into protective custody, Hussein died in
Sachsenhausen in November 1944.
The Germans also took a number of black soldiers as prisoners of war, though treat-
ment of black soldiers in the POW camps was inconsistent. The Germans captured as
many as 16,000 French African soldiers in 1940. As of July 1940, they had more than
28,700 French, British, and Belgian African prisoners of war in custody. The Germans
are known to have killed between 1,500 and 3,000 French colonial soldiers upon their
capture during the summer of 1940. Some Allied troops of African descent never reached
the POW camps, although little information exists on their numbers and their fates.
Approximately 200 black U.S. military personnel fell into the hands of the Germans after
U.S. troops landed on the European continent in 1943 and 1944.
When dealing with black prisoners of war, the Germans sometimes ignored the rules
of the Geneva Convention, which had been designed to regulate the conduct of war and
the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers. In contrast to the general treatment
of white U.S. and British POWs, the Germans worked some black POWs to death on
construction projects or allowed them to die as a result of mistreatment and harsh living
conditions in the camps.

roma (gypsies)
The Nazis placed Roma (Gypsies) among the groups they most despised and feared for
the imagined threat they posed to “Aryan” German “racial purity.” Reflecting long-held

94 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

popular prejudices (in Germany and elsewhere) that judged Roma’s itinerant lifestyle
as violating the cultural norms of the European West, Hitler and his followers identified
Roma as fundamentally antisocial and a biological source of criminal and degenerate
behavior. Consequently, the Nazis hunted, persecuted, and killed them throughout Europe.
Roma have long been popularly called “Gypsies.” Although today the term is considered
too general and derogatory, it is still sometimes used when discussing the history of the
Roma and state policies toward them. Collectively, Roma are an ethnic minority defined
by language and some common customs. Within the Roma are smaller groupings known
as tribes or nations. Although all Roma share the common Romany language (based on
Sanskrit from classical India), particular tribes often speak in distinct dialects, the names
of which they sometimes use to identify themselves. For example, in Germany and
western Austria, Roma speak the Sinti dialect and are often called by that name. In eastern
Europe and the Balkans, they are often referred to as Romani people or Roma. The term
Roma has today come to include all “Gypsy” nations or tribes.
The Romani people have a long past, and historical fact has mingled with public per-
ception to shape impressions and attitudes about them that persist to this day. They are
believed to have migrated into Europe from the Punjab region of northern India between
the eighth and tenth centuries c.e., although their exact origins and the cause of their
exodus are unknown. Europeans referred to Roma as “Gypsies” in the mistaken belief
that they came from Egypt. From the beginning of their presence among the settled
populations of Europe during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, Roma were
known for their markedly different appearance, language, customs, and way of life. Their
social and cultural life was governed by a complex system of ritual purity laws, which
distinguish unclean (marime) from pure (wuzho). Fundamentally distinct from the habits
and norms of European society, those laws required that Roma live apart from non-Roma
(gage). Historically, Roma have tended to be nomads and travelers, interacting with local
peoples primarily in their roles as craftsmen, entertainers, seasonal laborers, or tinkerers
(menders of metal pots, kettles, and utensils), although individual Romani families have
led settled lives throughout Europe from at least the seventeenth century.
White Europeans scorned and persecuted Roma for centuries, regarding their itinerant
lifestyle and their seemingly mystical beliefs with a mixture of fascination, suspicion, and
fear. Traditionally, they accused Roma of being beggars, thieves, con artists, spies, and
practitioners of magic who used their charms to lure the unsuspecting to their ruin. They
also perceived Roma as being constitutionally unable to settle and hold down permanent
employment, preferring to live by means of petty crime. Europeans tended to view the
Romani practice of moving from place to place as further evidence that they preyed on

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 95
the settled population by stealing or cheating and then moving on before they could be
caught. Many insisted that Roma were dangerous outsiders who did not merit the respect
or protection awarded to other members of society.
Many Roma became Christian in the course of their migrations through Persia, Asia
Minor, and the Balkans. By the turn of the twentieth century, the numbers of truly no-
madic Roma were on the decline in many places, although many who were considered
sedentary continued to move seasonally, depending on their occupations. Others, particu-
larly in central Europe, chose a settled lifestyle, and by the 1920s, a small, lower-middle
class existed of Roma shopkeepers and some civil servants, including a number who were
employed in the German postal service. Nevertheless, popular perception continued to
set Roma apart as mysterious and dangerous strangers, which, in turn, seemed to justify
ever-increasing restrictions against them.

A group of Romani (Gypsy) prisoners, (right) awaiting instructions from their German captors, sit
. .
in an open area near the fence in the Belzec concentration camp. Belzec, Poland, c. 1940; ushmm,
courtesy of archiwum dokumentacji mechanicznej, warsaw, poland.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many social scientists and officials
adopted beliefs about the hereditary nature of criminal behavior. Those ideas offered a
seemingly plausible foundation for legal measures against Roma, who were viewed as
constitutionally prone to theft and vagrancy. As early as 1899, the Bavarian Criminal
Police established a central office for Gypsy Matters in Munich and created special file
indices to identify all Roma in Bavaria. Although Roma were granted full rights of citi-

96 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Many insisted that

Roma were dangerous outsiders

who did not merit the respect

or protection awarded to other members of society.

zenship in 1919 under the new Weimar Constitution, they were still subject to special,
Underamong
discriminatory decrees. Most notable the terms
thoseof thetheNuremburg
was Bavarian lawRace Laws,
of July 16, 1926,
which outlined measures for “Combating Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work Shy.” Within
the scope of this law, the Bavarian state government prohibited Roma from camping in
Roma were deprived of all civil rights,
groups; it used Roma who could not prove regular employment as forced laborers for up
to two years. Other German states passed similar legislation. Despite the promise of equal
rights as German citizens, authorities, with and intermarriage
strong was prohibited.
support and some initiative from the
general public, felt free to discriminate against Roma.

Maria Sava Moise (left) was one of four children born to Romani parents in the capital of Molda-
via in eastern Romania. The family lived in a mixed neighborhood that included Romanians and
Roma. Her father made a living by singing and by working at some of the many wineries that
dotted the Moldavian countryside.

My parents couldn’t afford to send me to school. To help make ends meet, my sister, older brother, and
I helped my mother pick grapes for a local winery. The work was seasonal, and we were contracted by
the week. We worked hard and long, from 5 a.m. until evening.
When I was 16, my father was drafted by the Romanians to fight against the Soviet Union. The following
year, Iasi’s Gypsies were rounded up by the Romanian police and sent eastward by cattle car. When we
disembarked in Transnistria, we were marched to a farm and left in open fields to die slowly. That’s how
my sister died. My husband, Stefan, managed to run away. By coincidence, my father’s unit was stationed
nearby, and on New Year’s Eve of 1943, he smuggled some of us back to Romania on a troop train.

Maria survived the rest of the war in Iasi, Romania. After the war, she and her husband reunited
and resettled in Iasi. no date or place given. ushmm, courtesy of merle spiegel

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, the plight of Roma grew dramatically worse. The
July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, which permitted the
coercive sterilization of people with mental and physical disabilities, affected Roma, de-
spite the fact that the terms of the law did not specifically permit the sterilization of Roma.
Instead, physicians and social workers diagnosed a disproportionate number of Roma

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 99
with “feeblemindedness” and other conditions, which provided a basis for making them
infertile against their will.
The September 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws did not explicitly refer to Roma, but subse-
quent interpretations categorized them (together with blacks and Jews) as racially distinc-
tive minorities with “alien blood.” Despite prevailing stereotypes, nearly half the Romani
population was integrated into German society at this time, having abandoned an itiner-
ant lifestyle. Many had married “Aryan” Germans. In fact, those intermarriages were of
great concern to many in Germany—Nazis and non-Nazis alike—who viewed them as
a sign that race-mixing was on the rise in Germany and that dangerous consequences
would follow. Under the terms of the Nuremberg Race Laws, Roma were deprived of all
civil rights, and intermarriage was prohibited.
Classifying and treating Roma as deviants and criminals was another tactic used by
German authorities to persecute Roma. A 1933 Law against Habitual Criminals, though
targeting recidivist lawbreakers and people suspected of serious violent crimes, also gave
the police broader powers to arrest and incarcerate Roma and others deemed antisocial,
including prostitutes, beggars, chronic alcoholics, and homeless vagrants.
In June 1936, anticipating the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin, the Ministry
of the Interior issued a series of directives that were intended to keep Roma people
out of sight so they would not mar the image of the city. Police in the capital were
authorized to conduct raids against Roma; by July, they had arrested 600 Romani people
and interned them in a municipal camp in the suburb of Marzahn. This “temporary
measure” became more or less permanent. Uniformed police, aided by dogs, guarded
the camp and prevented the free movement of the internees. With only three water pumps
and two toilets, unsanitary conditions prevailed, facilitating the spread of contagious
disease. In addition to violating their civil rights and subjecting them to the misery
of camp life, the local authorities seemed deliberately to mock values deeply held by
Roma by locating the camp near a sewage dump and a cemetery. Forced to reside close
to sites of refuse and death, both of which were impure (marime) areas, the internees
were unable to maintain the ritual purity laws central to their social and cultural beliefs.
During the 1930s, municipal authorities established similar internment camps for Roma
in cities across Germany.
Nazi efforts to isolate and oppress the Romani population were advanced by Dr. Robert
Ritter, a German child psychologist turned race scientist. He had specialized in criminal
biology and then directed genealogical and racial research about Roma in central Europe.
In identifying the racial origins of Roma, he was faced with an ironic and vexing problem.
According to Nazi terminology, Romani people were technically “Aryan,” having supposedly

100 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

originated in northern India. At the same time, they were viewed as racially inferior and
hereditarily disposed to criminal behavior. How to reconcile the two? Ritter’s working
hypothesis was that although Roma had indeed come from India and hence had once
been “Aryan,” they had interbred with “lesser” peoples in the course of their migrations
westward. This process had tainted their racial makeup, inclining them toward antisocial
behavior and a criminal way of life and turning them, in Ritter’s words, into “riff-raff
without form and character.” According to Ritter, “mixed-race” Roma were particularly
dangerous because they had abandoned their itinerant lifestyle and lived in and among
the settled population. Their close contact with “Aryan” Germans allowed them to poison
society with restless and antisocial behavior.
Ritter’s dubious research, in which he attempted to prove a link between heredity and
criminality, eventually served as an instrument of and a justification for the onslaught
against the Romani population in Germany. In 1936, Ritter was appointed director of the
Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research Institute in the Reich Ministry of Health
and was provided with both funding and access to criminal police files. Using those resources,
he began systematically to collect data on all Roma residing in Germany and, later, in
Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Criminal Police facilitated
those efforts by requiring all Roma to submit genealogical records. Ritter believed
anyone with Romani blood constituted a danger to German society; he perceived even
individuals with one mixed-race Romani grandparent as tainted. To prevent the further
pollution of the purity of the German “Aryan” bloodline, Ritter argued that Roma should be
segregated by sex and prohibited from marrying until after both partners had been sterilized.
His aim was the eventual disappearance of a population he declared to be innately antisocial.
In December 1937, the regime issued a Basic Law on Preventive Suppression of Crime,
which allowed police to issue so-called preventive detention orders. Under the pretext of
stopping illegal acts from occurring, Criminal Police officials could arrest and incarcerate
for an unlimited time all people whom they suspected might break the law. People under
a preventive detention order were summarily imprisoned in concentration camps, which,
until that time, had primarily been used for political prisoners and other perceived ene-
mies of the regime. Because police officials typically viewed Roma as hereditary criminals
or “work shy” and, therefore, antisocial, the decree authorized the incarceration of many
Roma in concentration camps for indefinite periods.
In June 1938, as part of a general roundup of asocials, the German police arrested about
1,000 Roma and sent them to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, Lichtenburg,
and Sachsenhausen. A year later, the police captured several thousand more Roma, im-
prisoning them at Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück.

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 101
 In the camps, Roma were made to wear either the black triangle, the symbol for
antisocial prisoners, or the green triangle, which designated them as habitual crimi-
nals. Sometimes they also wore the letter Z, which stood for Zigeuner, the German word
for Gypsy. Nearly every concentration camp in Germany had Romani prisoners. In the
concentration camps, Roma, like other prisoners, were assigned to forced labor in stone
quarries, brickworks, or repair workshops. Denied adequate food and subjected to brutal
forced labor, Romani prisoners often found that incarceration in a concentration camp
became a death sentence. Following Germany’s occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, the Czech
lands, the Netherlands, and Poland, the police arrested Roma as antisocial elements or
habitual criminals in those territories as well.

Karl Stojka (right) was the fourth of six children born to Roman Catholic Romani parents in the
village of Wampersdorf in eastern Austria. The Stojkas belonged to a tribe of the Lowara Roma, who
made their living as itinerant horse traders. They lived in a traveling family wagon and spent
winters in Austria’s capital of Vienna. Karl’s ancestors had lived in Austria for more than 200 years.

I grew up used to freedom, travel, and hard work. In March 1938, our wagon was parked for the win-
ter in a Vienna campground, when Germany annexed Austria just before my seventh birthday. The
Germans ordered us to stay put. My parents converted our wagon into a wooden house, but I wasn’t
used to having permanent walls around me. My father and oldest sister began working in a factory,
and I started grade school.
By 1943, my family had been deported to a Nazi camp in Birkenau for thousands of Gypsies. Now
we were enclosed by barbed wire. By August 1944, only 2,000 Gypsies were left alive; 918 of us were
put on a transport to Buchenwald to do forced labor. There the Germans decided that 200 of us were
incapable of working and were to be sent back to Birkenau. I was one of them; they thought I was too
young. But my brother and uncle insisted that I was 14 but a dwarf. I got to stay. The rest were returned
to be gassed.

Karl was later deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was freed near Roetz, Germany,
by American troops on April 24, 1945. After the war, he returned to Vienna. no date or place given.
ushmm, courtesy of karl stojka

102 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Roma were made to wear either the black triangle,

the symbol for antisocial prisoners, or the green triangle,

which designated them as habitual criminals.

 German physicians also used Roma concentration camp prisoners in medical experi-
ments. For example, in 1944, the German air force sponsored an experiment on the
potability of sea water. The SS selected 44 Roma, previously in good health, who had
just been transferred to Buchenwald from Auschwitz and brought them to Dachau. The
prisoners were forced to drink sea water and soon exhibited signs of starvation and severe
thirst. As they became incoherent, they were physically restrained. When they were
approaching death, SS doctors injected them with an experimental substance that was
thought to counteract the effects of drinking sea water. Only the fact that other prisoners
smuggled food and water to them enabled the Romani test subjects to survive.
In January 1944, SS doctors transferred 100 Romani prisoners from Auschwitz to the
Natzweiler-Struthof camp in eastern France for use in typhus experiments. The Roma
were infected with typhus bacillus and, naturally, developed high fevers, although none
of them died. Later, some of those same Romani prisoners were used in gas experiments
at the University of Strasbourg, in which they were injected with a so-called protective
element and then subjected to various concentrations of phosgene gas. Four of the Romani
prisoners died as a result of the experiments. In Ravensbrück, SS Dr. Carl Clauberg used
Romani women and girls, some of them as young as eight, in sterilization experiments. As
late as February 1945, approximately 140 Romani women were sterilized there. Some of
the operations were performed without anesthesia, and at least ten of the women died.
After Germany incorporated Austria into the Reich in March 1938, the police established
two internment camps for Roma there. One opened in Salzburg in October 1939, housing
80 to 400 Roma; the second opened in Lackenback, southeast of Vienna, in November 1940
and held 4,000 prisoners. Conditions at the Lackenback camp were particularly bad, which
led to a high death rate at that camp through the end of the war.
The actions against Roma between 1935 and 1938, particularly their registration and
incarceration in municipal camps and then in concentration camps, were a prelude to further
actions envisioned by the Nazi leadership. Indeed, on the basis of Ritter’s “race-biological”
research, SS and police chief Heinrich Himmler recommended the full-scale segrega-
tion of Roma in his decree of December 8, 1938, on “Combating the Gypsy Plague.” He
ordered the registration of all Roma above the age of six years and their classification into
three racial groupings: Gypsy, Gypsy mixed race, and those leading a nomadic and Gypsy-
like lifestyle. Himmler stated that the aim of this measure was to “defend the homogeneity
of the German nation” and the “physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation.”
The information that Ritter and his associates gathered was essential to the police actions
against Roma in Germany. In short, they provided the information necessary for the police
to identify and locate Roma, and then to deport and ultimately kill them.

104 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 In 1939, some 30,000 to 35,000 Roma lived in the Greater German Reich (Germany,
Austria, and the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia). As in the case of other groups,
the Nazi regime used the onset of war in September 1939 to radicalize its policy toward
Roma. Thus, just three weeks after the beginning of the war, on September 21, 1939,
German officials discussed the deportation of 30,000 Roma from Germany and Austria
to occupied Poland, together with the removal of the Jews.
The experience of Roma who were sent east and murdered in massive numbers there
closely paralleled the systematic deportations and killings of Jews, even though the number
of Roma killed and the scope of Nazi efforts did not. The banishment of the German
Romani population began in May 1940 with the transport of almost 3,000 men, women,
and children to Lublin in occupied Poland. In early November 1941, 5,000 Austrian Roma
were deported to Lódź ghetto. Two months later, they were sent to the nearby Chelmno
killing center, where they were among the first to be killed by carbon monoxide poisoning
in mobile gas vans. Similarly, in the summer of 1942, SS and police officials deported
German and Polish Roma who had been imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka,
where they were put to death by gas. German Roma were also deported to ghettos in
Bialystok, Kraków, and Radom.
In a decree of December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of the remaining
pure and mixed-race Roma from the Greater German Reich to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
killing center in occupied Poland. Although a change of heart prompted by Ritter’s
research led Himmler to permit certain exemptions for families that could demonstrate
they had never intermarried through the generations, those exemptions were sometimes
ignored. Even German army soldiers of Roma descent were seized and deported as Roma
while home on leave. The SS and police deported nearly 21,000 Roma to Birkenau in the
first half of 1943. Police also deported small numbers of Roma from Belgium, France,
Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS set up a Gypsy Family Camp in Section B-IIe of Birkenau.
There, Roma were held together in families because the SS leadership had not yet decided
what their fate should be. During the 17 months in which the Gypsy Family Camp existed,
the majority of Roma died as a result of starvation, exhaustion, and disease. To add to
their misery, some Roma at Auschwitz, including children, perished as a result of medical
experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele and other SS physicians.
In mid-May 1944, the SS tried to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp. The Romani
prisoners, apparently warned by the SS guard who was responsible for the Gypsy camp
and who opposed the operation, armed themselves with improvised weapons, including
knives fashioned out of scrap metal, clubs, and rocks; they refused to come out of their

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 105
barracks. The SS refrained from carrying out the action at that time, and the Romani
prisoners’ defiance may have helped postpone their demise. However, on August 2–3, 1944,
the SS destroyed the Gypsy camp at Birkenau and used the gas chambers to murder the
nearly 3,000 remaining men, women, and children.
As with all so-called racial enemies of the Nazi regime, German SS and police units extended
the killing of Roma into German-occupied eastern Europe. After Germany invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, the Mobile Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen), Order Police battalions, and
indigenous collaborators began shooting Roma together with Jews. On so-called racial grounds,
they killed tens of thousands of Romani men, women, and children in those massacres.
In western and southern Europe, the fate of Roma varied from country to country
depending on local circumstances. In France, authorities had placed restrictions on the
movement of Roma even before the German invasion. In northern France in October
1940, the German military commander ordered the arrest and internment of all Roma
in the occupied zone. French authorities did not shrink from implementing this order;
indeed, they participated in the roundups and served as guards in the camps. A number of
the Roma incarcerated in camps in both occupied and unoccupied France died of starva-
tion and disease; many others were eventually released during the war.
The German authorities deported 360 Roma from Belgium and northern France to
Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1944; 121 Belgian Roma were registered at Auschwitz;
only 13 survived the war. From Holland, where, as in Belgium, itinerant Roma were sub-
ject to discrimination and persecution, the SS and police deported 245 persons designated
as Gypsies from Westerbork to Auschwitz, where the SS classified them as “Polish Gyp-
sies” in the camp records. In Italy, the Fascist dictatorship interned some itinerant Roma
after 1938, although the Italian police released many of them after the fall of Mussolini in
July 1943. Some joined the Italian resistance after the German occupation in September
1943; German forces killed as many as 2,000 Italian Roma in occupied Italy.
In the German puppet state of Croatia, Ustas̆a, Croatian fascists, killed between 26,000
and 30,000 Roma, between 8,000 and 15,000 of them in the Jasenovac concentration
camp system. In occupied Serbia, German soldiers and SS units shot Roma and Jews in
reprisal for partisan attacks against the military; the ratio was 50 to 100 people for every
German soldier killed. Estimated numbers of Roma killed in Serbia range widely, between
1,000 and 20,000. For Greece and Bulgaria, the numbers also vary, with about 200 Roma
killed in Greece and perhaps as many as 5,000 in Bulgaria. In Slovakia, although itinerant
Roma were subject to persecution by the so-called Slovak Republic, few were killed before
the Germans invaded the country in August 1944 to quell an uprising. In the aftermath of
fighting, German forces and Slovak collaborators shot between 200 and 500 Roma.

106 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 The Romanian government deported approximately 26,000 Roma to Romanian-occupied
Transnistria in Ukraine. How many died there at the hands of the Romanian authorities
is impossible to pin down, but estimates range from 13,000 to 19,000. Most died as a result of
disease, starvation, and brutal treatment. A post–World War II Romanian war crimes
commission found that a total of 36,000 Romanian Roma were killed in Romania
proper and the areas under its occupation. In Hungary, after the fascist Arrow Cross
seized power with German assistance in October 1944, police forces deported as many
as 28,000 Roma. The present state of documentation does not permit a firm estimate of how
many died. Existing estimates range between 1,000 and 50,000; the estimate of the Hungar-
ian War Victims Association of at least 25,000 Roma killed is probably the most accurate.
Scholars estimate that at least 200,000 and perhaps many more Roma were mur-
dered throughout Europe during the Holocaust era. Those who managed to survive the
war found that they were no more welcome after the war than before in most European
countries. Few knew or cared that the Nazis had singled them out for abuse and murder.
In fact, discrimination against Roma continued when the Federal Republic of Germany
(then West Germany) decided that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were
legitimate policies of state and were not subject to restitution. Incarceration, sterilization,
and even deportation were regarded as legitimate policies.
After the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, German courts
agreed to compensate Roma for Nazi racial persecution but only for policies that targeted
Roma and were enacted after 1943, that is, for their deportation and murder. In the early
1960s, the Federal German Supreme Court revised its position and set the eligibility date
for compensation back to 1938, the date when Himmler issued his decree on the Regula-
tion of the Gypsy Question. Nevertheless, many Roma had been incarcerated in concen-
tration camps before 1938 for alleged crimes or asocial behavior, which made successfully
claiming compensation for injuries done to them under the Nazi regime exceedingly
difficult in German courts.
The Bavarian criminal police took over Robert Ritter’s research files, including his
registry of Roma in Germany. Ritter himself retained his credentials and returned to his
former work in child psychology. Efforts to bring Dr. Ritter to trial for complicity in the
killing of Roma ended with his death in 1950.
In 1982, German chancellor Helmut Kohl formally recognized the fact of the Nazi per-
secution of Roma. By then, most of the Roma eligible for restitution under German law
had already died. Subjected to brutal suffering and mass murder during the Nazi regime
and denied recognition and restitution in its wake, the Romani term for their own experi-
ence under the Nazis is Porrajmos (the Devouring). Discrimination against Roma did not

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma | 107
end with Germany’s acknowledgment of their suffering. Indeed, as late as the 1990s,
Roma faced physical violence in Romania and the Czech Republic. Today, with the rise of
strident nationalism in many East European nations and unemployment and economic
insecurity throughout Europe, Roma continue to face widespread public prejudice and
official discrimination.

108 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

the holocaust:
The Destruction of European Jewry
 he nazis reserved their most vicious hatred and systematic genocidal
plans for the Jews. Indeed, many of the measures they carried out against other
groups—the imprisonment of political opponents or social nonconformers; the
sterilization and murder of those with mental and physical disabilities; and the arrest,
imprisonment, deportation, and murder of other so-called racial enemies—set
the economic and social conditions; prepared the psychological ground; and offered the
national security, military, and practical precedent for the mass killing of the Jews. The
Nazis devoted themselves to this task as a priority and with a determination unmatched
in the historical record. The success of their actions resulted in the almost complete
annihilation of Jewish life and culture in Europe.
Nazi antisemitism grew out of a centuries-old tradition of hatred and fear of Jews as a
religious, social, and cultural minority in Europe. Although Christianity began as a Jewish
sect, Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and his arrival was the
fulfillment of God’s covenant with the people of Israel and of the Hebrew scriptures.
Convinced that their religion superseded and replaced the Judaic faith, devout Christians
further believed that the Jewish people were destined to wander the earth until they converted
to Christianity. Jews were also vilified as “Christ-killers” and were blamed for the crucifixion.
In 70 c.e., Jews living in the province of Judea (now Israel) in the Roman Empire
revolted against oppressive measures and were crushed by the legions of the Emperor
Titus. His soldiers sacked the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and banished the
Jews from their holy land to the far reaches of Europe and Asia, scattering them from
present-day Portugal to present-day Iran. They joined other Jews in exile, also known as
the Diaspora, living among majority populations who did not share their beliefs and who
often viewed them with suspicion and mistrust.
In 380 c.e., Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. In the
centuries that followed, the Church was a powerful institution, aligned throughout Europe
with the governing authorities. Jews were forced to the margins of society and banished
to the role of perennial outsider. Most of the social, economic, and political restrictions
against Jews had the explicit sanction of church leaders. Seminal Christian thinkers from
Augustine in the fifth century to Martin Luther in the sixteenth denounced the Jews even as
they sought to convert them. Increasingly, European culture understood itself as explicitly
“Christian,” and Jews were characterized as alien, inferior, disloyal, exploitative.
The status of Jews in western Europe remained tenuous until the modern era. With
the English civil war in the seventeenth century and the French Revolution in 1789, Britain
and France formed the vanguard of the emancipation movement, which gave civil and
legal equality to Jews as religious kingdoms gave way to the modern national state.

| 111
By the late nineteenth century, Jews throughout western and central Europe had gained
the same rights. Austria-Hungary granted equal rights to Jews in 1867; the newly united
German Empire followed suit in 1871. Nevertheless, emancipation did not completely
eliminate social discrimination and antisemitism. For generations, Europeans had feared
and mistrusted Jews, seeing them as fundamentally foreign, untrustworthy, and inferior.
Emancipation could not change the public perception overnight. At the same time, the
legal foundation of equality allowed Jews to gradually assimilate into the larger cultural
mainstream and to compete with Christians for job opportunities and careers, particularly
in middle-class professions. Although antisemitism remained present throughout Euro-
pean societies and although members of all social groups held anti-Jewish opinions, Jews,
nevertheless, were gaining status and security as the nineteenth century ended.
In contrast, most East European Jews, which before 1914 included the Jews of Russia,
Romania, and the eastern borderlands of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy, lived in small, tightly knit communities called shtetls. They were separated
from their Christian neighbors by virtue of faith, culture, and language. They maintained
traditional religious observances and spoke in a German dialect called Yiddish. Although
they, too, were granted equal citizenship rights in the aftermath of World War I, most Jews
in Poland, Romania, Russia, and elsewhere still faced poverty, severe discrimination in
the public and private sectors, and periodic outbreaks of mass violence known as pogroms.
At the same time, in both East and West Europe, Jewish religious life, tradition, and culture
remained rich and vibrant. Jewish artists, writers, scholars, and scientists thrived and
made significant contributions to their fields of endeavor.

Herbert Mosheim (second from the left) poses in costume with friends during Karneval (also
known as Fasching or Fastnacht), which, like Mardi Gras, is a time of wild celebration, costume
balls, and revelry leading up to the beginning of Lent. German Jews participated fully in the
country’s public life, and it was not unusual for assimilated Jewish families to take part in
Christian holidays such as Karneval and Christmas. germany, 1929–32. ushmm, courtesy of susan
mosheim alterman

112 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 In 1933, the approximately 530,000 Jews in Germany constituted less than 1 percent
of the total population of 67 million people. This relatively small minority was generally
integrated in society; they tended to be proud of their citizenship in a country that
had produced many great poets, writers, musicians, and artists. About 100,000 German
Jews—a high percentage given their numbers—served in the German armed forces in
World War I. Between 30,000 and 35,000 were decorated for bravery; some 12,000 died
fighting. German Jews served in high public office; taught in universities; and were active
in the arts, the sciences, the professions, and commerce. Of the 38 Nobel Prizes won by
German writers and scientists between 1905 and 1936, 14 were awarded to Jews. During
the first third of the twentieth century, intermarriage had become more common; often,
Jews in such relationships converted to Christianity and raised their children in their new
faith. Although some German Jews continued to encounter discrimination in their social
lives and professional careers, many remained confident of their future under Weimar
democracy. They spoke the German language and regarded the country as their home.
Their identities as Germans seemed secure.
That confidence was badly shaken by the rise of the Nazi party and the appointment
of Hitler as chancellor of Germany. Little more than a radical fringe element just five
years earlier, Hitler and the Nazis were the largest and most powerful political party in
the German parliament by 1933. From this newly won position of strength, many radicals
within the Nazi movement were impatient to enact their long-standing agenda. Within
the framework of Nazi ideology, nothing was more central than antisemitism—it served
as impetus, rationale, and justification for virtually every major element of the party
platform. Once in power, Hitler encouraged latent currents of anti-Jewish feeling in
Germany and built upon those currents and other fears and prejudices to create and
implement policies of exclusion, isolation, and eventually murder.
The nature of Nazi antisemitism is difficult to grapple with, in part because it
was at one and the same time an outgrowth of the historical past and a relatively new
formulation that diverged significantly from traditional manifestations of antisemitism.
Historian Raul Hilberg proposed a framework that places the Nazis’ beliefs and actions
in the context of the whole history of Christian-based and secular antisemitism. He
pre­sents three successive trends: first, the Church attempted to convert Jews to Christianity;
second, when mass conversion proved impossible and unsuccessful, the Church and
then the secular leaders that followed it set out to banish the Jews from their midst by
excluding them, segregating them, and forcing them into exile; third, when this effort
failed to solve the so-called Jewish problem, the Nazis resolved to kill them. As Hilberg
put it:

114 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Since the fourth century after Christ, there have been three anti-Jewish policies: conversion,
expulsion, and annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third
emerged as an alternative to the second. […] The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect:
You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You
have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.

antisemitic policies in nazi germany, 1933–39

The Nazis did not take long to translate their antisemitic ideology into action. Over the
course of the first 60 days of the Nazi regime, radicals within the party and its para-
military organization, the SA (Sturmabteilungen), commonly known as storm troopers,
attacked those who “looked Jewish.” When reports of the street violence reached Great
Britain and the United States, pressure mounted for an embargo of German-made goods,
though no action was taken. In response, Hitler then ordered a boycott of Jewish-owned
businesses in Germany. Calling the images of Jews being humiliated by Nazi storm troopers
“atrocity propaganda,” Hitler framed the boycott as a protest against Jewish efforts to
tarnish the reputation of Germany abroad.
The boycott was the first public, nationwide move against the German Jewish com-
munity organized by the Nazi party. It began on the morning of Saturday April 1, 1933, as
party radicals, storm troopers, and SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite guard of the Nazi party,
paraded down the streets, warning the population not to shop in stores owned by Jews, and
then blocked entrances to thousands of Jewish-owned businesses across the country. They
painted Stars of David in yellow and black across doors and windows and carried signs
emblazoned with antisemitic slogans.
Popular reaction was mixed. In many places, spontaneous violence erupted against
Jews. Some Germans, however, made it a point of honor to enter Jewish-owned shops
or to call on Jewish friends. Others complained that the Nazi rowdies disrupted their
lives and contributed to public disorder. Many people continued to shop in their favorite
stores regardless of the boycott. Reactions in the press outside Germany were almost uni-
versally disapproving.
Despite the mixed results, the Nazis predictably proclaimed the boycott a success. Less
than a week later, Hitler issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,
which required, with a few exceptions, compulsory dismissal of Jews and other “non-Aryans”
and of alleged political opponents of the nation from all government positions. This step

the destruction of european jewry | 115

marked the beginning of a pattern that would repeat itself in years to come: anti-Jewish
agitation from party activists, sanctioned by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, would consis-
tently prompt the state bureaucracy to develop and implement discriminatory legislation
against Jews and to prepare the German population to accept those “legal” measures. At
the same time, because of the ambivalent response on the part of German citizenry to
the April boycott, Hitler refrained from issuing further public policy statements about
Jews. Over the next two years, Nazi anti-Jewish policy was generally characterized by the
imposition of quotas in higher education; exclusion of Jews from state employment,
the professions, and social organizations; and preferential treatment for non-Jews in a
broad range of areas.

Hanne Hirsch Liebmann (left) was born to a Jewish family in the German city of Karlsruhe in
November 1924. Her father, Max, was a photographer. When he died in 1925, Hanne’s mother,
Ella, continued to maintain his studio. In 1930, Hanne began public school. Three years later, she
experienced the boycott against Jewish businesses in Germany and the rising wave of antisemitism
in her native country.

In April 1933, our studio, like the other Jewish businesses in Karlsruhe, was plastered with signs during
the anti-Jewish boycott: “Don’t buy from Jews.” At school, a classmate made me so furious with her taunts
that I ripped her sweater. After the November 1938 pogroms, the studio was busy making photos
for the new ID cards marked “J” that Jews had to carry. The studio remained open until December 31
when all Jewish businesses had to be closed.

In 1940, Hanne was deported to the French-run detention camp of Gurs. Under the auspices
of the Children’s Aid Society, she eventually was sheltered in the French village of Le Chambon-
sur-Lignon. After 1942, when roundups in France intensified, she was taken in by two different
farming families. In early 1943, she escaped to Switzerland. Immediately after the war ended, she
married Max Liebmann, and three years later she emigrated with her husband and daughter to
the United States. le chambon, france, october 18, 1942. ushmm, courtesy of jack lewin

The 1933 pattern was repeated in 1935. After a spring and summer marred by both
spontaneous and organized street violence against Jews throughout Germany, Hitler

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decreed and the Reich parliament enacted two laws on September 15, 1935, at the annual
Nazi party rally in the city of Nuremberg. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the
Protection of German Blood and Honor would become the centerpiece of anti-Jewish
legislation in Germany. Generally known as the Nuremberg Laws, the decrees defined
who was and was not a Jew, and thus it clearly delineated between those who were encir-
cled in the protective shelter of the state and those who were outside it. Under the Reich
Citizenship Law, only people of “German or kindred blood” could claim the status of
Reich citizen. German Jews were relegated to “subjects of the state” overnight.
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor went on to legalize the segre­
gation of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans by banning intermarriage and redefining sexual
relations between them as “racial defilement,” a crime that could be prosecuted. It also
forbade German Jews to employ female non-Jewish household servants under the age of 45.
Throughout the centuries of antisemitic persecution in Europe, never before had a
need to legally define Jewishness existed. Jews were guided in their behavior and customs
by the principles of religious law and by generations of tradition. Those elements shaped
virtually every aspect of daily life, including the clothing Jews wore, the language they
spoke, the food they ate, and the holidays they celebrated. For hundreds of years, in con-
crete ways, and for better or worse, Jews were different and largely recognizable. By the
time the Nazis took power, things had changed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. No
longer obvious outsiders, many Jews had given up the traditional ways and had adopted
the cultural norms of mainstream society. Many abandoned the practice of Judaism and
celebrated secular and Christian holidays, especially Christmas. In this context, identify-
ing a Jew was not always easy. In the culture of fear and suspicion that the Nazis cultivated,
they persuaded the German people that nothing was more important than knowing one’s
enemies. The Jews among them had to be identifiable once again.
Defining Jewishness was not easy. The Nazis rejected the long-standing view of Jews
as members of a religious group and a cultural community. Instead, in keeping with their
ideology of racial struggle, they insisted that Jewishness was conferred by birth and de-
fined by blood descent. In their efforts to impose this new framework, however, the Nazis
faced a problem. In spite of elaborate efforts to prove a biological essence of Jewishness
using the pseudo-science of race hygiene, scientists could find no physical distinction
between Jews and Germans. The Nazis, determined to define Jews as a race, sought to
find their way around the problem by looking to familial ancestry, rather than personal
religious observance or belief, as the solution.
Under the Nuremberg Laws, people with three or more grandparents born into the
Jewish religious community counted as Jews in Nazi Germany. Although the Nazis called

118 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

this a “racial” definition for propagandistic reasons, they depended, in fact, on member-
ship in the Jewish community—rather than blood type, physical characteristics, or other
so-called racial identifiers—as the source of a person’s origins. The starting point for Jewish
identity was establishing religious affiliation—two generations back—and then defining
those people’s grandparents as “racially” Jewish. Furthermore, the general principle led
to elaborate variations, including certain exceptions and definitions of those who were
“part-Jewish” (Mischlinge). Despite the persistent rhetoric of Nazi ideology, no scientifically
valid basis existed for designating Jews as a race.
The Nazis’ action had the net effect of imposing a Jewish identity on tens of thousands
of people who did not think of themselves as Jews or who had no religious and cultural
ties to that community. Furthermore, the law classified as Jews many who had converted
from Judaism or even whose parents or grandparents had adopted another religion. Thus,
practicing Roman Catholics and Protestants—even priests, ministers, and nuns—sud-
denly found themselves defined as Jews and, just as abruptly, stripped of their citizenship
and deprived of their basic rights.
The Nuremberg Laws, in effect, reversed emancipation and unraveled the gains that
Jews had made in Germany over the previous century. Still worse, they laid the founda-
tion for future antisemitic measures by unequivocally dividing the nation into “Aryan”
Germans and Jews. For the first time in history, Jews were oppressed not for what they
believed, but for who they—or their parents—were by birth. As a result, the terms of the
law made Jewish identity impossible to deny or alter, representing a fundamental break
with the antisemitism of the past. In Nazi Germany, no profession of belief, no change
of affinity, and no act or statement on the part of a Jew could release him or her from the
destiny decreed by the state.
In Nazi Germany, propaganda was the face and voice of the Nazi party, constantly
reminding the German people how they must think and act. In March 1933, shortly after the
Nazis seized power, Hitler had established a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and
Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. Its aim was to ensure that the Nazi message was
successfully communicated through the news media (radio and print journalism) and edu-
cational material, as well as through art, music, theater, films, books, and other forms of enter-
taiment. Hitler described the function of propaganda in Mein Kampf, when he advocated its
use to spread the Nazi ideals of racism, antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. “Propaganda
attempts to force a doctrine on the whole people,” he wrote; “propaganda works on the
general public from the standpoint of an idea and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea.”
Propaganda addressed all aspects of daily life. Within this overwhelming barrage of
political, social, and cultural pressure, the Nazis orchestrated an antisemitic propaganda

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campaign designed to cultivate fear and hatred of Jews. Nazi propaganda attempted to
convince ordinary Germans that Jews were an alien people, who were separate from and
hostile to the nation and to the German “Aryan” race. Images depicted Jews as grotesque
caricatures and presented them as scheming, cunning profiteers who fed off Germany for
their own ends. Jews were portrayed as the antithesis of the pure “Aryan” German, who
was tall, muscular, and fair, with finely chiseled features, and who was usually shown
working at physical labor in the service of the nation. Propaganda artists established a
visual vocabulary that worked on the German collective psyche, thus linking the image
of “Aryans” with the beautiful, the good, and the noble and, conversely, associating Jews
with ugliness, dishonesty, greed, and destructiveness. This two-pronged approach—the
glorification of the Nazi regime, its leaders, and its goals, on one hand, and the intense
vilification of its so-called enemies, on the other—left no room for ambiguity in the public
imagination. Above all, anti-Jewish propaganda sent a message to Germans that the Jews
were an enemy lying in wait, plotting to harm the Fatherland. Every aspect of Nazi anti-
semitic propaganda was coordinated to ensure that Germans would fear and despise the
Jews and would eventually accept legal measures against them.
Another way in which the Nazis secured public acceptance of antisemitic policy was
by gradually, incrementally, and unrelentingly implementing anti-Jewish legislation. Dur-
ing the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939,
Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of
their public and private lives. Many of those laws were national ones that had been issued
by the German administration and affected all Jews. But state, regional, and municipal
officials, on their own initiative, also promulgated a barrage of exclusionary decrees against
Jews in their own communities. Thus, hundreds of individuals in all levels of govern-
ment throughout the country were involved in the persecution of Jews as they conceived,
discussed, drafted, adopted, enforced, and supported anti-Jewish legislation. No corner of
Germany was left untouched.
The first wave of legislation, from 1933 to 1934, focused largely on limiting the parti­
cipa­tion of Jews in German public life. As described previously, the April 1933 Law for the
Restoration of the Professional Civil Service forced half of the approximately 5,000 Jewish
government employees out of their jobs. During the same year, the city of Berlin forbade
Jewish lawyers and notaries to work on legal matters, the mayor of Munich disallowed Jewish
doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, and the Bavarian Interior Ministry denied admis-
sion of Jewish students to medical school. At the national level, the Nazi govern­ment
revoked the licenses of Jewish tax consultants; imposed a 1.5 percent quota on admission
of “non-Aryans” to public schools and universities; fired Jewish civilian workers from

120 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

the army; and, in early 1934, forbade Jewish actors to perform on the stage or screen.
Local governments also issued regulations that affected other spheres of Jewish life: in
Saxony, Jews could no longer slaughter animals according to ritual purity requirements,
effectively preventing them from obeying the Jewish dietary laws.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 heralded a new wave of antisemitic legislation that
brought about immediate and concrete segregation: Jewish patients were no longer ad-
mitted to municipal hospitals in Dusseldorf, German court judges could not cite legal
commentaries or opinions written by Jewish authors, Jewish officers were expelled from
the army, and Jewish university students were not allowed to sit for doctoral exams. Other
regulations reinforced the message that Jews were outsiders in Germany; for example,
in December 1935, the Reich Propaganda Ministry issued a decree forbidding Jewish
soldiers to be named among the dead in World War I memorials.
Government agencies at all levels aimed to exclude Jews from the economic sphere of
Germany by preventing them from earning a living. Jews were required to register their
domestic and foreign property and assets, a prelude to the gradual expropriation of their
material wealth by the state. Likewise, the German authorities intended to “Aryanize” all
Jewish businesses, a process involving the dismissal of Jewish workers and managers, as
well as the transfer of companies and enterprises to non-Jewish Germans, who bought
them at prices officially fixed well below market value. From April 1933 to April 1938,
“Aryanization” effectively reduced the number of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany
by approximately two-thirds.
By 1938, the signs grew still more foreboding as the government required Jews to
identify themselves in ways that would permanently separate them from the rest of the
population. In January, they were prohibited by law from changing their personal names
and the following April from altering the names of their businesses. Then, in August,
Jews whose names were not considered ethnically identifiable were required to adopt
the middle name Israel (for men) and Sara (for women). Finally, in October, Jews were
required to revalidate their passports, a procedure that involved marking the document
with a large red J.
This legislative assault had a powerful psychological component, which not only
worked against the Jews but also implicated the German citizenry. The government
issued laws gradually over a span of many years, and this incremental quality served to
camouflage the escalation that was, in fact, taking place. In that way, much of the non-Jewish
German public—as well as many Jews—were lulled into a false sense of complacency,
thus accommodating and normalizing each individual step. For the Nazis, however, each
law facilitated still more restrictive measures that weakened and demoralized individual

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Jews and the community as a whole while increasing the divide between Jews and non-Jews.
Moreover, the economic benefits that many non-Jewish Germans drew from the conse-
quences of this legislation reinforced their personal stake and interest in the survival of the
Nazi regime.
Until Nazi Germany started World War II in 1939, antisemitic legislation in Germany
served to “encourage” and ultimately to force a mass emigration of German Jews. The
Nazi government did all it could to induce the Jews to leave Germany. In addition to
making life miserable, the German authorities reduced bureaucratic hurdles so those
who wanted to leave could do so more easily. At the same time, the Nazis viewed the Jews’
belongings and their financial capital as German property, and they had no intention of
allowing refugees to take anything of material value with them. Most of those who fled had
to relinquish title to homes and businesses, and were subject to increasingly heavy emi-
gration taxes that reduced their assets. Furthermore, the German authorities restricted
how much money could be transferred abroad from German banks, and they allowed
each passenger to take only ten reichsmarks (about U.S. $4) out of the country. Most
German Jews who managed to emigrate were completely impoverished by the time they
were able to leave.

A refugee girl (left) arrives in Harwich, Great Britain, as part of a Kindertransport (Children’s
Transport) on December 2, 1938. For humanitarian reasons, Great Britain allowed the immigration
of approximately 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Nazi Germany. A similar provi-
sion providing a haven for Jewish children fleeing Nazi Germany, the Wagner-Rogers Act, failed
in Congress in the United States. harwich, great britain, december 2, 1938. ushmm, courtesy of
stadtmuseum baden-baden

Many nations in which the German Jews sought asylum imposed significant obstacles
to immigration. Application processes for entry visas were elaborate and demanding,

122 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Most German Jews who managed to emigrate

were completely impoverished

by the time they were able to leave.

requiring prospective immigrants to provide information about themselves and their
family members from banks, doctors, and the German police. In the case of the United
States, applicants were required to provide affidavits from multiple sponsors and to have
secured a waiting number within a quota established for their country of birth, which
severely limited their chances to emigrate. All this red tape existed against the backdrop
of other hardships: competition with thousands of equally desperate people, slow mail
that made communication with would-be sponsors difficult, financial hardships, and op-
pressive measures in Germany that made even the simplest task a chore. Finally, many
who wanted to flee had, by necessity, to apply to numerous countries for entry. It is no
wonder that for many Jews in Germany in the 1930s, the attempt to emigrate was more
than a full-time job.
The years in the late 1930s were particularly ill-suited for a major refugee crisis. A severe
worldwide economic depression reinforced through Europe and the United States an
existing fear and mistrust of foreigners in general, as well as antisemitism in particular.
Above all, people were wary of immigrants who might compete for their jobs, burden their
already beleaguered social services, or be tempted as impoverished workers by the prom-
ises of labor agitators or domestic Communist movements. Even government officials in
democratic countries were not immune to those sentiments. Most foreign countries,
including the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, were unwilling to increase their
immigrant quotas to admit very large groups of refugees, especially the impoverished
and the dispossessed. Indeed, the United States refused to reduce the myriad obstacles
to getting an immigrant visa, with the result that until 1938, the immigration quota for
Germany was unfilled. Many German Jews who were in immediate danger were forced to
emigrate elsewhere, such as France, Holland, and Czechoslovakia, where eventually the
wave of German conquest overtook them.
The bureaucratic hurdles for emigration were overwhelming. Far from streamlining
the process to allow more refugees to enter, nations required extensive documentation that
was often virtually impossible to obtain. In some cases, refugees literally faced a “catch-22”:
proof of passage booked on a ship was required for a visa, and proof of a visa was required
to book passage on a ship.

The following is a list of the documents required by the United States to obtain a visa:
· Five copies of the visa application
· Two copies of applicant’s birth certificate
· Quota number (establishing the applicant’s place on the waiting list)
· Two sponsors:

124 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 – Close relatives of the prospective immigrant were preferred

– The sponsors were required to be U.S. citizens or to have permanent resident status,

and they were required to have completed and notarized six copies of an Affidavit of
Support and Sponsorship
· Supporting documents:
– Certified copy of most recent federal tax return

– Affidavit from a bank regarding applicant’s accounts

– Affidavit from any other responsible person regarding other assets, (affidavit from

sponsor’s employer or statement of commercial rating)

· Certificate of Good Conduct from German Police authorities, including two copies of each:
– Police dossier

– Prison record

– Military record

– Other government records about individual

· Affidavits of Good Conduct (after September 1940) from several responsible

disinterested persons
· Physical examination at U.S. consulate
· Proof of permission to leave Germany (imposed September 30, 1939)
· Proof that prospective immigrant had booked passage to the Western hemisphere
(imposed September 1939)

After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and Nazi-sponsored street violence in both
Austria and Germany dramatically increased the numbers of German and Austrian Jews seek-
ing to emigrate, pressure mounted on U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the
intensified refugee crisis. He responded by proposing an international conference to be held
in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains on July 6–15, 1938. At the same time, the tenor of
the invitation was indicative of U.S. and international ambivalence about the refugee situation.
Thirty-three nations were invited with the reassurance that “no country will be expected
... to receive a greater number of immigrants than is permitted by existing legislation.” The
invitation further pointed out that refugee assistance programs would be financed by private
agencies and emphasized that no government funds would be required. In addition, Great
Britain was assured that the subject of Jewish immigration into Palestine would not be discussed.
President Roosevelt did not send his secretary of state to the conference; instead, he dispatched
Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and his personal friend, to represent the United States.
Two days after Roosevelt announced the Evian Conference, Adolf Hitler remarked, “I
can only hope that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals

the destruction of european jewry | 125

[the Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We
on our part are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries—for all
I care, even on luxury ships.”
The delegations from the invited nations did not convert sympathy into practical aid.
Representatives from country after country stood up and acknowledged the refugees’
plight but offered excuses and justifications for refusing to open their doors. Great Brit-
ain would admit few Jews and kept Palestine closed to large-scale Jewish immigration.
Canada was willing to accept farmers, but this opportunity did not help the urban-dwelling
Jews of Austria and Germany. Australia declined to assist because, in the words of its
representative, it “does not have a racial problem, and [is] not desirous of importing one.”
For its part, the United States continued to refuse to increase the number of immigrants
it would allow or to reduce the overwhelming bureaucratic hurdles involved in obtaining
a visa. Only the Dominican Republic offered substantial aid by agreeing to allow 100,000
Jews to enter its tiny country.
The consequences of the Evian Conference were dire for the Jews of Germany. They
were no better off in practical terms than they had been before the conference, yet their
oppressors seemed vindicated by the reluctance of Europe and the Americas to help them.
Adolf Hitler, himself, addressed the matter at the Party Congress in Nuremberg on Sep-
tember 12, 1938: “They complain … of the boundless cruelty with which Germany—and
now Italy also—seek to rid themselves of their Jewish elements.… But lamentations have
not led these democratic countries to substitute helpful activity…. [O]n the contrary, these
countries with icy coldness assured us that obviously there was no place for the Jews in
their territory.…” Although Hitler’s government would not implement the murder of the
European Jewish population for three more years, the events of Evian provided Nazi lead-
ers with a useful propaganda tool to explain why emigration would not work and to justify
more extreme measures of “removing” the Jews from German “living spaces.”
On November 7, 1938, a Polish Jewish student living in Paris was angered at Germany’s
treatment of his parents, Polish Jews who had been living and working in Germany but
who had been expelled recently. He assassinated a German diplomat at the embassy
in Paris. The Nazi leadership seized the opportunity to portray the act as an organized
effort by their enemies to destroy Germany. Just as they had blamed the Communists for
the Reichstag fire in 1933 and used the event to step up violence against their political
enemies, the Nazis accused “world Jewry” of orchestrating the assassination. In reprisal,
they unleashed a massive pogrom throughout the Reich, which by then included Austria
and the Sudeten German regions of Czechoslovakia. Although the Nazis presented the
events that followed as a spontaneous outburst of public rage, the pogrom was, in fact,

126 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

instigated and carried out by Nazi party officials, storm troopers, SS men, and Hitler
Youth. Its purpose was to prepare the German people to accept and endorse a new wave of
legislation aimed at eliminating the Jews entirely from the economic life of Germany and
forcing their expulsion from Germany.
The violence began on November 9 and lasted through November 10, 1938, with
sporadic acts of violence over the following days. The Nazis destroyed more than 250
synagogues, including many of the finest Jewish houses of worship in all of Europe, and
they damaged beyond repair thousands of precious ritual objects. They attacked anything
that was associated with Jews, thereby desecrating cemeteries; vandalizing businesses
and homes; looting property; and, in many cases, assaulting and even killing individuals.
At least 91 Jews were killed during the pogrom. Some ordinary citizens joined in the
destruction of property and physical assault on people, while others looked on, appalled
by the violence and disorder.
On orders from Gestapo headquarters, the German police rounded up about 30,000
Jewish men and incarcerated most of them in concentration camps. There the SS guards
treated them brutally; hundreds died within days or weeks of their arrival. The pogrom is
known as “The Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) to describe the wanton destruction
of glass windows that littered the streets of German cities after the authorities finally put
an end to the violence.
To add insult to injury, the Nazis blamed Jews for provoking the attack and held them
financially responsible for the cleanup. The Nazis imposed on the victims a penalty of one
billion reichsmarks (the equivalent of US$400 million at 1938 rates) and made Jews liable
for the repair of their damaged homes, shops, and synagogues. As a further burden, the
government appropriated the insurance payments owed to Jewish clients. Store and home-
owners were made to repair their buildings and replace their property at their own expense.
“The Night of Broken Glass” marked a turning point and prepared the political and
psychological atmosphere for yet another wave of anti-Jewish legislation. In the weeks
that followed, the government issued dozens of laws and decrees that deprived Jews
of their property and prevented them from earning a livelihood. The regulations also
excluded Jews from all aspects of public social life: the German authorities barred them
from all public schools and universities, as well as cinemas, theaters, and sports facilities.
In many cities, Jews were forbidden to enter designated “Aryan” zones, to enter public
parks, and to sit on certain benches. By the end of 1938, the driver’s licenses of Jews had
been revoked, and all their financial assets were frozen.
Meanwhile, Nazi aims regarding Jewish emigration escalated from encouragement to
outright force. Of the tens of thousands of Jewish men who had been arrested and sent

the destruction of european jewry | 127

to concentration camps, most were released only after they proved that they had made
arrangements to emigrate from Germany and to transfer their property and assets to non-
Jews. Under unprecedented pressure by their own government, tens of thousands of Jews
lined up at foreign consulates seeking visas and immigration papers.

The Jewish synagogue in Baden-Baden, Germany (left), continues to burn the morning after “The
Night of Broken Glass,” November 9–10, 1938. Synagogues occupy a central place in Jewish
religious and communal life. To the Nazis, however, they served as a powerful physical reminder
of the presence of Jews in Germany. The Nazis destroyed 250 synagogues in German-occupied
territory during “The Night of Broken Glass.” baden-baden, germany, november 10, 1938. ushmm,
courtesy of stadtmuseum baden-baden

Still, the international community failed to sufficiently loosen requirements, increase

quotas, and streamline bureaucratic processes. In 1939, the United States finally—and
for the first time—filled its combined German-Austrian quota (which, after March 1939
included the incorporated Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia). However, that limit
did not come close to meeting the demand. By the end of June 1939, 309,000 German,
Austrian, and Czech Jews had applied for only 27,000 places available under the U.S.
quota. Ultimately, only 43,450 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Czech lands immi-
grated to the United States in 1939. Other efforts by Americans to help the beleaguered
Jews of Germany failed. In particular, the Wagner-Rogers Bill, an effort to admit 20,000
endangered Jewish refugee children on an emergency basis, failed to pass the U.S. Senate
in 1939 and again in 1940.
The administrative obstacles to emigration were the most concrete, but not always the
most pressing, reason that people failed to exit Germany in time. German Jews thought of
themselves as Germans, and many simply could not accept that the rights and privileges
that had been theirs since emancipation had been so completely swept away. Until “The

the destruction of european jewry | 129

Night of Broken Glass,” German Jews had been tempted to believe that Nazism was a
temporary reactionary swing and that the most reasonable and prudent stance was to be
patient, to endure, and to wait for it to blow over. In addition, many German Jews—espe-
cially those who were established, middle or upper class, and culturally assimilated—had
much to lose. The thought of fleeing their homes, leaving behind family, friends, jobs
and professions, community, and all other familiar elements of daily life was emotionally
agonizing. Germany had been their home for generations, and their attachment to the
country of their birth kept them from understanding and accepting the precariousness
of their position. Indeed, to leave was to accept that they were no longer German citizens
but Jewish refugees. For many, the full understanding and recognition of the danger they
faced did not become clear until it was too late.
Despite the difficulties faced in trying to emigrate, by 1939, about half the German
Jewish population and more than two-thirds of Austrian Jews had fled Nazi persecution.
The ones who were able to emigrate settled mainly in Palestine, the United States, and
Central and South America. Under a program known as the Children’s Transport (Kinder-
transport), 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children were admitted to Great Britain during
1938–39. More than 18,000 Jews from the German Reich were also able to find refuge in
Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China. Still others made their way into other European
nations where they would be caught again in the Nazi net during the war.

world war ii
Nazi leaders planned World War II to accelerate the accomplishment of their long-term
goals. First and foremost, they wanted to conquer “living space” (Lebensraum), so that the
“Aryan” German race would have room to expand and thereby survive. Simultaneously, the
conflict would provide a cover and a justification to physically eliminate “racial” enemies,
especially the Jews, which the Nazis viewed as their highest priority. The Nazis drew on
the domestic consensus, or at least acquiescence, that they had carefully built among the
Germans to implement their territorial conquests.
As stated earlier, German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Two days later,
Britain and France declared war on Germany; they had issued a guarantee of Poland’s
borders five months earlier in an attempt to force Germany to negotiate for territorial
acquisition and to prevent military action. When their approach failed, the nations of
Europe found themselves at war.
Using the heightened sense of national emergency that accompanied the outbreak
of hostilities, the Nazi government imposed new decrees that discriminated against the
Jews who remained in Germany. Authorities subjected the Jewish population to a strict

130 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

curfew, excluded them from certain areas of cities, and limited the time periods in which
they could purchase provisions and supplies. When food rationing began, the German
authorities allotted reduced amounts for Jews and forbade them from buying certain
items. German authorities also ordered Jews to turn in their radios, electrical appliances,
bicycles, and cars to the police.
Additionally, the defeat and occupation of Poland by the German army in less than a
month brought nearly two million Polish Jews under German authority. This development,
as well as the refusal of Britain and France to accept Hitler’s offer to negotiate peace, further
complicated efforts to expel the Jews from areas in which Germans lived. Enemies of
Germany closed their borders to immigration from Germany, virtually denying would-be
emigrants a path to safety or a country willing to take them. The Nazi leadership had to
deal with a vastly increased Jewish population and few ways to force them out of territory
under German control.
Faced with such obstacles, the Nazis considered the idea of establishing a so-called
Jewish reservation. It was a concept that had been put forth as a solution to the “Jewish
question” in the nineteenth century and that regained currency among high-ranking
Nazis in the late 1930s. Before the war, planners had speculated that such a place would
be established by international action. In the face of the war, Nazi planners clearly
saw that they would have to act unilaterally, locating the reservation on territory under
German occupation.
When, in May 1940, the Germans invaded and swiftly conquered the western European
countries of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, the Nazi leadership
saw other possibilities open up for mass expulsion of the Jews to a given location. In
particular, the German victory over France led some policy planners to turn their atten-
tion to the large French island colony of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. They
focused on the idea of establishing a Jewish reservation there, because it was far from
lands on which Germans might settle. The concept of the Madagascar plan depended on
a German victory over or accommodation with the British, the continued neutrality of the
United States, and devotion of considerable naval and security resources to the removal
of Jews. The uncertainty of peace with or victory over the British became clear within
weeks of the armistice with France, and by September 1940, continued British domination
of the seas was clear.
As Hitler’s attention turned eastward toward the Soviet Union and a war that the
Nazis had always planned to fight, interest in Madagascar began to wane. At the same
time, Hitler’s preparation for invading the Soviet Union brought core Nazi goals into
sharp focus. A “final solution” to the “Jewish question” in Europe made sense only in the

the destruction of european jewry | 131

context of the do-or-die struggle between German Nazism and Soviet communism. The
Nazi leadership knew that the invasion of the Soviet Union would bring still more Jews
under German control and that the principle of preemptive action to subdue the “Jewish-
Bolshevik” enemy created an ideological and psychological atmosphere favoring even
more-radical solutions.

The youngest of seven children, Moishe Felman (left) was raised in a Yiddish-speaking, religious
Jewish home in Sokolow Podlaski, in central Poland. Moishe’s parents ran a grain business.
Moishe attended a Jewish school and began public school in Sokolow Podlaski in 1933.
Summer vacation had just finished, and 13-year-old Moishe was about to begin another year
at elementary school when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. German aircraft
bombed Sokolow Podlaski’s market and other civilian targets before German troops entered the
town on September 20. Three days later, they set fire to the main synagogue. Later, the Germans
confiscated the family’s grain business.
Over the next two years, the Germans imposed restrictions on the Jews, eventually ordering
them to wear an identifying Star of David on their clothing. On September 28, 1941, the Germans
set up a ghetto and concentrated all of the town’s Jews there. About a year later, on the most
solemn holiday of the Jewish religion, the Day of Atonement, the Germans began to round up
the people in the ghetto. Those who resisted or tried to hide were shot. Moishe, his mother, and
sister were herded onto the boxcar of a train.
On September 22, 1942, Moishe and his family were deported to the Treblinka extermination
camp. He was gassed there shortly after arriving. He was 16 years old. no date or place given.
ushmm.

The Nazis saw the conundrum in increasingly stark terms: on the one hand, they
endorsed an unshakable imperative to remove the Jews; on the other hand, they had
increasingly limited options to fulfill that goal. Although scholars still debate the timing
of the decision to physically annihilate the Jews of Europe, the steps the Nazi leadership
would take against the Jews in the Soviet Union would shape and focus their thinking on
that unprecedented and most radical “solution” to the dilemma of the “Jewish problem.”
While the Nazi leadership deliberated about what to do with Europe’s Jews, those leaders
took the intermediate step of concentrating, containing, controlling, and isolating them
in manageable pockets throughout Poland. The Nazis used as their model the medieval
ghetto, an area of town designated by Church authorities as a place where Jews were

the destruction of european jewry | 133

permitted to reside but were kept strictly separate from the Christian population. In the
twentieth century, ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe were typically composed
of a small number of streets surrounded by barbed wire, fences, or stone walls in the
poorest part of a city or town. In more-rural areas, ghettos were often not enclosed at
all and, in some cases, constituted the entire town. From the outset, the ghettos were
conceived not as a permanent solution to the “Jewish question” but as a provisional
measure to control, isolate, and segregate Jews pending their complete removal from
territories under German control.
The ghettos established by the German authorities were located primarily in eastern
Europe between 1940 and 1943 and in Hungary in 1944. Seeing no need to expend re-
sources on Jewish inhabitants, German occupation policy ensured virtually unlivable
conditions in most ghettos. They were severely overcrowded, little existed in the way of
sanitation or other measures to control disease, they generally lacked heat and electricity,
and food rations were almost always substandard and drastically limited. The brutal and
primitive living conditions heavily increased mortality rates from epidemic disease, mass
starvation, and exposure.

Jewish children (right) holding bowls for soup rations in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, between
1940 and 1943. The deprivations of ghetto life affected children with particular severity, turning
many of them into beggars and food smugglers. Weakened by hunger and disease, younger
children in the ghetto died more quickly than adults did; infants were the first to perish. A small
percentage of Jewish children were rescued by non-Jews, who hid them from the German authorities
and their accomplices. warsaw, poland, c.1940. ushmm, courtesy of instytut pamieci narodowej

134 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 The ghettos were conceived ... as a provisional measure

to control, isolate, and segregate Jews

pending their complete removal

from territories under German control.

 Initially created as a short-term measure, ghettos existed for as long as three years in
occupied Poland (and later in the Soviet Union). During that time, German enterprises,
including those owned by the armed forces, the SS, the civilian occupation authorities,
and private individuals, took the opportunity to exploit the residents for inexpensive
forced labor. Some Jewish ghetto administrations sought investment in the ghettos, par-
ticularly from the army and the private sector, in the hope of improving conditions and
even ensuring survival in return for production of usable goods. The German civilian
authorities continued to allot food and supply rations that were just enough to keep alive
those able to work, while those who were weakened by exhaustion or illness inevitably
died. Hard labor came to dominate the lives of ghetto inhabitants, and they quickly came
to see a relationship between their ability to produce—individually and collectively—and
their ongoing survival.
By 1941, conditions in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland had deteriorated to
such an extent that they were places of mass death. The results could hardly have been
otherwise, considering the Germans’ deliberate neglect of the residents’ basic needs. Some
historians have argued that, had the Germans left the harsh ghetto regime intact, Polish
Jewry might well have been annihilated within ten years. Although those ghettos in which
both military and private entrepreneurs had invested significantly had advocates for
continued existence among the German civilian administrators, the SS and police—who
used ideological and security arguments—and German health officials in the occupation
bureaucracy—who feared epidemics that might spread to the non-Jewish population—won
the debate.

German Einsatzgruppen (Mobile Killing Squad) soldiers guard Jewish women and children (right)
before massacring them. In the background, other Jews are forced to undress and their clothing
is heaped on the ground. This photo, originally in color, was part of a series taken by a German
military photographer. Copies from this collection were later used as evidence in war crimes
trials. lubny, [ukraine] ussr, october 16, 1941. with permission of the hamburger institut für
sozialforschung

136 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

The Nazis, and many other Germans understood the war

as a life-and-death struggle between two world views–

the “German/Aryan” and the “Jewish/communist”–

in which no compromise was possible.

 Moreover, in the first months of 1941, the Nazi leaders were deep in planning for the
invasion of the Soviet Union, which would, in turn, bring millions more Jews under their
control. Against the backdrop of the failed plans for mass expulsion and plans to initiate
the conflict that would destroy the archenemy of National Socialism, the Nazi leaders took
a first, practical step toward the “Final Solution”; they planned the murder of the Jewish
population throughout the Soviet Union.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, violating the existing nonaggression
pact between the two countries and initiating a war that would make genocide possible.
The Germans presented the invasion as a historic struggle against the Bolshevik ideology,
which was supposedly disseminated by Jews, and as an attack on the Soviet Union, which
was the seat of world communism. More than other conflicts, the Nazis and many other
Germans understood the war as a life-and-death struggle between two world views—the
“German/Aryan” and the “Jewish/Communist”—in which no compromise was possible.
In this context, German authorities gave their invading forces explicit orders to target for
annihilation all potential enemies, particularly Jews, Roma, members of the Soviet state
and Communist Party elites, and anyone else who might oppose their permanent rule.
Mobile Killing Squads of German SS and police personnel, who followed the German
army as it advanced deep into Soviet territory, were tasked with identifying and murder-
ing those whom they perceived to be racial or political enemies of Germany, as well as
developing intelligence nets to flush out those enemies who were not immediately visible.
Because Nazi ideology defined Soviet Jews as especially dangerous, the Mobile Killing
Squads, together with the auxiliary forces that they recruited from local collaborators and
the German Order Police units that reinforced them, first shot primarily Jewish men of
arms-bearing age, then buried them in mass graves. By the end of July, however, German
forces began to annihilate entire Jewish communities—men, women, and children—
without regard for age or sex. Those who were able to flee the massacres were often killed
by the local population or turned over to the Germans to be shot. SS and police units also
killed Roma and officials of the Soviet state and the Communist Party, as well as thousands
of residents of institutions for people with mental and physical disabilities.
The civilian German administrator of the Belorussian town of Slutsk witnessed and
reported on a massacre in his locale as follows:

As far as the manner in which this action was carried out, it is with deepest regret that I have to
state that this bordered on the sadistic.… The Jewish people but also [non-Jewish] White Russians
were taken from their homes and rounded up with indescribable brutality by both the German

138 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

police officials and, in particular, the Lithuanian partisans. Gunfire could be heard everywhere
in the town and the bodies of the executed Jews piled up in the streets.… I was not present at
the shooting which took place outside the town. I cannot, therefore, make any remarks about
the brutality. It should however suffice to say that some time after the graves had been filled up
victims managed to work their way out of them.

One of the most infamous massacre sites was Babi Yar, a ravine situated just out-
side Kiev in Ukraine. By the time the Germans captured Kiev on September 19, 1941,
more than half the Jews who lived there had managed to flee. Ten days after taking the
city, the Germans ordered the remaining Jews to report for supposed resettlement. Jews
who ignored the German order faced the death penalty. Whole families, from infants to
grandparents, followed the German directive and appeared at the assembly point, having
no idea of the fate that awaited them. They were directed to proceed along Melnik Street
toward the Jewish cemetery and into an area that included the cemetery itself and a part of
the Babi Yar ravine. It was cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence and guarded by Germans
and Ukrainian auxiliary police. As the Jews approached the ravine, they were forced to
hand over their valuables, take off all their clothes, and advance toward the ravine edge in
groups of ten. When they reached the edge, German SS and police gunned them down
with automatic weapons. At the end of the day, the bodies were covered over with a thin
layer of soil. In two days of shooting, the Germans and their auxiliaries had killed more
than 33,000 Jews. In the months that followed, thousands more were killed at Babi Yar,
including many Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. The final death toll at Babi Yar has
been estimated at 100,000.
Most men of the Mobile Killing Squads were ideologically committed individuals, but
they drew support and reinforcement from tens of thousands of German Order Police
and military personnel, many of whom had not joined either the Nazi party or the SS. The
killing units also depended on assistance from local populations, who were not necessarily
adherents of Nazi ideology but whose actions clearly represented a willingness to kill Jews
and Communists. Many scholars believe that the systematic slaughter of Jews in the occu-
pied Soviet Union was a critical test of the readiness of ordinary people—both German and
non-German—to acquiesce and in some cases to participate in organized mass murder.

the “final solution”

The “Final Solution” was the Nazis’ comprehensive program to solve the “Jewish question”
by murdering every Jew in Europe. It was the culmination of a process in Nazi anti-Jewish

the destruction of european jewry | 139

policy that began with legal discrimination against Jews in Germany, transitioned to coercive
emigration and schemes for mass expulsion, and then escalated from the mass murder of
the Soviet Jews to the attempted annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

A family (left) poses for a photograph in the prewar Polish town known in Yiddish as Eishishok
and in Polish as Ejszyszki (present-day Eišiškes, Lithuania). The history of this town mirrors that
of many Jewish communities in eastern Europe. German troops arrived on June 23, 1941, and
less than three months later, on September 21, an SS Mobile Killing Squad entered the town, ac-
companied by Lithuanian auxiliaries. Four thousand Jews from Eishishok and its environs were
herded into three synagogues and imprisoned there. They were taken in groups of 250 to the
old Jewish cemetery where SS men ordered them to undress and stand at the edge of open pits.
There, Lithuanian auxiliary troops shot them to death. Over only a few days, the massacre ended
900 years of Jewish life and culture in Eishishok. Today, no Jews live there. eishishok (present-day
eišiškes, lithuania), before 1941. with permission of the shtetl foundation

The exact timing of the decision to implement the “Final Solution” will probably never be
known and remains a subject of debate among scholars. Implementation of the policy surely
was accelerated by the unparalleled success of German forces in the Soviet Union in
the summer of 1941, when the prospect of victory over the Soviets and indeed all of Europe
seemed within reach. After the SS and police had begun to physically annihilate entire
Jewish communities in the east, mass murder became not only conceivable but also
achievable in practice—a more “final” solution than mass expulsion. But some of the
inherent problems in the killing operations in the Soviet Union rendered them difficult, if
not impossible, to implement elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. Murder by shooting in
open-air pits was slow, inefficient, and psychologically traumatic for some of the shooters;
also, it tended in the long term to awaken genuine unrest in the indigenous populations.

the destruction of european jewry | 141

 The tactics used by the German authorities to kill Jews in Russia could not be exported
to Germany and western Europe. Outright killings in plain sight of the local populations
not only would present serious opposition to the Nazi regime, but also would allow news
of the atrocities to spread throughout the world at large. Mindful of those issues, the SS
and police leaders merged elements of their past programs to develop the “Final Solu-
tion.” In addition to continuing the police shootings in the Soviet Union and the General
Government, the SS and police leaders established stationary killing centers at locations
convenient to deportation of the large numbers of Polish Jews. Using the model of the
“euthanasia” program gas chambers or the gas vans that had been used in Serbia and Soviet
Russia, they chose as a killing method suffocation with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B gas.
To ensure security and to facilitate deception, the Nazis located the killing centers in areas
of Poland that were distant from the German and west European population centers; they
were also at some distance from the major ghettos where the Polish Jews were concentrated.
To gua­rantee both security and secrecy, the Germans would carry out the actual gassing
operations inside secured enclosures, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded on the
perime­ter. Drawing on the experience of earlier population resettlement programs, the
Germans would transport the Jews to their deaths using existing European rail routes,
augmented by special rail spurs into the killing centers themselves. The German au-
thorities planned to hide the murders behind the deceptive facade of “Resettlement
in the East.” In the autumn of 1941, SS and police officials began the construction of
special gassing facilities, and on December 8, 1941, the first killing operations began at
Chelmno in occupied Poland.
On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi party, SS, and German government
officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the
implementation of the “Final Solution.” The participants at the conference did not deli­
berate whether such a plan should be undertaken but instead discussed the mechanics and
logistics needed to realize a decision that had already been made. Most of them were
already aware that Jews were being killed, but they received a fuller briefing on the scope
of the mass-murder program. Nazi planners envisioned that the “Final Solution” would
ultimately involve 11 million European Jews from Ireland to the Urals and from Scandinavia
to Spain—in short, every Jew in Europe. More than half of the conference participants
held doctoral degrees. No one protested the plan or the decision to implement it.
Likewise, the “Final Solution” could not have taken place without the contributions
of countless regular citizens who came from all walks of life and all levels of society.
Although few thought of themselves as criminals, most understood the consequences of
their actions. Some perpetrators had held official office before Hitler’s rise to power;

142 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

others were newcomers seeking to establish themselves. Some were zealots motivated by
Nazi racial ideology; a great many others merely followed orders; still others justified their
actions as a defense of their nation, society, and culture against Soviet communism; and,
finally, some were motivated by personal gain, jealousy, or revenge.
Most Germans performed small roles in what became a vast undertaking. Using assembly-
line techniques, individuals did their jobs within a bureaucratic apparatus that allowed
them to remain detached from the consequences of their actions. The participants included
high-ranking bureaucrats who helped formulate and implement the “Final Solution” and
those who identified and located the victims. They included lawyers who handled the
“Aryanization” of property owned by Jews, industrialists who profited from the forced
labor of concentration camp inmates, and contractors who built the gas chambers and
supplied Zyklon B gas to the SS. In a more direct way, the SS men who operated the killing
centers in German-occupied Poland helped, as did the ordinary soldiers and police officials
who shot Jews at the edge of mass graves in the Soviet Union. The Nazi leadership depended
on the active cooperation of regular people in regular professions, and, at the very least,
the silent acquiescence of others who did not carry out Nazi orders directly.
By the summer of 1942, more than 400 ghettos of varying sizes had been established
throughout German-occupied eastern Europe. They held more than two million Jews and,
in the Warsaw and Lódź ghettos, more than 8,000 Roma. The provisional nature of the
ghettos evolved into a semi-permanent one as the Nazis translated the “Final Solution”
from concept to reality. The largest of the ghettos included those of Warsaw, Lódź, Sosnowiec,
and Bialystok in Poland; Minsk in Belorussia; Kovno (present-day Kaunas) and Vilna
(present-day Vilnius) in Lithuania; and Riga in Latvia. The larger ghettos were sealed off
from the outside world with high walls or fences, along with barbed wire. Signed passes
were required to enter or leave, and armed guards stood at entrances and exits.
Smaller ghettos, such as those of Radom, Chelm, and Kielce, were usually surrounded
only by a fence, and Jews could enter and leave them with relative ease. Some ghettos,
.
such as Izbica, Piaski, and Belzyce, encompassed virtually whole towns and were not bor-
dered off at all. Some of the “open” ghettos were short-lived: the SS and police annihilated
them after a short period of time, either shooting the inhabitants or deporting them to
concentration camps or killing centers. With the Nazi decision for mass murder in 1942,
the German authorities began the long and involved process of emptying the ghettos in
the occupied east and deporting the inhabitants to killing centers.
As a general rule, the Nazis did not use ghettos in Germany or in western Europe.
Beginning in September 1941, the Nazis required all Jews who lived in those areas and were
over the age of six to wear the yellow Star of David badge; plus, strict residence ordinances

the destruction of european jewry | 143

forced the inhabitants into certain areas of the cities, thereby concentrating them in “Jewish
buildings.” Deportation of Jews from Germany began on October 15, 1941, even before the
Germans began construction of the killing centers in occupied Poland. Between October
and December 1941, nearly 42,000 Jews were deported from Germany, Austria, and the
Czech lands to ghettos in the east and later to the killing centers.
In November 1941, the SS established the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto near the Czech
city of Prague in northwest Bohemia. Although it fulfilled the role of both a ghetto and
a transit camp by confining Jews until such time as the Germans chose to deport them
farther east, Theresienstadt simultaneously served an important propaganda function for
the SS. The German authorities repeatedly stated publicly that the deportation of Jews
from Germany was part of a resettlement operation, where they would be employed in
“productive” labor. The purpose of this deception was primarily for domestic German con-
sumption, because the Nazi leaders feared that public unrest might arise if the population
knew exactly what was being done in the killing centers. Hence, the reality of the ghettos,
camps, and killing centers could not be publicly confirmed. But how would it look to
deport elderly Jews who were clearly unsuitable for labor, and how could one explain the
disappearance of prominent Jewish artists, thinkers, writers, and others? The Nazis saw
Theresienstadt as a suitable cover to respond to those Germans who were not entirely
satisfied with the official explanations of the fate of all German Jews in the east.
In Nazi propaganda, Theresienstadt was presented as a retirement ghetto where
German Jews—primarily the elderly; disabled war veterans; or prominently known artists,
writers, or entertainers—could live in safety. Eventually, it was portrayed to the Interna-
tional Red Cross and the world at large as a “city” for the Jews, complete with amenities
and comforts for adults and children alike. The German public and the International Red
Cross, who were permitted access in June 1944, were all too willing to accept this decep-
tion, or at least not to probe further. In fact, Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for
nearly 70,000 Czech Jews en route to Auschwitz and other ghettos and camps, as well as
a temporary residence for nearly 20,000 German and Austrian Jews whom the Germans
eventually deported to killing centers. In all, nearly 141,000 German, Austrian, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, Slovak, and Hungarian Jews arrived in Theresienstadt during the war.
More than 88,000 of them were deported to their deaths, the majority at Auschwitz. Nor
was the reality of Theresienstadt itself much different from other ghettos: about 33,500 of
its residents died from the harsh conditions in the ghetto.
For the German authorities, the ghettos continued to serve the provisional purpose
of concentrating and isolating the Jewish population; but, in reality, the complexity of
implementing the “Final Solution” required maintaining many ghettos for years. The

144 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Jews confined there necessarily developed an intricate and involved communal life over
time. While daily survival was necessarily dominated by the realities of work, food, shelter,
health, and well-being, the Jews in the ghetto—in part through the efforts of the Jewish
Councils—also found ways to educate their children, organize cultural and social events,
clandestinely observe their faith, and engage in countless other activities that sustained
them amid unrelenting deprivation.

german policies in western europe

Almost immediately following the German invasion and the occupation of western
Europe in June 1940, the Germans initiated steps that would later facilitate implementing
the “Final Solution” there. With varying degrees of help from indigenous governments
and officials, they applied the experience gained in Germany to the occupied countries
or dependent partners, often initiating an overwhelming barrage of antisemitic laws
in rapid succession. For those who were defined as Jews, the Germans, or collaborators,
then restricted or eliminated their civil rights, confiscated their property and businesses,
and banned them from most professions. Isolated from non-Jews and, in most countries,
marked with the yellow Star of David, Jews were without recourse.
The next step for the Nazis was to establish internment or transit camps that would
serve as portals from the western European countries to the railways leading to the east.
Beginning in 1942, German authorities and their collaborators gathered tens of thousands
of Jews in special police transit camps such as Drancy in France, Malines in Belgium, and
Westerbork in Holland, where the Jews were confined in limbo for days, weeks, and some-
times months or years. Meanwhile, a steady stream of Jews in transit camps were loaded
onto trains and deported to the concentration camps and killing centers in the east.
German anti-Jewish policy in the occupied countries always reflected the goals of the
“Final Solution.” However, the ultimate fate of each community varied, depending on the
degree of control the Germans exercised; the number of Jews; and the level of cooperation
the Germans received from indigenous government or other agencies, administrative
officials, and individual civilians. In general, foreign and stateless Jews who had taken
refuge in western Europe in the 1930s were especially vulnerable. Host countries did not
feel obligated to keep or protect those Jews, and indeed, they often viewed them as an
unnecessary burden in very trying times. When the Germans demanded Jews for deporta-
tion, foreign or stateless Jews were the first to be surrendered.
About 350,000 Jews lived in France at the time of the German invasion. Beginning in
March 1942, the French police assisted in carrying out the deportations, both in the
German-occupied zone of northern France and in the unoccupied south. By the end of

the destruction of european jewry | 145

the war, the Germans had deported and killed nearly 75,000 Jews who had resided in
France. Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Jewish community numbered about 66,000. From
the summer of 1942 to mid 1944, 25,000 Jews—more than one-third—were deported to
Auschwitz by way of Belgian transit camps. In the Netherlands, the Dutch civil adminis-
tration, supervised by the Germans, deported about 107,000 of 140,000 Jews residing in
Holland to the killing centers through the transit camps at Westerbork and Amersfoort.
Barely more than 5,000 survived.
The transportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals from their homes across
the continent of Europe could not have taken place without trains. In that regard, the
European rail system played a crucial role in the implementation of the “Final Solution,”
thereby linking the collection centers, internment and transit camps, and ghettos to labor
and concentrations camps and to killing centers where the Jews and others were put to
death. The Germans used both freight and passenger cars for the deportations and doubled
the number of passengers who could fit in each car to maximize the efficiency of each trip.
Reflecting the high priority of their mission, the transports rolled as often as possible.
The Germans did not tell the Jews where they were going, how long the journey would
last, or what would happen once they reached their final destination. They also did not
provide the deportees with food or water, even when the transports had to wait days on
railroad spurs for other trains to pass. The people sealed in freight cars suffered from
intense heat in summer and freezing temperatures in winter. Aside from a bucket, no
provisions existed for sanitary requirements. Deprived of food and water, many deportees
died before the trains reached their destinations. Armed guards accompanying the train
transports shot anyone trying to escape.
German transportation officials and local railroad workers could see that large numbers
of people arrived at isolated railroad stations in German-occupied Poland and disappeared
into makeshift facilities. Local officials, in particular, also saw that the returning trains
were either empty or filled with the possessions of those who had just arrived. Most sus-
pected and many knew full well that the SS was killing the Jews who arrived on transport
trains at those locations, but no record exists of any railroad employees protesting or
resigning. Between the fall of 1941 and the fall of 1944, the German authorities transported
millions of people by train to murder sites in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet
Union. After the war, despite the complicity of hundreds of railroad workers, not one
German transportation official was convicted of Nazi crimes.
The killing centers fulfilled the singular function of mass murder: the SS and police
designed, organized, and operated them to have the capacity so that by the end of the day
they could put to death entire transports which had arrived that morning. With the

146 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

exception of those few selected for work in support of the assembly-line mass murder, no
one—not the young, the healthy, or the fit for work—was spared. The first killing center
was Chelmno, which began operations in December 1941 on an estate some 30 miles
(48.3 kilometers) northwest of Lódź, in German-occupied Poland. On arrival, the SS and
police induced or forced the Jews to undress and relinquish their valuables and then
herded them into closed paneled trucks. Engineers and mechanics hermetically sealed
the trucks and reconfigured the exhaust pipes to pump carbon monoxide exhaust fumes
into the back of the truck until those inside were dead. Between December 1941 and July
1944, the SS and police killed 156,000 people at Chelmno, most of them Jews, but about
5,000 were Roma. No victims are known to have escaped.
In 1942 in the General Government, SS and police engineers constructed the killing
centers of Belz· ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The centers functioned in support of Operation
Reinhard, one element of which encompassed the murder of all Jews residing in the
General Government. Just as Nazi planners had envisioned, the SS and police staffs at
those centers could commit mass murder quickly, efficiently, and with minimal oversight;
they killed all but a handful of deportees shortly after arrival by means of carbon monoxide
gas in stationary gas chambers modeled on the T-4 killing operations.
The camp authorities temporarily spared a small number of “work Jews” to facilitate
the process, assisting the deportees off the trains and through the various stages to the gas
chambers, all the while being required to calm the victims with reassurances about the
future. Others in the labor details removed the corpses and buried them. After the autumn
of 1942, when the SS authorities decided to burn the corpses, the forced labor details
were required to exhume them and burn them over large outdoor ovens made of rail
track. Finally, the killing center authorities deployed Jews to sort through the victims’
personal possessions and to prepare them for shipment to Germany. Every few weeks
or months, the SS would kill the “work Jews,” replacing them with new arrivals. SS and
police personnel murdered approximately 1.7 million Jews as part of Operation Reinhard.
Very few deportees survived the camps: some 300 survived Sobibór and about 120 survived
Treblinka, virtually all as a result of uprisings that occurred in 1943. Only two individuals
are known to have survived Belz· ec.
The Auschwitz concentration camp, located about 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) west of
Kraków in southwestern Poland, was the largest camp complex established by the Germans
during World War II. It included a concentration camp–detention facility (Auschwitz I), a
killing center (Auschwitz II or Birkenau), and a second concentration camp that served as
a hub for a vast string of forced labor camps (Auschwitz III or Monowitz). By spring 1943,
Auschwitz-Birkenau had four gas chambers in operation.

the destruction of european jewry | 147

 Unlike the Operation Reinhard camps, but like other concentration camps that had
gas chambers, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp staff used Zyklon B gas for mass murder.
Trains brought Jews almost daily to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Germany itself and virtually
every German-occupied country. Prisoners arriving at the camp were sentenced to one of
two fates: immediate death or brutal labor under conditions that were frequently lethal.
On the basis of selections often casually made when a transport arrived, the SS staff sent
the sick, the elderly, pregnant women, and children directly to the gas chambers; healthy-
looking male and female prisoners were brought into the camp as forced laborers.

Jewish women, children, and the elderly (left) await deportation at the railroad station in Köszeg,
a small town in northwestern Hungary. köszeg, hungary, may 1944. ushmm, courtesy of magyar
nemzeti muzeum torteneti fenykeptar

Registered in more or less the same fashion as the inmates of other concentration
camps, Auschwitz prisoners had their heads shaved and were issued ragged, striped camp
uniforms. They also—unlike other camp inmates—had a number tattooed on the left fore-
arm, a practice initiated at Auschwitz because the camp authorities could not maintain pace
in record keeping with the number of deaths and wanted to be certain that the dead could be
identified even if the bodies were quickly stripped of their prisoner uniforms. Indeed, tens
of thousands perished because of the unbearable living and working conditions. They were
packed into bunks in barracks that barely provided shelter, they received little to eat, and
they were punished by long hours of physically exhausting labor.

the destruction of european jewry | 149

 The SS sent almost all children and adolescents under the age of 15 who arrived at
Ausch­witz immediately to the gas chambers. During the deportation of the Hungarian Jews
in 1944, the camp staff on occasion killed as many as 10,000 Jews in a single day. The bodies
were incinerated in crematoria adjacent to the gas chambers; in the case of a malfunction,
the bodies were burned in open fields. Between the establishment of Auschwitz I in 1940
and the evacuation of the complex in January 1945, the SS at Auschwitz killed about one
million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war.
Lublin concentration camp, which was also known as Majdanek, in German-occupied
Poland, was also a site of mass killing. It had served first as a detention center for prisoners
of war and was redesignated a concentration camp in February 1943. In all, nearly 100,000
people died in Majdanek. The majority were Jews; other victims included Polish and
Soviet civilians, plus Soviet prisoners of war. On November 3, 1943, SS and police units
shot 18,000 Jewish prisoners in pits dug behind Majdanek as part of the grotesquely
named Operation Harvest Festival. As the victims were led outside the barbed-wire
fence of the camp, the Germans broadcast military music to hide the sounds of the
shooting. This massacre was the largest single-day shooting operation in the history of
the Holocaust.
Gradually, the Jews began to understand the nature and scope of the German killing
policy. In response, and despite the overwhelming nature of the assault they faced,
Jews organized and carried out armed resistance against their oppressors. They faced
tremendous obstacles, including a lack of armaments and training, the hazards of carry-
ing out operations in a hostile zone, the minimal support and even antisemitic hostility
from the surrounding population, the necessity of parting with family, and the ever-
present Nazi terror. Nevertheless, both as individuals and in organized groups, Jews
engaged in opposition efforts in France, Belgium, Belorussia, Lithuania, Poland, and
Ukraine. They also fought in national French, Greek, Italian, Soviet, and Yugoslav
resistance organizations.
Resistance organizations emerged in more than 100 ghettos in Poland, Lithuania,
Belorussia, and Ukraine; and Jews fought back when the Germans attempted to establish
ghettos in a number of small towns, including Starodub (now Russia), Kleck (Kletsak),
Lachwa, Mir, and Tuczyn (Tuchyn, now Ukraine) in eastern Poland in 1942. As the Germans
destroyed major ghettos in 1943, they met with armed Jewish resistance in Kraków, Bialystok,
Czestochowa, Bedzin, Sosnowiec, and Tarnów, as well as a major uprising in Warsaw.
Thousands of Jews escaped from the ghettos and joined partisan units in nearby forests.
Jews from Minsk, Vilna (present-day Vilnius), Riga, and Kovno (present-day Kaunas) all
formed partisan units that engaged in armed resistance. Many ghetto fighters knew that

150 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

their efforts could not save Jewish masses from destruction, but they fought for the sake
of Jewish honor and to avenge the murder of their families, friends, and communities.
The largest and best-known armed resistance effort was the Warsaw ghetto uprising
in April–May 1943, which was sparked by rumors that the Nazis would deport the
remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center in German-occupied Poland.
As German forces entered the ghetto, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization
·
(Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) pelted German tanks with hand grenades and Molotov
cocktails. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the
ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point
for deportation. In the end, the Germans burned the ghetto to the ground to force the
Jews out. It took 27 days to destroy the ghetto and crush the last resisters. Although they
knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and valiantly.
In western Belorussia, western Ukraine, and eastern Poland, Jewish civilians gathered in
camps and assisted Soviet partisan efforts by repairing weapons, making clothing, cooking
for the fighters, and participating in active assaults on the Germans. As many as 10,000
Jews survived the war by taking refuge with those partisan units.
Despite the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating resistance
and uprisings in the German camps, as well, and even in the killing centers of Treblinka,
Sobibór, and Auschwitz-Birkenau during 1943–44. About 1,000 Jewish prisoners participated
in the revolt in Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, Jews seized what weapons they could find—
picks, axes, and some firearms stolen from the camp armory—and they set fire to the camp.
About 200 managed to escape. The Germans recaptured and killed about half of the escapees.
On October 14, 1943, prisoners in Sobibór killed 11 SS guards and police auxiliaries and set the
camp on fire. About 300 prisoners escaped, breaking through the barbed wire and risking
their lives in the minefield surrounding the camp. More than 100 were recaptured and later
shot. On October 7, 1944, prisoners assigned to Crematorium IV at Auschwitz-Birkenau
rebelled after learning that they were going to be killed. The Germans crushed the revolt and
murdered almost all of the several hundred prisoners involved in the rebellion. Other camp
uprisings took place in the Kruszyna (1942), Minsk-Mazowiecki (1943), and Janowska
(1943) camps. In several dozen camps, prisoners organized escapes to join partisan units.
In France, the Jewish Army (Armée Juive), a French Jewish partisan group, was founded
in Toulouse in January 1942. Composed of members of Zionist youth movements, the Jewish
Army operated in and around Toulouse, as well as Lyon, Nice, and Paris. Its members
smuggled money from Switzerland into France to assist Jews in hiding; smuggled at least
500 Jews and non-Jews into neutral Spain; and took part in the 1944 uprisings against the
Germans in Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse.

the destruction of european jewry | 151

 The Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (more commonly known as Solidarité)
was a Jewish Communist organization that carried out attacks on German personnel in
Paris. Many Jews joined the general French resistance as well. In Belgium, a combined
Jewish and non-Jewish resistance unit (also named Solidarité) derailed a deportation train
in April 1943. On July 25, 1942, Jewish resisters attacked and burned the files of the
Association of Jews in Belgium, which had functioned—at German direction—as a Jewish
Council. Jews were also active in the Dutch and Italian underground movements.
The effect of armed Jewish resistance should not be exaggerated. In part because of
existing antisemitism among the surrounding populations, Jewish partisans received
little help. Their isolation was reinforced by the fact that the Allies failed to provide arms
and explosives, and their effectiveness was severely hindered by the all-encompassing
strength and power of the enemy. In the end, Jewish resistance efforts did little to stop the
Germans from mass-murdering the Jews.
In addition to participating in armed operations, Jews resisted the Nazis by focusing
on aid to those in hiding, rescue, escape, and spiritual defiance. Jews in the ghettos and
camps also responded to Nazi oppression by creating and sustaining cultural institutions,
continuing religious observance, and undertaking efforts to document their experiences
under Nazi oppression. Individuals and groups attempted to preserve their history, culture,
communal life, and evidence of their destruction through diaries, testimonies, communal
records, poetry, song, and art. Their efforts can be seen as a counterpart to armed resistance:
not by killing the enemy, but by attempting to preserve the dignity of the victims and to leave
behind a record of their existence in the world.
As the tide of the war shifted and it became clear that the Allies were gaining ground,
the SS was faced with the problem of concealing the evidence of mass killing. It was a
daunting prospect because the camps had to be dismantled and untold numbers of dead
had to be exhumed and cremated. The SS tried to conceal their traces both by burning
bodies and by destroying documentation that testified to their crimes.
.
The Operation Reinhard killing centers were dismantled in 1943: Belzec, which had
ceased operations in December 1942, was dismantled in the spring; Treblinka, where the
prisoner revolt in August 1943 effectively halted operations, was closed in the autumn;
and Sobibór, where operations as a killing center ended with the prisoner revolt, was
closed at the end of the year. After their work was finished, the SS and police murdered
.
the prisoners who had been forced to dismantle the camps. The sites where Belzec and
Treblinka had been located were plowed over, relandscaped, and camouflaged as small
farms. After the gassing facilities had been removed at Sobibór, the camp served for a time
as an ammunition depot for the Waffen SS. The SS continued to murder those arriving at

152 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Auschwitz-Birkenau until November 1944, when, at Himmler’s order, the SS destroyed
the killing apparatus as Soviet forces approached the area.
After the catastrophic German defeats at Stalingrad in January 1943 and in Kursk in
July 1943 on the eastern front, Security Police and Security Service officials in the occu-
pied Soviet Union also took steps to conceal the traces of the shooting operations carried
out in 1941–42. Throughout the occupied Soviet Union, SS and police forces identified
mass graves and then deployed forced labor detachments of Jews to exhume the partially
decomposed bodies and burn them on open-air pyres built on rail tracks. After the job
was complete, the SS and police killed the Jews whom they had forced to carry out the
gruesome tasks.
In January 1945, Nazi Germany faced total military defeat. As Allied and Soviet forces
approached the camps, the SS organized the remaining prisoners into columns and
marched them away from the advancing armies. Those evacuations came to be called
“death marches” as prisoners—Jewish and non-Jewish—were made to traverse hundreds
of miles in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Any prisoner unable to keep up
with the others was shot. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944–45
as the Soviet army liberated Poland.
The SS camp guards reacted in different ways to total defeat. Some took off their
uniforms and tried to disappear among the millions of German army POWs. Others,
remaining faithful to Nazi ideology, viewed the Allied victory as the handiwork of the Jews
and thus attempted to fulfill their mission by killing as many Jews as possible in the final
moments of the war. Still others carried out massacres to prevent Jewish survivors from
falling into the hands of the liberators and publicly testifying to the Nazi atrocities.
As Germany fell into complete collapse, the converging armies of the Allies and the
Soviets arrived in the concentration camps. The typical brutality and lethal nature of camp
life was exacerbated in those last months by the total breakdown of supplies, often limit-
ing or eliminating what little food the prisoners were getting. Liberators confronted piles
of unburied corpses and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners. The stench of
death was everywhere. Even though the structures of assembly-line mass murder had
been destroyed, liberation exposed the full scope of Nazi horrors to the world. Despite
Nazi efforts to hide their traces, thousands of starved and diseased prisoners had been left
behind to testify—both in words and by their physical condition—about their experiences
in the camps.
Even after liberation, thousands of prisoners continued to die at a high rate. The lack
of sanitary conditions in the camps intensified the problem, contributing to outbreaks
of epidemics. Within a few days, half the prisoners found alive when the Soviets arrived

the destruction of european jewry | 153

at Auschwitz had died. In Bergen-Belsen, hundreds of prisoners died every day for three
weeks. During the first month after liberation, 13,000 of the camp’s approximately 50,000
surviving prisoners died. Even at the sites of the killing centers, which the SS and police
had dismantled, forensic evidence, such as buried ash and bone fragments, bore witness
to the crimes committed there.
World War II ended in Europe with the unconditional surrender of the German armed
forces to the Western Allies on May 7, 1945, and to the Soviets on May 9, 1945. May 8,
1945, was proclaimed Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). One week earlier, as Soviet forces
neared his command bunker in central Berlin on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed
suicide. It is no exaggeration to say that Europe lay in ruins. War and genocide, displace-
ment and upheaval left the continent in a state of chaos. Although trials of the perpetrators
began within months of the German surrender, western European Jewish communities
would take decades to partially restore themselves. The Jewish communities of central and
eastern Europe disappeared, culturally and physically, except for remnants in Hungary and
Romania and small groups of survivors elsewhere in the region. Indeed, what was destroyed
during the 12 years of Nazi rule—human life, culture, history, community, and collective
memory—could be never be rebuilt or repaired.

Shortly following the liberation in April 1945, emaciated survivors (right) rest in a group at the
Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. buchenwald, germany, c. april 11, 1945. ushmm,
courtesy of hadassah bimko rosensaft

According to Nazi ideology, the Jews of Europe represented the priority “racial” enemy
who by their very existence threatened the survival of the “Aryan” German race. Drawing

154 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Despite Nazi efforts to hide their traces

thousands of starved and diseased prisonors

had been left behind to testify

—both in words and by their physical condition—

about their experiences in the camps

on a thousand years of stereotypes about Jews and “Jewish” behavior, as well as recent
malicious stereotyping linking Jews to Bolshevik radicalism, the Nazis enlisted a nation of
more than 60 million and hundreds of thousands of collaborators from annexed, occupied,
and allied countries in a program to physically annihilate the Jewish population of Europe.
In terms of numbers alone, they almost succeeded; the Germans and their Axis partners
killed up to six million European Jews living in the territory that they had seized.
Perhaps 1.5 million Jews survived this unprecedented, murderous onslaught, the vast
majority of whom either lived on the land controlled by Germany’s Axis partners or man-
aged to flee German-occupied Europe. Many of those who survived the camps, killing
centers, and shooting operations would have to recover from having witnessed the physical
elimination of their families and communities. Moreover, by virtually eliminating the
Jewish minority in central and eastern Europe, the Nazi program of mass murder tore
asunder forever an integral part of Central and East European society and culture, in both
the cities and the countryside. Although individual, national cultures could revive, even
after 40 years of Communist rule, they lack—to this day—that unique flavor, diversity, and
complexity that their Jewish communities contributed over the course of a millennium
to their development. As for the survivors of the Nazi assault, they brought their creativity,
talents, hopes, and hard work to the lands and peoples that offered them refuge and a
chance to start anew during and after the era of the Holocaust.

156 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

epilogue | the aftermath of the holocaust:
Punishing and Preventing the Crime of Genocide
 he holocaust and other nazi crimes were neither the inevitable outcome
of a process set in motion by Adolf Hitler in 1933, nor the preordained result of
the development of his and other Nazi party leaders’ beliefs. To the contrary, the
citizens who participated in or simply stood by and watched Nazi atrocities faced
daily choices. The momentum of their actions as individuals over time propelled
European society into unprecedented violence and systematized mass murder.
In the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat, the Allies faced a challenge: What should they
do with a German nation that had made the Holocaust possible? What actions could be
taken to bring culpable individuals to account and to return public life to an acceptable
course? In addition to restoring order and physically rebuilding, the Allied leadership
sought ways to confront the lingering effects of Nazi ideology. This effort, called “denazi-
fication,” aimed at uprooting and eradicating all traces of Nazism in German society. This
activity included confiscating and destroying books; monitoring radio stations, maga-
zines, movies, and other public media; and destroying symbols, such as the swastika, that
could contribute to the persistence of Nazi ideals and beliefs.
Among the most important efforts to reeducate and recivilize Germany was the crimi-
nal prosecution of Nazi perpetrators for crimes committed by the Nazi leadership and
innumerable ordinary citizens. In 1945, the victorious Allied powers (the United States,
the United Kingdom, France, and Soviet Russia) established the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg for that purpose. After legal experts had labored over new con-
cepts in international law to facilitate proceedings involving such unprecedented crimes,
the tribunal indicted 22 senior officials of the Nazi regime on four charges: war crimes,
crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit each of those
crimes. In the course of the trial, the tribunal rejected the long-standing doctrine of
sovereign immunity, which exempted heads of state from prosecution for actions taken
while in office, and the doctrine of superior orders, which protected subordinates from
being prosecuted for crimes they committed as a result of a direct order. As U.S. Chief
Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson explained, “[T]he combination of these two doctrines
means that nobody is responsible. Society as modernly organized cannot tolerate so broad
an area of official irresponsibility.”

Chief U.S. prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson (left) delivers the prosecution’s opening statement against
leading German officials at the International Military Tribunal war crimes trial at Nuremberg in
November 1945. nuremberg, germany, november 21, 1945. ushmm, courtesy of harry s. truman library

| 159
 The Nuremberg Trial brought major Nazi war criminals publicly to justice, exposing
evidence of their guilt to the world. Of 21 defendants, 18 were convicted (one defendant
committed suicide upon receiving the indictment); 12 were sentenced to death. As important
as the convictions were the acquittals, which gave the Nuremberg Trial immediate and
long-standing credibility. Each Nuremberg defendant had been granted a genuine oppor-
tunity to defend himself in the courtroom. In three cases, the evidence was insufficient to
convict the defendants of legal responsibility, and they were acquitted. Signaling an inten-
tion to prosecute lesser perpetrators, the tribunal also found three organizations—the SS,
the Gestapo and Security Service, and the Nazi Party Leadership Corps—to be criminal
entities in which membership potentially constituted a crime.
Following the initial trial, the International Military Tribunal (staffed exclusively with U.S.
prosecutors and judges), held 12 subsequent trials at Nuremberg for second-rank Nazi offend-
ers. Those trials focused on members of the military, political, and economic leadership
of Germany during the Third Reich, and included as defendants the doctors, judges, police-
men, captains of industry, ministry officials, soldiers, and others who had helped realize the
ideological goals of the Nazi regime, sometimes personally profiting from their service.
Finally, each victorious Allied power conducted dozens of trials in its allotted zone of
occupation in Germany, with lower-level Nazis and non-Nazi perpetrators as defendants.
In the U.S. zone alone, nearly 1,700 defendants were tried in 462 separate proceedings.
By prosecuting and convicting low-ranking officials, Allied judges maintained the prin-
ciple of individual legal responsibility for criminal acts while at the same time conveying
in no uncertain terms that the acceptance, participation, and cooperation of people at
every level of German society had facilitated Nazi crimes.
Among those working with the U.S. prosecution team to prepare for the Nuremberg
trials was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish jurist who had escaped Nazi persecution and
emigrated to the United States, but who had lost 49 members of his family, including his
parents, during the Holocaust. Dedicating himself to ending such violence in the world,
he was the first to give a name to the mass murder that had taken place, coining the term
genocide” in his 1944 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the
“destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group,” Lemkin wrote. “It is intended … to signify a
coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of
the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Lemkin
was able to get the word “genocide” included in the indictment against Nazi leadership,
but the tribunal failed to define it as a specific crime in international law.
Lemkin was determined to see the concept of genocide incorporated into international
law. He began lobbying at early sessions of the United Nations and worked to enlist the

160 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

support of national delegations and influential leaders. His efforts eventually resulted in
the United Nations’ approval of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
Genocide on December 9, 1948. The convention established genocide as an international
crime that signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” As defined in terms of
the convention, genocide means the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial, or religious group by killing members of the group; causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing mea-
sures intended to prevent births within the group; and/or forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group.
The Nuremberg trials and the 1948 Genocide Convention are two of the lasting legacies
of the postwar period. From a legal standpoint, the Nuremberg trials provided a precedent
for holding individuals at all levels of society accountable for criminal acts on behalf of
their government or society. The existence of this precedent inspired the postwar develop-
ment of an international criminal court to conduct criminal proceedings against individuals
accused of genocide, mass murder, torture, and other crimes. From a diplomatic perspec-
tive, the Genocide Convention created a framework in which nations could hold one another
responsible for the protection of human rights and a legal definition to develop indictments.
Both were groundbreaking efforts to establish standards of international conduct that are
not subject to changing political, social, or religious forces. But even with those legal and
diplomatic mechanisms in place, the postwar period has witnessed ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and resurgent antisemitism in many parts of the world,
including lands in which the Holocaust took place.
In spite of calls of “never again,” beginning in 2003 an ongoing genocide in Darfur,
Sudan, gave daily evidence of a militia committing mass murder and rape, killing children,
burning villages, and imposing wanton violence based on ethnic, racial, and tribal hatred.
Those events test the limits of our faith in legal and diplomatic approaches to the problem
of mass genocide. As society has so vividly become aware, a definition of genocide and
even a collective commitment to hold those who commit it accountable are not enough to
prevent it. Our inability to prevent genocide, however, does not absolve us of our respon-
sibility to bring its perpetrators to justice. At the time of this writing, the International
Criminal Court in The Hague indicts, prosecutes, and, if the evidence is sufficient, con-
victs perpetrators of the genocidal acts in Bosnia and Rwanda.
In this context, it is worth remembering that even during the Holocaust, some
individuals saw through what psychologist Eva Fogelman has called “the gauze of Nazi
euphemisms.” Despite the indifference of most and the collaboration of others, those indi-

epilogue | 161
viduals—from all religious backgrounds and every European country—risked their lives
to help Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime. In the end, the actions of individuals to
protect human lives, human rights, and human dignity are the ultimate bulwark against
abuses of human rights and genocide. As General Roméo Dallaire, head of a small peace-
keeping force in Rwanda in 1993 who helplessly watched as the United Nations failed to
stop the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus, has said, “You’ve got to start wondering
about the depth of your belief in the moral values, the ethical values, and your belief
in humanity. All humans are human. There are no humans more human than others.
That’s it.”

162 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

further reading and additional sources

nazi ideology
Berenbaum, Michael. A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis.
New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Cameron, Norman, R. H. Stevens, and Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, eds. Hitler’s Table Talk,
1941–44: His Secret Conversations. New York: Enigma Books, 2000.
Jäckel, Eberhard. Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
Mosse, George L. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985.

political opponents, jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals

Giles, Geoffrey J. Why Bother about Homosexuals?: Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi
Germany. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.
Graffard, Sylvie, and Michel Reynaud. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution,
Deportation, and Murder, 1933–1945. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.
Grau, Günter. Hidden Holocaust?: Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–45. Chicago:
Fitzroy Dearborn, 1995.
Hesse, Hans, ed. Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s Witnesses during the Nazi Regime,
1933–1945. Bremen, Germany: Edition Temmen, 2001.
King, Christine Elizabeth. The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in
Non-Conformity. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982.
Lautmann, Rudiger, Erhard Vismar, and Jack Nusan Porter. Sexual Politics in the Third Reich:
The Persecution of the Homosexuals during the Holocaust. Newton Highlands, Mass.:
The Spencer Press, 1997.
Mommsen, Hans. Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance under the Third Reich. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals. New York: H. Holt, 1986.
Schoenberner, Gerhard. Artists against Hitler: Persecution, Exile, Resistance. Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1984.
Tarrant, V. E. The Red Orchestra. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.

164 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

polish and soviet civilians, and soviet prisoners of war
Glantz, David M. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1995.
Hirschfeld, Gerhard. The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany.
Boston: Allan & Unwin, 1986.
Lukas, Richard. The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944.
New York: Hippocrene, 1997.
Lukas, Richard. Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1989.
Rowinski, Leokadia. That the Nightingale Return: Memoir of the Polish Resistance, the Warsaw
Uprising and German P.O.W. Camps. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.

germans with mental and physical disabilities, african germans, and roma
Benedict, Susan. “Caring While Killing: Nursing in the ‘Euthanasia’ Centers.” In Experience
and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, eds. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna
Goldenberg, pp. 95–110. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.
Biesold, Horst. Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany. Washington, D.C.:
Gallaudet University Press, 1999.
Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Campt, Tina. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the
Third Reich. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004.
Duna, William A., and Paul Polansky. The Hidden Holocaust of the Gypsies. Minneapolis:
Sa-Roma, 1997.
Fings, Karola, Herbert Heuss, and Frank Sparing. From “Race Science” to the Camps: The Gypsies
during the Second World War. Hertfordshire, United Kingdom: University of Hertfordshire
Press, 1997.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Friedman, Philip. “The Extermination of the Gypsies.” In Genocide and Human Rights: A Global
Anthology, ed. Jack Nusan Porter, pp. 151–57. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.
Hancock, Ian. Land of Pain: Five Centuries of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Buda, Tex.: World
Romani Union, 1986.
Kenrick, Donald, and Grattan Puxon. Gypsies under the Swastika. Hertfordshire, United Kingdom:
Gypsy Research Centre, University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995.

further reading | 165

Kesting, Robert W. “Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust.” Journal of Negro History 77,
no. 1 (1992): 30–36.
Lewy, Guenther. The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York:
Basic Books, 1986.
Lusane, Clarence. Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European
Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Massaquoi, Hans J. Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. New York: William
Morrow, 1999.
Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1988.
Tebbutt, Susan, ed. Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature. New York:
Berghahn Books, 1998.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.
Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004.

the destruction of european jewry

Arad, Yitzhak, et al. The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death
Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews, July 1941–January 1943. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989.
Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001.
Berenbaum, Michael, et al., eds. The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the
Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Bergen, Doris L. War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2003.
Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Knopf;
distributed by Random House, 1991.
Breitman, Richard, and Allen Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: MacMillan, 1990.
Gilbert, Martin. Auschwitz and the Allies. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003.
Kogon, Eugen, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds. Nazi Mass Murder:
A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.
Kurek, Ewa. Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in
German-Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997.

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Morse, Arthur. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook
Press, 1998.
Sloyan, Gerald, ed. Ethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Christian and Jewish Perspectives.
Franklin, Wis.: Sheed & Ward, 2001.

the aftermath of the holocaust

Eltringham, Nigel. Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. London and Sterling,
Va.: Pluto Press, 2004.
Marrus, Michael R. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945–46: A Documentary History. Boston:
Bedford Books, 1997.
Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York:
Basic Books, 2002.
Smith, Helmut Walser, ed. The Holocaust and Other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics.
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
Tent, James F. Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied
Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, Israel W. Charny, eds. A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays
and Eyewitness Accounts. New York: Routledge, 2004.

further reading | 167

index

Page references in italic refer to photographs. Binding, Karl, 80–81

biological inferiority, 75
African Germans, 14, 90–94 birth rates, German, 17, 39
antisemitism, 11, 15, 124, 161 blacks, Nazi segregation and persecution, 14, 90–94
German, 17, 111 Bloody Sunday (1939), 26
Hillberg on trends, 114–15 Blut und Boden (blood and soil), 12
Nazi antisemitic policy (1933–1939), 114–24, 120, Bolshevism, 65–67
127, 139 Bonhöffer, Karl and Dietrich, 87
Nazi antisemitic policy (1940–1945), 145–54 book burnings, 44
pogroms, 112, 126–27, 128 Bosnia, ethnic cleansing, 161
public acceptance of antisemitic policy, 120, 127, 139 Bouhler, Philip, 83
resistance movement success and, 152 boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, 115
“Aryan,” meaning and use of term, 13 Brack, Viktor, 89
“Aryan” Germans, 13–14
“Aryanization” of business, 121 carbon monoxide poisonings, 70, 84, 86, 105, 142, 147
compared to Jews, 15 Charitable Foundation for the Transport of Patients
death of the race (Volkstod), 75 Inc., 84–86
depiction in propaganda, 120 children and teenagers, 35, 58, 59–61, 82–83, 91,
kidnapping Polish children, 59–61 93–94, 149, 129, 134, 135, 150
“Master Race” superiority, 13–14, 20, 75 Children’s Aid Society, 117
racial (bloodline) purity, 14, 75, 90, 91–93, 101, 118 Children’s Transport (Kindertransport), 122, 123, 130
Romani people as technically “Aryan,” 100–101 Clauberg, Carl, 104
unconditional obedience, 18 collaboration with Nazis, 62, 72, 139, 142–43, 156
Asocials, 44, 89, 100, 101, 102, 107 Communist Party. 24, 25, 26–27, 28, 64
asylum for German Jews concentration camp system, 30
emigration regulation, 124–30 African German incarceration, 93
obstacles, 122–24 Allied forces liberation, 153
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) killing center, black prisoners of war, 94
30, 39, 147–49 death marches, 153
crematorium, 150, 151 destruction of evidence, 152–53
deaths (1945), 150 Holocaust survivors, 151, 153–54, 155, 156
destruction of evidence, 153 homosexuals incarceration, 48–50
Gypsy Family Camp, 105–6 internment camps, 100, 104, 106, 144, 145–46
Hungarian Jews, 150 Jehovah’s Witness persecution, 38–39
incineration of corpses, 150 Jewish uprisings and resistance, 150–52
mass murder by gassing, 70, 147–49 Operation 14 f 13 extension of T-4 program, 88–89
murder of children, 61, 149, 150 political prisoner deaths (1933–1945), 30–31
Poles, 58, 59 post-liberation mortality, 153–54
prisoner uprisings, 151 preventive detention orders and incarceration in, 101
Roma, 104, 105–6 Soviet prisoners of war, 70, 71
tattooing of Jews, 149 work Jews (Arbeitsjuden), 147
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, coining of term congenital feeblemindedness (retardation), 78
“genocide,” 160 conspiracy, Jewish, 15, 17
conspiracy to commit crimes, 159
Babi Yar (Ukraine) massacre, 139 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
Basic Law on Preventive Suppression of Crime Genocide, 160–61
(1937), 101 crime prevention, preventive detention orders, 101
Bavarian Criminal Police, central office for Gypsy crimes against humanity, 159
Matters, 97–99 crimes against peace, 159
Beer-Hall Putsch (coup), 11 criminal courts, 30, 45, 48

168 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Dalliare, Roméo, 161–62 Galen, Clemens von, 87
Darfur, Sudan, 161 gassing installations, 86, 88, 89, 106, 142
Darwin’s (Charles) theory of natural selection, 11 experiments, 70, 104
denazification, 159 genetic or hereditary illnesses and disabilities, 75,
deportation 76–80
German Jews, 144, 148 abortion and, 79
Jehovah’s Witnesses, 38–39 euthanasia, 80–82, 83, 87, 88
Poles, 56–57, 58 euthanasia program killings, 81–90
Roma, 101–7 hereditary health courts, 79–80
Soviet civilians, 65 genetic or hereditary nature of criminal behavior,
Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), 16, 17 97–101
the Diaspora, 14–15, 111 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War (1929), 67, 96
dictatorship, legalization of, 26–27 genocide, 11
disabled people (mental and physical), defined, 160–61
14, 75–80 forensic evidence, 154
deaths (1939–1945), 79, 83, 89 punishing and preventing, 159–62
euthanasia, 80–82, 83, 87, 88 “Gerda D.”, schizophrenia patient, 76, 77, 80
euthanasia program killings, 81–90 German constitution, provisional suspension of
Soviets massacred, 138 individuals rights decree, 26–27
T-4 program, 49, 83–90 German Empire, 18, 39, 112
German Labor Front, 27
Eishishok (Poland) massacre, 141 German nationalism
emigration obstacles and regulation, 121, 122–30, 141 blood and soil (Blut und Boden), 12
international ambivalence or reluctance, 125–26 German police, 24, 26, 27, 45, 47–48, 69-70, 101,
Enabling Act (1933), 26–27 138, 139, 160
epidemic disease 134, 136, 153–54 German society
epilepsy, 78, 79 Jewish assimilation and citizenry, 112–14
ethnic cleansing, 161 Germany
ethnic Germans, 53–54, 57, 64, 65 death of democracy, 27
eugenics, 42, 49, 76, 78 Hitler’s vision for, 11–12
Europe, 78, 106, 111–12, 156, 161 Jewish population (1933), 114
European rail system, Final Solution and, 146 ghettos, 133–36, 143–44, 150
“euthanasia”, 80–82, 83, 87, 88 emptying by deportations, 143, 144
“euthanasia” program killings, 81–90, 142 Jewish uprisings and resistance, 150–52
deliberate starvation, 88 Gilges, Hilarius (Lari), 92, 93
expansion beyond disabled persons, 89 Goebbels, Joseph, 26, 119
Hitler’s stop order, 87–88 The Golden Age, 31
as open secret, 86–87 Gorath, Karl, 40, 41
as secure secret, 142 Göring, Hermann, 24, 26
“wild euthanasia” phase (Operation 14 f 13), 88–89 Great Britain
Evian-les-bains Conference, 125–26 appeasement policy, 53
Extraordinary Pacification Operation, Poles, 57 Children’s Transport (Kindertransport), 122, 123, 130
embargo, 115
feeblemindedness, 78–79, 79, 80, 100 equal rights for Jews, 111–12
Felman, Moishe, 132, 133 Jewish emigration, 124, 125, 130
Final Solution to the Jewish question, 133, 138, peace negotiation, 131
139–45 sterilization laws, 78
killing centers, 146–54 Groszheim, Friedrich-Paul, 47, 48
Nazi estimated deaths, 142 Gypsies, 94, 97
Folgelman, Eva, 161
forced labor Hague Convention on the Rules of War (1907), 67
destruction of evidence and, 153 health authorities
Poles, 58, 59, 136 “euthanasia” operations and, 82–83, 87
Roma, 99, 102 sterilization laws complicity, 78–80
Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, 65, 72 hereditary health courts, 79–80
forced labor camps, 30, 31, 100 Herero people, 90
France, 17, 53, 105, 106, 111–12, 131, 145–46, 151, 152 Hering, Gottlieb, 89
Freemasons, 27–28 Hillberg, Raul, 114–15

index | 169
Himmler, Heinrich Ich Klage an (I Accuse), 81
“Combating the Gypsy Plague” decree, 104, 105, identification patches
107 asocials, 44, 102
destruction of evidence, 153 habitual criminals, 102
on educating non-Germans, 58 homosexuals, 48
Germanization, 56 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 38
on homosexuality, 39, 44, 45, 47–48, 49 Jewish Star of David, 18, 19, 115, 143, 145
on racial aliens, 59 Poles, 58
screening of Polish children for “adoption,” 59–61 Zigeuner (German word for Gypsy), 102
Hindenburg, Paul von, 23 individual rights, equality, and personal freedom
constitutional suspension decree, 26 Freemasons and, 27–28
Hirshfield, Magnus, 40, 44 human rights protection, 161–62
Hitler, Adolf post–World War I climate, 39–40, 42
appointed chancellor, 23, 30 Roma and, 96, 99
background, 11 suspension of constitutional individuals rights
beliefs, theories, and views, 11–20, 159 decree, 26–27
on Evian Conference, 126 inferior peoples and regime offenders, 11, 14, 18,
individuality, 13 20, 75
imprisonment, 11 identification patches for, 18, 19, 38, 44, 48, 58,
Mein Kampf, 11–12, 14, 15, 17, 91, 119 102, 143, 145
Nuremberg speech (1923), 15 Institute for Sexual Science, 40, 44
radicalism, 23–24 International Bible Students Association (Jehovah’s
suicide, 154 Witnesses), 37–38
Hitler Youth, 35, 42, 44 International Criminal Court, The Hague, 161
Hoche, Alfred, 80–81 international Jewry, 18, 34
the Holocaust, 11, 18 international law, 159–62
forensic evidence, 154 genocide incorporated into, 160, 161–62
Holocaust survivors, 153–54, 155, 156 International Red Cross, 144
Soviet partisan group uprisings and, 151 internment camps, 100, 104, 106, 144, 145–46
Home Army (Armia Krajowa), Polish underground,
62–63 Jehovah’s Witnesses
homosexuals about, 31
abuse by fellow prisoners, 48 children and teens, 35
citizen denunciations of, 45 deaths during Nazi regime, 39
civil rights, 42 discriminatory legislation, 37–38
deaths, 49 executions, 37
expansion of “Aryan” race and, 39, 45, 76 incarceration and deportation, 38–39
friendship leagues, 40 International Society support of, 37–38
imprisonment, 45–50 Kusserow family profile, 32, 33
legal sanctions, 39–40, 44–50 loyalty and spirituality of prisoners, 38–39
lesbians, treatment of, 44 military conscription and, 35, 37
medical experiments on, 48–49 persecution, 23–24, 31–39
number of arrests, 49 social welfare bureaucracy abuses, 35
Paragraph 175 (German criminal code) and, 39–40, Jewish Army (Armée Juive), 151
44–50 Jewish conspiracy, 27
persecution, 23–24, 39–50 Jewish-Communist threat (Bolshevism), 65–67, 156
postwar pardons, 50 Jewish culture, community, and tradition, 112, 114, 118
punishment battalions and, 47, 48 “Aryanization” of businesses, 121
reparations, 49–50 boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, 115, 117
Hungary, 53, 105, 107, 134, 150 legal definition of Jewishness, 118
hydrogen cyanide gas, 70 practice of Judaism, 118, 119, 121
preservation efforts, 145, 152, 154
Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja
Bojowa), 151
Jewish identity, 114, 118–19
Jewish “problem” and question
Hillberg on, 114–15
Jewish reservation, 131–32

170 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

Jewish resistance, 150–52 kidnapping and abduction of children, 61
Jewish stereotyping, 111–12, 114–15, 156 killing centers and operations, 30, 144
Jewish synagogues, 128, 129 assignment disguised as resettlement,
Jews 142, 144
Children’s Transport (Kindertransport), 122, 123, 130 destruction of evidence, 152–53
curfews, 131 Final Solution and, 146–54
deportation of German Jews, 144, 148 Holocaust survivors, 151, 153–54, 155, 156
discriminatory legislation, 100, 117–22, 130–31, 141 perpetrators, 89–90, 142–43, 154, 159.
east European, 112, 134 political prisoner deaths (1933–1945), 30–31
economic exclusion, 121 post-liberation mortality, 153–54
emigration from Germany, 121, 122–30, 141 security and secrecy, 142
employment loss, 115–17, 120, 122 work Jews (Arbeitsjuden), 147
evidence of destruction, 152–53 Kindertransport (Children’s Transport), 122, 123, 130
false sense of complacency, 121, 129–30 Kohl, Helmut, 107
food rationing, 131 Kreyssig, Lothar, 86–87
German Jews in military service, 114 Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), 28,
in German society, 112–14 126–27, 128, 128, 129, 130
historical characterization and discrimination of, Kusserow family, 32, 33
111–12, 114–15, 156
Hitler’s beliefs and characterizations, 14–17, 91 Law against Habitual Criminals (1933), 100
impoverishment and loss of property, 122, 127, 130, Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased
131, 145, 147 Offspring (1933), 76–80, 99
incarceration in concentration camps, 129 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
intermarriage ban, 118 Honor (1935), 118
killings of Jews (1933–1939), 88, 89, 138–45 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil
killings of Jews (1940–1945), 145–54 Service (1933), 115–17, 120
loss of Reich citizenship, 118 Lebel, Helene Melanie, 84, 85
mixed race, 119 Lebensraum (living space), 12, 17–18, 53, 126, 130
modern emancipation and equal rights for, legal and judicial system abuses
111–12, 119 euthanasia secret authorization order, 82, 86–87
Operation Harvest Festival, Madjanek, 150 German Civil Code abuses, 35
passport invalidation, 121 hereditary health courts and appeals, 79–80
Polish, 56, 62, 126, 131, 142 irrelevance of legal considerations, 20, 31
post–World War I citizenship, 112 judicial system abuses, 30
prohibited from participation in German public measures against Roma, 96, 99
life, 120–21 Paragraph 175 (German criminal code) abuses,
racial enemy of the Nazi regime, 14, 106, 111, 39–40, 44–50
154–56 legislative authority and actions
segregation, 14, 121 discriminative legislation, 26–27, 37–38, 99, 104,
Soviet Jews, massacres of, 138–39, 141 105, 107, 108, 117–22, 130–31, 141, 145.
Star of David emblem abuse, 18, 19, 115, 143, 145 effects of antisemitic legislation on non-Jewish
stateless, 145 Germans, 121–22
street violence against, 117–18 emigration of German Jews and, 121, 122–30, 141
successful emigration, 130 Lemkin, Raphael, 160
tattooing, 149 lesbians, treatment of, 44
tradition of hatred and fear of, 111 Liebmann, Hanne Hirsch, 116, 117
west European, 111–12 living space (Lebensraum), 12, 17–18, 53, 126, 130
work
. Jews (Arbeitsjuden), 147
Zegota, 62 Madagascar plan, 131
Judaism, 118, 119, 121 Malthusian economics, 12
Marriage Law (1935), 80
medical community
euthanasia program involvement, 82–90
medical oath perversion, 88
post–Allied-occupation euthanization, 89
SS disguised as, 84–86
sterilization laws complicity, 78–80
medical experiments, 49, 59, 93, 104, 105

index | 171
Mein Kampf, 11–12, 14, 15, 17, 91, 119 Nazi regime (Das Dritte Reich), 13–14
mental illness, 78 antisemitic policies (1933–1939), 114–24, 120,
mercy killings, 81–82, 83, 87, 88 127, 139
military conscription and military service Final Solution citizen cooperation, 142–43, 145
German soldiers of Romani descent, 105 killing center perpetrators and commandants,
homosexuals, 47 89–90, 142–43, 154, 159
Jehovah’s Witnesses, 35, 37 legalized dictatorship, 26–27
Mischlinge (part-Jewish), 119 legislative authority and actions, 26–27
Mobile Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen), 57, 106, 136, loss of Jewish contribution to European society
137, 138–39, 141 and culture, 156
Moise, Maria Sava, 98, 99 military conscription, 35, 37
moral feeblemindedness, 79 military defeat (1945), 153–54
Mosheim, Herbert, 112, 113 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (nonaggression
municipal camp incarceration, Roma, 104 agreement), 54, 64, 138
paramilitary formations, 24, 26
Nassy, Josef, 94 Soviet prisoners of war as forced labor, 72
National Community (Volksgemeinschaft), 13, 18, 23, various leaders as defendants, 160
75, 159 Nazi rhetoric, 17–18, 126
birth rates and population expansion, 39, 44, 45 Nazi–Nationalist coalition, 23
citizen denunciations of homosexuals, 45 the Netherlands, deportations and murders, 105,
denazification, 159 106, 146
establishment, 23 “The Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), 28,
“euthanasia” and, 81–82 126–27, 128, 128, 129, 130
false sense of complacency, 121–22 Noga, Julian, 62, 63
Final Solution cooperation, 142–43, 145 nonaggression agreement (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact),
indifference to fate of Holocaust victims, 88–89, 54, 64, 138
159, 161 Nuremberg Laws (1935), 91–93, 100, 118–19, 121
Nazi expectations of, 24 Nuremberg Trial, 159–61
parental responsibilities, 35
public acceptance of antisemitic policy, 120, 127 Operation 14 f 13, extension of T-4 program, 88–89
reeducation of “Aryan” Germans, 23–24 Operation Barbarossa, 64–72
rejecting Nazi ideology, 18, 24 Operation Harvest Festival, 150
social welfare bureaucracy abuses, 35 Operation Reinhardt, 147, 148
treatment of resisters, 24 destruction of evidence, 152
unconditional obedience, 18
various leaders as defendants, 160 People’s Army (Armia Ludowa), 64
national security, acts performed in pretext of, 26–27 “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life,” 80
Nazi ideology, 11–20 phosgene gas, 104
denazification, 159 pogroms, 112, 126–27, 128
eugenics, 42, 49, 76, 78 Poland
Final Solution sympathizers and collaborators, 62, death marches, 153
72, 139, 142–43, 156 General Government, 54, 56–59, 64, 147
Nazi party, 11, 159 German land acquired by, 17
crush of political opposition, 23, 24–31 Germanization, 56–61
Leadership Corps war crimes, 160 ghettos, 105, 133, 134–36, 135, 142, 150
Reichstag and, 23 invasion of, 54–64, 130, 131, 133
Nazi propaganda partitioning, 54–56
antiblack, 90, 91 Roma deportations, 105
antisemitic, 16, 17, 119–20 transports, 56, 146
“euthanasia”, 81 Western territorial guarantee, 53–54
Evian Conference outcome, 126 Police, German, 24, 26, 27, 45, 47–48, 69-70, 101,
SA atrocity propaganda, 115 138, 139, 160
Theresienstadt camp-ghetto, 144

172 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

 Polish civilians, 54, 55 Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and
children, 58, 59–61, 60 Propaganda, 119–20
concentration camps, 59 Reichleitner, Franz, 89
deaths, 59, 64 Reichstag (Parliament), 23, 26
discriminatory measures, 58 Reinecke, Hermann, 69–70
domination, exploitation, and murder of, 57–58, resistance movements and organizations, 27, 61-64,
59, 64 66, 69, 106, 151, 152
eviction and deportation of, 56–57, 58 Rhineland, Germany, 53, 91, 93
gas chambers and, 70, 142 Ritter, Robert, race-biological research, 100–101, 107
medical experiments on, 59 Röhm, Ernst, 42, 44
resisters and resistance movements, 57, 61–64 Roma (Gypsies)
victims of postwar Soviet occupation, 64 as ethnic minority, 94-95
.
Polish military, 62–64 Belzec concentration camp, 96, 97
Polish nationalism and culture, destruction, 57–61 compensation for Nazi persecution, 107
political opposition to the Nazi regime, 23, 24–31, deportation, incarceration, and murder of, 101–7, 138
42, 44, 115 discriminatory legislation, 99, 100, 107
population expansion, German, 17, 20, 39, 44, 45 Himmler’s segregation and deportation decree,
Porrajmos (the Devouring), 107 104, 105, 107
prisoners of war, black, 94 historical perceptions and persecution of, 95–96, 99
prisoners of war, Soviet, 68 internment camps, 100, 104, 106
in concentration camps, 70, 71 medical experiments, 104, 105
deaths, 67, 69, 70, 72, 139 postwar release, 106
illness, starvation, neglect, and murder of, 67–70, 72 present-day prejudice and discrimination, 108
postwar Communist Party treatment of, 72 racial enemy of the Nazi regime, 14, 94–95, 106
resistance, 69 West German discrimination, 107–8
Security Police and Security Service actions Roman Catholic Church, 57, 80, 87, 119
against, 69–70 Romania, 54, 102, 107, 108, 139
shelter, 67–69 Romney, Lionel, 94
Soviet counterattack success and, 70–72 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 125–26
treatment, 67–72 Russell, Charles Taze, 31
Protestant churches, 80, 119 Russian Jews, 112
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” 15 Rwanda, genocide, 161–62

race-consciousness, 13 SA (Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers), 24, 26, 42,

race hygiene, 118 44, 115
Race Hygiene and Population Biology Research same-sex friendship leagues, 40
Institute, 101 schizophrenia patients, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85
racial (bloodline) purity, 14, 75, 90, 101 Secret State Police (Gestapo) 27, 45, 93, 160
alien blood, 91–94, 100 Security Service (SD), 69–70
racial defilement, 118 Slavs
racial enemies of the Nazi regime, 14, 75 lands occupied by, 17, 20, 53, 65
racial groups, hierarchy of, 12–13 Nazi view of, 53, 65, 70
“Aryan” Germans as “Master Race,” 13–14, 20, 75 racial enemy of the Nazi regime, 14
Slavs and, 53, 65 Untermenschen (subhumans), 65
racial intermixing, 12, 14 Slutsk (Belorussia) massacre, 138–39
African Germans, 90, 91–93 Snow, Valaida, 94
Jews, 114, 118 social Darwinism, 11–12
Roma, 100–101 Social Democratic Party, 23, 26, 27
racial makeup, 12, 75 Solidarité (Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual
racial struggle, 12, 13, 53, 118 Aid), 152
racial survival, 12–20, 154–56 sovereign immunity doctrine, 159
railroad workers, Final Solution complicity, 146 Soviet civilians
Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality deaths, 66
and Abortion, 45 deportation, 65
Reich Citizenship Law (1935), 118 domination, exploitation, and murder of, 65–66
Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of massacres, 138–39
Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases, resistance, 66
82–83 starvation, 66–69

index | 173
Soviet Union van der Lubbe, Marinus, 26
Commissar Order and, 66–67 Versailles Treaty, 17, 53
German attack on, 64–72, 131–33, 138–39 Volkstod (death of the race), 75
German conquest, 18
ghettos, 136 Wagner-Rogers Bill, 129
Jewish-Communist threat (Bolshevism), 65–67, war crimes, 89–90, 146, 152–53, 154, 159–62,
133, 156 The Watchtower, 31, 38
Jews, 15, 17, 53, 72, 133, 138–39, 141. Week of Blood (1933), 26
mass murder collaborators among local Weimar Republic, 11, 13, 14, 23, , 27, 39–40, 91,
populations, 139 99, 114
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (nonaggression Weizsäcker, Richard von, 49–50
agreement), 54, 64, 138 Wohfahrt, Franz, 36, 37
Operation Barbarossa, 64–72 Women, 30, 44, 79, 104,
partisan group uprisings, 151 work Jews (Arbeitsjuden), 147
seige on Leningrad, 64 world Jewry, 126
Soviet counterattack success and, 70–72 World War I 35, 114
spoliation of resources, 66 World War II, 11, 130, 154
transports, 146 .
SS (Schutzstaffel, or elite guard of the Nazi party), Zegota, support of Jews, 62
24, 26, 160 Zyklon B gas, 142, 143, 149
boycott enforcement, 115
destruction of evidence, 153
homosexuals and, 42, 44, 48–49
Mobile Killing Squads (Einsatzgruppen), 57, 106,
136, 137, 141
reaction to defeat, 153
Security Police and Security Service, 69–70, 160
sterilization
children and teenagers, 93
disabled people, 77–80
related deaths, 79, 104
Roma, 99–100, 101
Stojka, Karl (Ceja), 102, 103
Sturmabteilung (storm troopers), 24, 26, 42, 44, 115
superior orders doctrine, 159

T-4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4) euthanasia program, 49,

83–90, 147
Taylor, Myron C., 125
territorial acquisition and conquest, 14–17, 20, 53–54
concentration camps and, 30–31
invasion of Poland, 54–64, 130, 131
living space (Lebensraum), 12, 17–18, 53, 126, 130
Operation Barbarossa, 64–72
Thälmann, Ernst, 28, 29
theoretical underpinnings of Nazi ideology, 11–20
Tiergartenstrasse 4 (T-4) euthanasia program, 49,
83–90
trade unions, 27
transports, 56, 145–47, 148, 149
Trotha, Lothar von, 90
typhus experiments, 104

Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid

(Solidarité), 152
United Nations, 160–61
United States 65, 78, 115, 124, 129, 130
Untermenschen (subhumans), 65

174 | nazi ideology and the holocaust

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