1.
Internment
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Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The term is used for the confinement of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects. Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement, use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. Interned persons may be held in prisons or in known as internment camps. In certain contexts, these may also be known either officially or pejoratively, internment also refers to a neutral countrys practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war under the Hague Convention of 1907. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the use of internment, article 9 states that No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. The United States set up camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s. From 1863 to 1868, the U. S, military persecuted and imprisoned 9,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache. Living under armed guards, more than 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, the term concentration camp saw wider use during the Second Boer War, when the British operated such camps in South Africa for interning Boers. They built 45 tented camps for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans, of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, the British sent 25,630 overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the camps were women and children. Some of them managed to go into exile or went off to join the armies of the Allies in order to fight against the Axis powers, while others ended up in Nazi concentration camps. During the 20th century, the internment of civilians by the state reached its most notorious excesses with the establishment of the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazi concentration camp system was notable for its size, with as many as 15,000 camps. Moreover, Nazi Germany established six camps, specifically designed to kill millions
2.
Auschwitz concentration camp
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Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Auschwitz III–Monowitz, Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, from early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camps gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish, approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel, some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe reports of the atrocities at the camp. As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march, the prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, acts of violence perpetrated against Jews became ubiquitous. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933 excluded most Jews from the legal profession, similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Harassment and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to leave the country voluntarily and their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. German Jews were subjected to violent attacks and boycotts, in September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens, thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people and this supplementary decree defined Gypsies as enemies of the race-based state, the same category as Jews. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germanys 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed, approximately 65,000 civilians, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race, were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani, sS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September that Polish Jews should be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links
3.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims
4.
SS
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The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party in Nazi Germany. It began with a guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed, under his direction, it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance. The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS and Waffen-SS, the Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of combat units of troops within Nazi Germanys military. A third component of the SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, ran the concentration camps, additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst organizations. The SS was the organization most responsible for the killing of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews. Members of all of its branches committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II, the SS was also involved in commercial enterprises and exploited concentration camp inmates as slave labor. After Nazi Germanys defeat, the SS and the NSDAP were judged by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be criminal organizations, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS officer at the time, was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and hanged in 1946. By 1923, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler had created a volunteer guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz to provide security at their meetings in Munich. The same year, Hitler ordered the formation of a bodyguard unit dedicated to his personal service. He wished it to be separate from the mass of the party, including the paramilitary Sturmabteilung. The new formation was designated the Stabswache, originally the unit was composed of eight men, commanded by Julius Schreck and Joseph Berchtold, and was modeled after the Erhardt Naval Brigade, a Freikorps of the time. The unit was renamed Stoßtrupp in May 1923, the Stoßtrupp was abolished after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt by the NSDAP to seize power in Munich. In 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to organize a new bodyguard unit and it was tasked with providing personal protection for Hitler at NSDAP functions and events. That same year, the Schutzkommando was expanded to an organization and renamed successively the Sturmstaffel. Officially, the SS marked its foundation on 9 November 1925, the new SS was to provide protection for NSDAP leaders throughout Germany. Hitlers personal SS protection unit was enlarged to include combat units
5.
German-occupied Europe
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Several German occupied countries entered World War II as Allies of the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union. Some were forced to such as Czechoslovakia, others like Poland were conquered in battle. In some cases, the legitimate governments went into exile, in cases the governments-in-exile were formed by their citizens in other Allied countries. Selected countries occupied by Nazi Germany were officially neutral
6.
World War II
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World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific. The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery. Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
7.
Trawniki men
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Trawniki men were the Eastern European collaborators recruited from the POW camps set up by Nazi Germany for the Red Army soldiers who were captured during Operation Barbarossa in the border regions. Thousands of these served in the General Government territory of occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, the Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from the native subjects, trawnikimänner were organized by Streibel into two SS Sonderdienst battalions. Some 1,000 Hiwis are known to have run away during field operations, all the officers at Trawniki camp were Reichsdeutsche, and most of the squad commanders were Volksdeutsche. The conscripted civilians and former Soviet POWs included Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, the Trawnikis took major part in Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews. They also served at extermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising among others, in 1941 Himmler instructed Globocnik to start recruiting mainly Ukrainian auxiliaries among the Soviet POWs, behind the lines of the advancing Wehrmacht. Globocnik had selected Karl Streibel from Operation Reinhard as the key person for this new secret project, the ethnic Poles would not serve knowing the purpose of training. For example, one conscripted Polish farm boy was lashed nearly to death in public for insubordination once he realized what was expected of him and he perished at Majdanek three months later. The Trawniki-men were assembled at a facility adjacent to the Trawniki concentration camp built for the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto. The complex was set up in the village of Trawniki about 40 kilometres southeast of Lublin with rail lines in all directions in the occupied territory. From there, the Hiwi shooters were deployed to all major killing sites of the Final Solution and it was their primary purpose of training. At each of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps Trawniki Hiwi men served as the Sonderkommando guard units and were selected to act as the gas chambers operators and they came under the jurisdiction of the relevant camp commandant. Almost all of the Trawniki guards were involved in shooting, beating and terrorizing Jews, the Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov, who made a study of the Trawniki men serving at death camps claimed that there was little sign of any attraction to National Socialism among them. He claimed that most of the guards volunteered in order to leave the POW camps and/or because of self-interest, on the other hand, the Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote that Hiwis were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic sentiments. Despite the generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS expectations in the mistreatment of Jews, most Trawniki men executed Jews already as part of their job training. Similarly to Christopher Brownings 1992 book Ordinary Men, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of how people could become willing killers. The Trawniki men shot so fast and so wildly that the German policemen frequently had to cover to avoid being hit. Ukrainian Hiwis were perceived as indispensable, in Łomazy, the Germans were overjoyed to see them coming after the messy Józefów massacre which permanently traumatized the untrained executioners
8.
Treblinka extermination camp
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Treblinka was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located in a forest north-east of Warsaw,4 kilometres south of the Treblinka train station in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship, the camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people, more Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. Managed by the German SS and Trawnikis, the camp consisted of two separate units, Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease, the second camp, Treblinka II, was an extermination camp, or the Vernichtungslager in German, referred to euphemistically as the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka by the Nazis. A small number of Jewish men who were not killed immediately upon arrival became its Jewish slave-labour units called Sonderkommandos and these bodies were exhumed in 1943 and cremated on large open-air pyres along with the bodies of new victims. Gassing operations at Treblinka II ended in October 1943 following a revolt by the Sonderkommandos in early August, several SS Hiwi guards were killed and 200 prisoners escaped from the camp, almost a hundred survived the subsequent chase. The camp was dismantled ahead of the Soviet advance, a farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site and the ground ploughed over in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide. In postwar Poland, the government bought most of the land where the camp had stood, in 1964 Treblinka was declared a national monument of Jewish martyrology in a ceremony at the site of the former gas chambers. In the same year the first German trials were held regarding war crimes committed at Treblinka by former SS members, after the end of communism in Poland in 1989, the number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad increased. An exhibition centre at the camp opened in 2006 and it was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 most of the 3.5 million Polish Jews were rounded up, the system was intended to isolate the Jews from the outside world in order to facilitate their exploitation and abuse. The supply of food was inadequate, living conditions were cramped and unsanitary, malnutrition and lack of medicine led to soaring mortality rates. The initial victories of the Wehrmacht over the Soviet Union inspired plans for the German colonisation of occupied Poland, including all territory within the General Government. At the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on 20 January 1942, new plans were outlined for the genocide of the Jews, Treblinka was one of three secret extermination camps set up for Operation Reinhard, the other two were Bełżec and Sobibór. All three were equipped with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, for the processing of entire transports of people, the lethal agent was established following a pilot project of mobile killing conducted at Soldau and Chełmno extermination camps that began operating in 1941 and used gas vans. Chełmno was a ground for the establishment of faster methods of killing and incinerating people. It was not a part of Reinhard, which was marked by the construction of facilities for mass murder
9.
Majdanek concentration camp
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Therefore, Majdanek became the first concentration camp discovered by Allied forces. Also known to the SS as Konzentrationslager Lublin, Majdanek remains the best preserved Nazi concentration camp of the Holocaust, unlike other similar camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, Majdanek was not located in a remote rural location away from population centres, but within the boundaries of a major city. This proximity led the camp to be named Majdanek by local people in 1941 because it was adjacent to the suburb of Majdan Tatarski in Lublin. The Nazi documents initially called the site a Prisoner of War Camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin because of the way it was operated and funded. It was renamed by RSHA in Berlin as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9,1943, however, the original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 POWs. In early November, the plans were extended to allow for 125,000 inmates and it was further increased in March 1942 to allow for 250,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Construction began with 150 Jewish forced laborers from one of Globocniks Lublin camps, later the workforce included 2,000 Red Army POWs, who had to survive extreme conditions, including sleeping out in the open. By mid-November only 500 of them were alive, of which at least 30% were incapable of further labor. In mid-December, barracks for 20,000 were ready when an epidemic broke out. All work ceased until March 1942, when new prisoners arrived, although the camp did eventually have the capacity to hold approximately 50,000 prisoners, it did not grow significantly beyond that size. Those camps had begun operations in March, May and July respectively of that year, subsequently, Himmler issued an order that the deportation of Jews to the camps be completed by the end of 1942. The gassing was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the buildings, another popular killing method was execution by the squads of Trawnikis. According to the Majdanek museum, the gas chambers began operation in September 1942, there are two identical buildings at Majdanek, where Zyklon-B was used. Executions were carried out in barrack 41 with the use of hydrogen cyanide released by the Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in barrack 42, by mid-October 1942 the camp held 9,519 registered prisoners, of which 7,468 were Jews, and another 1,884 were non-Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals. According to the data from the official Majdanek State Museum,300,000 persons were inmates of the camp at one time or another, the prisoner population at any given time was much lower. From October 1942 onwards, Majdanek also had female overseers, Majdanek did not initially have subcamps
10.
Maly Trostenets extermination camp
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It operated between July 1942 and October 1943, by which time, virtually all Jews remaining in Minsk had been murdered and buried there. The camp became a Vernichtungslager on 10 May 1942 when the first consignment of Jews was brought in under the guise of resettlement, Jews from Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic were murdered there. In most cases, the Jews were killed immediately upon arrival and they were trucked from the train stop to the nearby killing grounds at Blagovshchina and Shashkovka forests and shot in the back of the neck. The primary purpose of the camp was the killing of Jewish prisoners of the Minsk Ghetto, firing squad was the chief execution method. Mobile gas chambers deployed at Trostinets performed a subsidiary if not insignificant function in the killing process, baltic German SS-Scharführer Heinrich Eiche was the camp administrator. On 28 June 1944, as the Red Army approached the region, the Germans blew up the camp as part of Sonderaktion 1005, only a few Jewish prisoners survived Maly Trostenets. They were liberated by the Red Army and gave first witness testimonies about its existence on 7 July 1944, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and other researchers estimate the true number of victims at 60, 000–65,000 Jews. Only a few perpetrators of the Holocaust from Trostinets were brought to justice after the war, among them was Eduard Strauch, who died in a Belgian prison in 1955. Several people were convicted during trials in West Germany and the USSR, although they were not at Maly Trostenets. Heinrich Seetzen committed suicide in a British POW camp, Heinrich Eiche fled to Argentina after the war and all trace of him was lost. Gerhard Maywald settled after the war in West Germany, in 1970, the public prosecutors office in Koblenz ended an investigation against him because of the absence of sufficient evidence of guilt. On 4 August 1977 Maywald was sentenced to four years imprisonment for murder, currently nothing remains of the actual camp other than a row of poplars planted by the inmates as part of the natural border of the camp. The site is scheduled for reconstruction and development, in Belarusian the name is Малы Трасцянец, transliterated as Maly Tras’tsyanyets, in Russian it is Малый Тростенец. Marking 70 Years to Operation Barbarossa on the Yad Vashem website, ernst Klee and Willi Dressen, with Volker Riess, “Gott mit uns”, Der deutsche Vernichtungskrieg im Osten, 1939–1945. Shmuel Spector, ‘Aktion 1005 – Effacing the Murder of Millions’, Holocaust Genocide Studies,5, pp. 157–173 Paul Kohl, Der Krieg der deutschen Wehrmacht und der Polizei, 1941–1944, sowjetische Überlebende berichten, with an essay by Wolfram Wette. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944, hans Safrian, ‘Expediting Expropriation and Expulsion, The Impact of the “Vienna Model” on Anti-Jewish Policies in Nazi Germany, 1938’, Holocaust Genocide Studies, vol. Kholokost v Belarusi, 1941–1944, dokumenty i materially, Лагерь смерти “Тростенец”, Документы и материалы. Henatsyd u druhoĭ susvetnaĭ vaĭne, Prablemy dasledavanniya u pamiyats akhviyar Trastsiyantsa, igor’ Kuznyetsov, ‘В поисках правды, или Трагедия Тростенца, до и после’, Belorusskaya delovaya gazeta, No.1416
11.
Nazi Germany
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Nazi Germany is the common English name for the period in German history from 1933 to 1945, when Germany was governed by a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Under Hitlers rule, Germany was transformed into a fascist state in which the Nazi Party took totalitarian control over all aspects of life. The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943, the period is also known under the names the Third Reich and the National Socialist Period. The Nazi regime came to an end after the Allied Powers defeated Germany in May 1945, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. The Nazi Party then began to eliminate all opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the powers and offices of the Chancellery, a national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany. All power was centralised in Hitlers person, and his word became above all laws, the government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitlers favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending, extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen. The return to economic stability boosted the regimes popularity, racism, especially antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime. The Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the purest branch of the Aryan race, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were murdered in the Holocaust. Opposition to Hitlers rule was ruthlessly suppressed, members of the liberal, socialist, and communist opposition were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. The Christian churches were also oppressed, with many leaders imprisoned, education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed, recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, and the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased the Third Reich on the international stage. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. Beginning in the late 1930s, Nazi Germany made increasingly aggressive territorial demands and it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Hitler made a pact with Joseph Stalin and invaded Poland in September 1939. In alliance with Italy and smaller Axis powers, Germany conquered most of Europe by 1940, reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas, and a German administration was established in what was left of Poland. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the tide gradually turned against the Nazis, who suffered major military defeats in 1943
12.
Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
13.
Slavs
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Slavs are the largest Indo-European ethno-linguistic group in Europe. They are native to Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Northeastern Europe, North Asia, Slavs speak Slavic languages of the Balto-Slavic language group. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of Central, states with Slavic languages comprise over 50% of the territory of Europe, therefore it is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe by land area. Present-day Slavic people are classified into West Slavs, East Slavs, there are an estimated 360 million Slavs worldwide. The Slavic autonym is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as *Slověninъ, plural *Slověne, the oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest the autonym as Slověne. The word slovo and the related slava and slukh originate from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱlew-, cognate with Ancient Greek κλῆς, whence comes the name Pericles, Latin clueo, some other theories have limited support. The English term slave eventually derives from the ethnonym Slav, Slavs were captured and enslaved by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD. The Slavs under name of the Antes and the Sclaveni make their first appearance in Byzantine records in the early 6th century. Procopius wrote in 545 that the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a name in the remote past. He described them as barbarians, who lived under democracy, and that believe in one god. They lived in scattered housing, and constantly changed settlement, regarding warfare, they were mainly foot soldiers with small shields and battleaxes, lightly clothed, some entering battle naked with only their genitals covered. And they live a life, giving no heed to bodily comforts. Jordanes described the Sclaveni having swamps and forests for their cities, another 6th-century source refers to them living among nearly impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes. Menander Protector mentions a Daurentius that slew an Avar envoy of Khagan Bayan I. The Avars asked the Slavs to accept the suzerainty of the Avars, he declined and is reported as saying, Others do not conquer our land. The relationship between the Slavs and a called the Veneti east of the River Vistula in the Roman period is uncertain. The name may refer both to Balts and Slavs, perhaps some Slavs migrated with the movement of the Vandals to Iberia and north Africa. Around the 6th century, Slavs appeared on Byzantine borders in great numbers, the Byzantine records note that grass would not regrow in places where the Slavs had marched through, so great were their numbers
14.
Communism
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Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, anarchism, and the political ideologies grouped around both. The primary element which will enable this transformation, according to analysis, is the social ownership of the means of production. Likewise, some communists defend both theory and practice, while others argue that historical practice diverged from communist principles to a greater or lesser degree, according to Richard Pipes, the idea of a classless, egalitarian society first emerged in Ancient Greece. At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, in the medieval Christian church, for example, some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. Communist thought has also traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More. In his treatise Utopia, More portrayed a society based on ownership of property. In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Later, following the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine, in the early 19th century, Various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. But unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the emphasis with a rational. Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony in Indiana, in its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels, in 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to power of Lenins Bolsheviks. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks had a majority, the event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx predicted that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development, Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule, the moderate Mensheviks opposed Lenins Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Great Purge of 1937–1938 was Stalins attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party and its leading role in the Second World War saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, with strong influence over Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The European and Japanese empires were shattered and Communist parties played a role in many independence movements
15.
Untermensch
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Untermensch is a term that became infamous when the Nazis used it to describe non-Aryan inferior people often referred to as the masses from the East, that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs. The term was applied to most Blacks, and persons of color. Jewish people were to be exterminated in the Holocaust, Roma, and the physically and mentally disabled were also to be exterminated. According to the Generalplan Ost, the Slavic population of East-Central Europe was to be reduced in part through mass murder, a few populations deemed partially Aryan in origin, such as Czechs, Slovenians, or Estonians were to be Germanized. These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy, while the Nazis were inconsistent in the implementation of their policy, the democidal death toll was in tens of millions of victims. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that books German version Der Kulturumsturz, the German word Untermensch had been used earlier, but not in a racial sense, for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, Untermensch is usually translated into English as sub-human. The leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European under man to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, jahrhunderts that this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the under man. Quoting Stoddard, The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the order in which he lives. It is possible that Stoddard constructed his under man as an opposite to Friedrich Nietzsches Übermensch concept, Stoddard doesnt say so explicitly, but he refers critically to the superman idea at the end of his book. For instance, German author Theodor Fontane contrasts the Übermensch/Untermensch word pair in chapter 33 of his novel Der Stechlin, earlier examples of Untermensch include Romanticist Jean Paul using the term in his novel Hesperus in reference to an Orangutan. In his speech Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus in 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that subhumans exist in people as a leavening agent. SS-Obersturmführer Ludwig Pröscholdt, Jupp Daehler and SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt Koenig are associated with its production,3,860,995 copies were printed in the German language. It was translated into Greek, French, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech, the pamphlet says the following, Nazis classified those they called the sub-humans into different types, they placed priority on extermination of the Jews, and exploitation of others as slaves. The Untermensch concept included Jews, Roma and Sinti, and Slavic peoples such as Poles, the Slavs were regarded as Untermenschen, barely fit for exploitation as slaves. Hitler and Goebbels compared them to the family or to stolid animals that were idle and disorganized. Biology classes in Nazi Germany schools taught about differences between the race of Nordic German Übermenschen and ignoble Jewish and Slavic subhumans, the view that Slavs were subhuman was widespread among the German masses, and chiefly applied to the Poles. It continued to support after the war
16.
Gas chamber
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A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide, gas chambers were used as a method of execution for condemned prisoners in the United States beginning in the 1920s and continue to be a legal execution method in three states. During the Holocaust, large-scale gas chambers designed for killing were used by Nazi Germany as part of their genocide program. The use of gas chambers in North Korea has also been reported, in June 1942 many hundreds of prisoners of the Neuengamme concentration camp, including 45 Dutch communists, were gassed in Bernburg Euthanasia Centre. The Nazi concentration and extermination camps, including Auschwitz and Majdanek, the gas chosen by the command of Operation Reinhard was exhaust gas from internal combustion engines. In the eastern territories, the executions by exhaust gas were performed by the Einsatzgruppen in modified vans. Some stationary gas chambers could kill 2,000 people at once, the use of gas chambers during the Holocaust was attested to by camp survivors as well as staff members, drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the SS. Most gas chambers were dismantled or destroyed as the Soviet troops approached, except for those at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, the gas chamber at Auschwitz I was amongst those blown up. It was reconstructed after the war to stand as a memorial, albeit with the entry door, the door that had been added when the gas chamber was converted into an air raid shelter was left intact. In 1937–1940, Lithuania operated a gas chamber in Aleksotas within the First Fort of the Kaunas Fortress, before, the executions were carried out by hanging or by shooting. However, these methods were viewed as brutal and in January 1937, Lithuania considered and rejected execution by poison. The first execution was carried on July 27,1937, Bronius Pogužinskas, age 37, historian Sigita Černevičiūtė counted at least nine executions in the gas chamber, though records are incomplete and fragmentary. Of the nine, eight were convicted of murder, one, Aleksandras Maurušaitis, was in addition convicted of anti-government actions during the 1935 Suvalkija strike. The last known execution took place on May 19,1940 for robbery, the fate of the gas chamber after the occupation by the Soviet Union in June 1940 is unclear. After undergoing medical checks, the chambers are sealed and poison is injected through a tube, kwons testimony was supported by documents from Camp 22 describing the transfer of prisoners designated for the experiments. The documents were identified as genuine by Kim Sang Hun, a London-based expert on Korea, a press conference in Pyongyang, organized by North Korean authorities, denounced this. The original invention of gas chambers based on adapted vans with the storage compartment sealed. These vans were used by NKVD from 1936 under disguise of bread vans, gas chambers have been used for capital punishment in the United States to execute death row inmates
17.
Gas van
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A gas van or gas wagon was a vehicle equipped as a mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had a compartment for victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by monoxide poisoning, the gas van was invented and used by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the late 1930s during the Great Purge. It was later implemented as an extermination method in Nazi Germany to kill those the regime deemed enemies of the state. But, when in Moscow Oblast there came to be three troikas having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution, to strip the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, during transportation the fuel gases went into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest ditch the arrestees were already dead. Note, Berg denied that he was the inventor of the gas van, during trips to Russia in 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler learned the psychological impact of shooting women and children on the Einsatzgruppen. Hence, he commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the task forces, nebes experiments eventually led to the utilization of the gas van. This type of vehicle had already used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau. Another source states that the vans were first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen and it was a vehicle with an airtight compartment for victims, into which exhaust gas was piped in while the engine was running. As a result, the victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning. The suffocations usually occurred as the gas van was carrying the victims to a freshly dug pit or ravine for mass burial, there were two types of gas vans in operation, used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, weighing 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, in Belgrade, the gas van was known as Dušegupka and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as душегубка. The use of gas vans had two disadvantages, It was slow—some victims took twenty minutes to die and it was not quiet—the drivers could hear the victims screams, which they found distracting and disturbing. By June 1942 the main producer of gas vans, Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models to Einsatzgruppen units, out of 30 ordered, not one gas van was extant at the end of the war. The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar, the total number of gas van gassings is unknown
18.
Nazi concentration camps
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Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled before and during the Second World War. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps initially held around 45,000 prisoners, Heinrich Himmlers SS took full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany in 1934–35. Himmler expanded the role of the camps to holding so-called racially undesirable elements of German society, such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani. The number of people in camps, which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II and peaked at 715,000 in January 1945. The concentration camps were administered since 1934 by Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in 1942 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände, use of the word concentration came from the idea of using documents confining to one place a group of people who are in some way undesirable. The term itself originated in the camps set up in Cuba by General Valeriano Weyler in 1897. Concentration camps had in the past been used by the U. S. against Native Americans, between 1904 and 1908, the Schutztruppe of the Imperial German Army operated concentration camps in German South-West Africa as part of their genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples. The Shark Island Concentration Camp in Lüderitz was the biggest and the one with the harshest conditions, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to suppress all real or potential opposition. The general public was intimidated through arbitrary psychological terror of the special courts, especially during the first years of their existence these courts had a strong deterrent effect against any form of political protest. The first camp in Germany, Dachau, was founded in March 1933, the press announcement said that the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000 people. Dachau was the first regular concentration camp established by the German coalition government of National Socialist Workers Party, Heinrich Himmler, then Chief of Police of Munich, officially described the camp as the first concentration camp for political prisoners. On 26 June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke commandant of Dachau, in addition, the remaining SA-run camps were taken over by the SS. Dachau served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi concentration camps, almost every community in Germany had members taken there. The newspapers continuously reported of the removal of the enemies of the Reich to concentration camps making the population more aware of their presence. There were jingles warning as early as 1935, Dear God, make me dumb, between 1933 and the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, more than 3. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions, as a result of the Holocaust, the term concentration camp carries many of the connotations of extermination camp and is sometimes used synonymously. Regardless of the circumstances of the camp, which can vary a great deal. During the war, new Nazi concentration camps for undesirables spread throughout the continent, Camps were being created near the centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Romani
19.
End of World War II in Europe
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The final battles of the European Theatre of World War II as well as the German surrender to the Soviet Union and the Western Allies took place in late April and early May 1945. Allied forces begin to take large numbers of Axis prisoners, The total number of prisoners taken on the Western Front in April 1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000. April also witnessed the capture of at least 120,000 German troops by the Western Allies in the last campaign of the war in Italy, in the three or four months up to the end of April, over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front. In early April, the first Allied-governed Rheinwiesenlagers were established in western Germany to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered Axis Forces personnel, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force reclassified all prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces, not POWs. The legal fiction circumvented provisions under the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of former combatants, by October, thousands had died in the camps from starvation, exposure and disease. Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and refugees, Allied forces begin to discover the scale of The Holocaust, the advance into Germany uncovers numerous Nazi concentration camps and forced labor facilities. Up to 60,000 prisoners were at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated on April 15,1945, Four days later troops from the American 42nd Infantry Division found Dachau. Allied troops force the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses, due to the prisoners poor physical condition, thousands continue to die after liberation. Captured SS guards are subsequently tried at Allied war crimes tribunals where many are sentenced to death, however, up to 10,000 Nazi war criminals will eventually flee Europe using ratlines such as ODESSA. Germans leave Finland, On 25 April 1945, the last Germans were expelled by the Finnish Army from Finland, Mussolinis death, On 25 April 1945, Italian partisans liberated Milan and Turin. On 27 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans and it is disputed whether he was trying to flee from Italy to Switzerland, and was traveling with a German anti-aircraft battalion. On 28 April, Mussolini was executed in Giulino, the other Fascists captured with him were taken to Dongo, the bodies were then taken to Milan and hung up on the Piazzale Loreto of the city. On 29 April, Rodolfo Graziani surrendered all Fascist Italian armed forces at Caserta, Graziani was the Minister of Defence for Mussolinis Italian Social Republic. Upper Inn river to the American General Jacob L. Devers, hitler appointed his successors as follows, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz as the new Reichspräsident and Joseph Goebbels as the new Reichskanzler. However, Goebbels committed suicide the day, leaving Dönitz as the sole leader of Germany. In the document, the Germans agreed to a ceasefire and surrender of all the forces under the command of Vietinghoff at 2pm on 2 May, German forces in Berlin surrender, The Battle of Berlin ended on 2 May. On that date, General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, on the same day the officers commanding the two armies of Army Group Vistula north of Berlin, surrendered to the Western Allies. Lehrter Bahnhof is close to where the remains of Bormann, confirmed as his by a DNA test in 1998, were unearthed on 7 December 1972, the number of German land, sea and air forces involved in this surrender amounted to 1,000,000 men
20.
Extermination through labour
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Thierack and Goebbels specifically used the term. The phrase was used again during the post-war Nuremberg trials, in the 1980s and 1990s, however, historians have debated the appropriate use of the term. Falk Pingel believed the phrase should not be applied to all Nazi prisoners, while Hermann Kaienburg, more recently, Jens-Christian Wagner has also argued that not all Nazi prisoners were targeted with annihilation. The Nazis persecuted many individuals because of their race, political affiliation, disability, while these people were considered German-blooded, they were also categorized as social misfits, as well as superfluous ballast-lives. Anyone who openly opposed the Nazi regime was detained in prison camps, many of them did not survive the ordeal. During the war in 1942 the Nazi leadership gathered to discuss what had come to be called the solution to the Jewish question at a conference in Wannsee. Under proper leadership, the Jews shall now in the course of the Final Solution be suitably brought to their assignments in the East. Able-bodied Jews are to be led to areas to build roads in large work columns separated by sex. They also used torture and physical abuse, torstehen – forced victims to stand outside naked with arms raised – like a gate hanging on its hinges. When they collapsed or passed out, they would be beaten until they re-assumed the position, pfahlhängen involved tying the inmates hands behind their back and then hanging them by their hands from a tall stake. This would dislocate and disjoint the arms, and the pressure would be fatal within hours, imprisonment in concentration camps was intended not merely to break, but to destroy inmates. The admission and registration of the new prisoners, the labour, the prisoner housing. Admission, registration and interrogation of the detainees was accompanied by scornful remarks from SS officials, the prisoners were stepped on and beaten during roll call. Forced labour partly consisted of pointless tasks and heavy labour, which was intended to wear down the prisoners, at many of the concentration camps, forced labour was channeled for the advancement of the German war machine. In these cases, excessive working hours were seen as a means to maximizing output. Oswald Pohl, the leader of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, who oversaw the employment of forced labour at the concentration camps, the camp commander alone is responsible for the use of man power. This work must be exhausting in the sense of the word in order to achieve maximum performance. There are no limits to working hours, time consuming walks and mid-day breaks only for the purpose of eating are prohibited
21.
Holocaust train
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Modern historians suggest that without the mass transportation of the railways, the scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible. The most modern accurate numbers on the scale of the Final Solution still rely partly on shipping records of the German railways, the first mass deportation of Jews from Nazi Germany occurred in less than a year before the outbreak of war. It was the eviction of German Jews with Polish citizenship fuelled by the Kristallnacht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were rounded up and sent via rail to refugee camps, in July 1938 both the United States and Britain at the Évian Conference in France refused to accept any more Jewish immigrants. The British Government agreed to take in the shipment of children arranged by Nicholas Winton in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the conditions that he pay the cost, Winton managed to arrange for 669 children to get out on eight trains to London. The ninth train was to leave Prague on 3 September 1939, the train never left the station, and none of the 250 children on board were seen again. All European Jews trapped under the Nazi regime became the target of Hitlers Final Solution to the Jewish Question, within various phases of the Holocaust, the trains were employed differently. At first, they were used to concentrate the Jewish populations in the ghettos, in 1939 for logistical reasons the Jewish communities in settlements without railway lines in occupied Poland were dissolved. By the end of 1941, about 3.5 million Polish Jews had been segregated and ghettoised by the SS in a massive deportation action involving the use of freight trains. Permanent ghettos had direct connections, because the food aid was completely dependent on the SS similar to all newly built labour camps. Jews were legally banned from baking bread and they were sealed off from the general public in hundreds of virtual prison-islands called Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden. However, the new system was unsustainable, by the end of 1941, most ghettoised Jews had no savings left to pay the SS for further bulk food deliveries. The quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin and it was a euphemism referring to the Nazi plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. During the liquidation of the ghettos starting in 1942, the trains were used to transport the condemned populations to death camps, to implement the Final Solution, the Nazis made their own Deutsche Reichsbahn an indispensable element of the mass extermination machine, wrote historian Raul Hilberg. Although the prisoner trains took away valuable track space, they allowed for the mass scale, the fully enclosed nature of the locked and windowless cattle wagons greatly reduced the number and skill of troops required to transport the condemned Jews to their destinations. The use of railroads enabled the Nazis to lie about the resettlement program and, at the time, build. The Nazis disguised their Final Solution as the mass resettlement to the east, the victims were told they were being taken to labour camps in Ukraine. In reality, from 1942 on for most Jews, deportations meant only death at either Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka, some trains that had already transported goods to the Eastern front on their return carried human cargo bound for extermination camps
22.
Aktion T4
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Aktion T4 was the postwar designation for a programme of involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to select patients deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination, about half of the victims were from church-run asylums. Several reasons for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, compassion, reducing suffering, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the nominal end of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices of Aktion T4, the unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds emptied by the end of 1941. The technology, personnel and techniques developed were instrumental in the implementation of Nazi genocides, the term Aktion T4 came into use after the war, before that German terminology included Euthanasie and Gnadentod. The euthanasia programme was part of the evolution of the policy of murder that culminated in the extermination of Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene, the idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted. Canada, Denmark, Switzerland and the US had passed laws for the sterilisation of people before Germany. Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation, the policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by Emil Kraepelin. Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance and it is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner and he wrote that he intended to radically solve the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. Although officially started in September 1939, Aktion T4 was initiated with a case in late 1938. Hitler instructed his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to evaluate a familys petition for the killing of their blind. The child, born near Leipzig and identified as Gerhard Kretschmar eventually, was killed in July 1939, Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. Three weeks after the killing of the boy, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and it was to prepare and proceed with the registration of sick children or newborns identified as defective. Secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started, by 1941 more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be unworthy of life and this issue, according to the Nazi regime, assumed new urgency in wartime. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power, as early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were unworthy of life
23.
Final Solution
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The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is a studied and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at murdering every last Jew in the German grasp, most historians agree, wrote Christopher Browning, that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. It is generally accepted the process was prolonged and incremental. There were also plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia, the term Final Solution was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Historians have shown that the tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. Euphemisms were, in Mark Rosemans words, their mode of communicating about murder. According to Nazi Party policy statement, the Jews, and Roma, were the only people in Europe. In 1936 the Bureau of Romani Affairs in Munich was taken over by the Interpol, after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, special offices were established in Vienna and Berlin to facilitate Jewish emigration without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation. In the German-occupied zone of Poland, Jews were forced hundreds of makeshift ghettos pending other arrangements. Two years later, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa against the USSR, reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler became the chief architect of a new plan, which came to be called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich, broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the murder behind the front-lines. By August 1941 all Jewish men, women and children were shot, in the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly-built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg wrote, In essence, the killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically but also in complexity. The plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe irrespective of geographic borders was formalised at the Wannsee Villa near Berlin on 20 January 1942, the conference was chaired by Heydrich and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government. Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, at the conference, Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the Final Solution. This figure included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, eichmanns biographer David Cesarani wrote that Heydrichs main purpose in convening the conference was to assert his authority over the various agencies dealing with Jewish issues
24.
Fascism
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Fascism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum. Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought changes to the nature of war, society, the state. The advent of war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. A military citizenship arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war, Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. Since the end of World War II in 1945, few parties have openly described themselves as fascist, the descriptions neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far right with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th century fascist movements. The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods and this was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates. According to Mussolinis own account, the Fascist Revolutionary Party was founded in Italy in 1915, in 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, which became the Partito Nazionale Fascista two years later. The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity, a rod is easily broken. Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements, for example, historians, political scientists, and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism. Each interpretation of fascism is distinct, leaving many definitions too wide or narrow, according to many scholars, fascism—especially once in power—has historically attacked communism, conservatism and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far right. Roger Griffin describes fascism as a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a form of populist ultranationalism. Griffin describes the ideology as having three components, the rebirth myth, populist ultra-nationalism and the myth of decadence. Fascism is a revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis. Fascist Philosophies vary by application, but remain distinct by one theoretic commonality, all traditionally fall into the far-right sector of any political spectrum, catalyzed by afflicted class identities over conventional social inequities. John Lukacs, Hungarian-American historian and Holocaust survivor, argues there is no such thing as generic fascism. He claims that National Socialism and Communism are essentially manifestations of populism, Fascism was influenced by both left and right, conservative and anti-conservative, national and supranational, rational and anti-rational
25.
Independent State of Croatia
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The Independent State of Croatia was a World War II puppet state of Germany and Italy. It was established in parts of occupied Yugoslavia on 10 April 1941 and its territory consisted of most of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia. During its entire existence, the state was governed by the fascist Ustaše movement and its Poglavnik, the regime targeted Serbs, Jews and Roma as part of a large-scale genocide campaign, as well as anti-fascist or dissident Croats and Muslims. Between 1941–45,22 concentration camps existed inside the territory controlled by the Independent State of Croatia, the state was officially a monarchy after the signing of the Laws of the Crown of Zvonimir on 15 March 1941. He later accepted the throne due to pressure from Victor Emmanuel III and was titled Tomislav II of Croatia, but never moved from Italy to reside in Croatia. From the signing of the Treaties of Rome on 18 May 1941 until the Italian capitulation on 8 September 1943, the state was a condominium of Germany and Italy. In its judgement in the Hostages Trial, the Nuremberg Military Tribunal concluded that NDH was not a sovereign state, according to the Tribunal, Croatia was at all times here involved an occupied country. In 1942, Germany suggested Italy take military control of all of Croatia out of a desire to redirect German troops from Croatia to the Eastern Front, Italy however rejected the offer as it did not believe that it could handle the unstable situation in the Balkans alone. The NDH attempted to annex Zara, which had been a territory of Italy since 1919 but long an object of Croatian irredentism. Geographically, the NDH encompassed most of modern-day Croatia, all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of modern-day Serbia, and a small portion of modern-day Slovenia in the Municipality of Brežice. It bordered the Third Reich to the north-west, Kingdom of Hungary to the north-east, Serbian administration to the east, Montenegro to the south-east, the exact borders of the Independent State of Croatia were unclear when it was established. Approximately one month after its formation, significant areas of Croat-populated territory were ceded to its Axis allies, on 13 May 1941, the NDH government signed an agreement with Nazi Germany which demarcated their borders. On 19 May the Rome contracts were signed by diplomats of the NDH, on 7 June the NDH government issued a decree that demarcated its eastern border with Serbia. On 27 October the NDH and Italy reached an agreement on the Independent State of Croatias border with Montenegro. On 8 September 1943, Italy capitulated and the NDH officially considered the Rome contracts to be void, along with the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920 which had given Italy Istria, Fiume and Zara. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop approved the NDH acquisition of the Dalmatian territories gained by Italy at the time of the Rome contracts, by now, most such territory was actually controlled by the Yugoslav Partisans, since the ceding of those areas had made them strongly anti-NDH. By 11 September 1943, NDH foreign minister Mladen Lorković received word from German consul Siegfried Kasche that the NDH should wait before moving on Istria, Germanys central government had already annexed Istria and Fiume into the Operational Zone Adriatic Coast a day earlier. Međimurje and southern Baranja were annexed by the Kingdom of Hungary, NDH disputed this and continued to lay claim to both, naming the administrative province centred in Osijek as Great Parish Baranja
26.
Serbs
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The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group that formed in the Balkans. The majority of Serbs inhabit the state of Serbia, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. They form significant minorities in Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia, there is a large Serb diaspora in Western Europe, and outside Europe there are significant communities in North America and Australia. The Serbs share many traits with the rest of the peoples of Southeast Europe. They are predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christians by religion, the Serbian language is official in Serbia, co-official in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is spoken by the majority in Montenegro. The modern identity of Serbs is rooted in Eastern Orthodoxy and traditions, in the 19th century, the Serbian national identity was manifested, with awareness of history and tradition, medieval heritage, cultural unity, despite living under different empires. When the Principality of Serbia gained independence from the Ottoman Empire, Orthodoxy became crucial in defining the national identity, instead of language which was shared by other South Slavs. The tradition of slava, the family saint feast day, is an important ethnic marker of Serb identity, the origin of the ethnonym is unclear. Serbia has among the tallest people in the world, after Montenegro and Netherlands, Slavs invaded and settled the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries. Up until the late 560s their activity was raiding, crossing from the Danube, the Danube and Sava frontier was overwhelmed by large-scale Slavic settlement in the late 6th and early 7th century. What is today central Serbia was an important geo-strategical province, through which the Via Militaris crossed and this area was frequently intruded by barbarians in the 5th and 6th centuries. The numerous Slavs mixed with and assimilated the descendants of the indigenous population, numerous small Serbian states were created, located in modern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia. With the decline of the Serbian state of Duklja in the late 11th century, Raška separated from it, prince Stefan Nemanja conquered the neighbouring territories of Kosovo, Duklja and Zachlumia. The Nemanjić dynasty ruled over Serbia until the 14th century, over the next 140 years, Serbia expanded its borders. Its cultural model remained Byzantine, despite political ambitions directed against the empire, the medieval power and influence of Serbia culminated in the reign of Stefan Dušan, who ruled the state from 1331 until his death in 1355. Ruling as Emperor from 1346, his territory included Macedonia, northern Greece, Montenegro, when Dušan died, his son Stephen Uroš V became Emperor. With the death of two important Serb leaders in the battle, and with the death of Stephen Uroš that same year, hrebeljanović was subsequently accepted as the titular leader of the Serbs because he was married to a member of the Nemanjić dynasty. In 1389, the Serbs faced the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo on the plain of Kosovo Polje, both Lazar and Sultan Murad I were killed in the fighting
27.
Romani people
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The Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym Gypsies, which some people consider pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity. Romani are dispersed, with their populations in Europe – especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe including Turkey, Spain. Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas, there are an estimated one million Roma in the United States, and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes some Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisition in the colonial era, in migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada. In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India. The conference ended with a recommendation to the Government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora, the Romani language is divided into several dialects, which add up to an estimated number of speakers larger than two million. The total number of Romani people is at least twice as large, many Romani are native speakers of the language current in their country of residence, or of mixed languages combining the two, those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani. French bohème, bohémien, from the Kingdom of Bohemia, whence they came, Rom means man or husband in the Romani, it has the variants dom and lom, related with the Sanskrit words dam-pati, dama, lom, lomaka loman, roman. Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma, Sanskrit सिनधु is a river or stream of water in general. In particular, it denotes the river Indus and the country around it, in the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning man of the Roma ethnic group or man, husband, with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni, however, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of all genders. Romani is the adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as a name, while others do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group. Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a r, i. e. rrom. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/, the rr spelling is common in certain institutions, or used in certain countries, e. g. Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians. In the English language, Rom is a noun and an adjective, while Romani is also a noun, both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy. Romani was initially spelled Rommany, then Romany, while today the Romani spelling is the most popular spelling, occasionally, the double r spelling mentioned above is also encountered in English texts. The term Roma is increasingly encountered during recent decades, as a term for the Romani people
28.
Croats
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Croats are a nation and South Slavic ethnic group at the crossroads of Central Europe, Southeast Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea. Croats mainly live in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but are a recognized minority in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia. Responding to political, social and economic pressure, many Croats have migrated throughout Europe, evidence is rather scarce for the period between the 7th and 8th centuries, CE. Archaeological evidence shows population continuity in coastal Dalmatia and Istria, in contrast, much of the Dinaric hinterland appears to have been depopulated, as virtually all hilltop settlements, from Noricum to Dardania, were abandoned in the early 7th century. Although the dating of the earliest Slavic settlements is still disputed, the origin, timing and nature of the Slavic migrations remain controversial, however, all available evidence points to the nearby Danubian and Carpathian regions. Much uncertainty revolves around the circumstances of their appearance given the scarcity of literary sources during the 7th and 8th century Dark Ages. Traditionally, scholarship has placed the arrival of the Croats in the 7th century, as such, the arrival of the Croats was seen as a second wave of Slavic migrations, which liberated Dalmatia from Avar hegemony. However, as early as the 1970s, scholars questioned the reliability of Porphyrogenitus work, rather than being an accurate historical account, De Administrando Imperio more accurately reflects the political situation during the 10th century. The major basis for this connection was the similarity between Hrvat and inscriptions from the Tanais dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, mentioning the name Khoroathos. Similar arguments have been made for an alleged Gothic-Croat link and they appear to have been based around Nin and Klis, down to the Cetina and south of Liburnia. Here, concentrations of the Old Croat culture abound, marked by very wealthy warrior burials dating to the 9th century CE. Other, distinct polities also existed near the Croat duchy and these included the Guduscans, the Narentines and the Sorabi who ruled some other eastern parts of ex-Roman Dalmatia. Also prominent in the territory of future Croatia was the polity of Prince Liutevid, however, soon, the Croats became the dominant local power in northern Dalmatia, absorbing Liburnia and expanding their name by conquest and prestige. In the south, while having periods of independence, the Naretines also merged with Croats later under control of Croatian Kings, with such expansion, Croatia soon became dominant power and absorb other polities between Frankish, Bulgarian and Byzantine empire. Each vied for control of the Northwest Balkan regions, nevertheless, two independent Slavic dukedoms emerged sometime during the 9th century, the Croat Duchy and Principality of Lower Pannonia. Having been under Avar control, lower Pannonia became a march of the Carolingian Empire around 800, aided by Vojnomir in 796, the first named Slavic Duke of Pannonia, the Franks wrested control of the region from the Avars before totally destroying the Avar realm in 803. After the death of Charlemagne in 814, Frankish influence decreased on the region, the Frankish margraves sent armies in 820,821 and 822, but each time they failed to crush the rebels. Aided by Borna the Guduscan, the Franks eventually defeated Ljudevit, for much of the subsequent period, Savia was probably directly ruled by the Carinthian Duke Arnulf, the future East Frankish King and Emperor
29.
Bosniaks
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The Bosniaks are a South Slavic nation and ethnic group inhabiting mainly the area of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A native minority of Bosniaks live in countries in the Balkans, especially in the Sandžak region of Serbia and Montenegro. Over two million Bosniaks live in the Balkans, with an additional million settled and living around the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide during the Bosnian War have had an effect on the distribution of the population. Partly due to this, a significant Bosniak diaspora exists in a number of countries, including Austria, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Turkey, Canada and the United States. The modern spelling is contained in the 1836 Penny Cyclopaedia V. 231/1, The inhabitants of Bosnia are composed of Bosniaks, a race of Sclavonian origin. In the Slavic languages, -ak is a suffix appended to words to create a masculine noun, for instance also found in the ethnonym of Poles. As such, Bosniak is etymologically equivalent to its non-ethnic counterpart Bosnian, from the perspective of Bosniaks, bosanstvo and bošnjaštvo are closely and mutually interconnected, as Bosniaks connect their identity with Bosnia and Herzegovina. The earliest attestation to a Bosnian ethnonym emerged with the historical term Bošnjanin which denoted the people of the medieval Bosnian kingdom, Bosniak, as well as the older term Bošnjanin, is originally a name defining the inhabitants of the medieval Bosnian state. The Bosniaks derive their ethnonym from Bosnia, first mentioned in De Administrando Imperio by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII as the horion of Bosona, some scholars also connect the Roman road station Ad Basante, first attested in the 5th century Tabula Peutingeriana, to Bosnia. According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could essentially be derived from Illyrian Bass-an-as which would be a diversion of the Proto-Indo-European root *bhoĝ-, other theories involve the rare Latin term Bosina, meaning boundary, and possible Slavic and Thracian origins. Nevertheless, leaders and intellectuals of the Bosniak community may have various perceptions of what it means to be Bosniak, some may point to an Islamic heritage, while others stress the purely secular and national character of the Bosniak identity and its connection with Bosnian territory and history. Moreover, individuals outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina may hold their own interpretations as well. Some people, such as Montenegrin Abdul Kurpejović, recognize an Islamic component in the Bosniak identity, still others consider all Slavic Muslims in the former Yugoslavia to be Bosniaks. In Yugoslavia, unlike the preceding Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no recognition of Bosniak ethnicity. In other ex-Yugoslav countries with significant Slavic Muslim populations, adoption of the Bosniak name has been less consistent, the effects of this phenomenon can best be seen in the censuses. For instance, the 2003 Montenegrin census recorded 48,184 people who registered as Bosniaks and 28,714 who registered as Muslim by nationality. Although Montenegros Slavic Muslims form one community with a shared culture and history
30.
Lublin Reservation
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The Lublin Reservation was a concentration camp complex developed by Nazi German Schutzstaffel in the early stages of World War II, as the so-called territorial solution to the Jewish Question. Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, the former Gauleiter of Vienna – appointed the SS, during early implementation of the plan, the Nazis set up a system of ghettos for Jewish civilians to utilize them as the German workforce. The first forced labour camps were established for the Burggraben project intended to fortify the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line, in total, about 95,000 Jews were deported to the Lublin Reservation. The main camp of the complex was set up in Bełżec initially for the Jewish forced labor. In March 1942 it became the first Nazi extermination camp of Operation Reinhard, though the Burggraben camps were temporarily closed in late 1940, many of them were reactivated in 1941. Two other extermination camps, Sobibor and Majdanek, were set up in the Lublin district also. The Lipowa camp became a subcamp of the latter in 1943, the Nisko Plan was abandoned for pragmatic reasons, nevertheless, the Zwangsarbeitslagers already established for DAW became the industrial base of other SS projects such as Ostindustrie. A number of them functioned until Aktion Erntefest, others beyond the massacres, the antisemitic regime in Nazi Germany intended to achieve a permanent solution to what they regarded as the Jewish question. Before the Final solution was agreed upon during the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, however, except for the Nisko Plan, none of the territorial solutions progressed beyond the planning stage. Instead, the Nazi Germans implemented the near extermination of the European Jews through the Holocaust. In late summer 1939, Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler, with one of his foremost Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg, after Nazi Germany had defeated Poland in September 1939 and partitioned her with the Soviet Union, the Lublin area became part of the Generalgouvernement headed by Hans Frank. Once under Nazi German control, the area was inspected by Franks deputy Artur Seyss-Inquart in November 1939. He reported that - according to the local governor - the area, swampy in its nature, would serve well as a reservation for Jews, on 25 November, Frank informed the local administration that an influx of millions of Jews was proposed. Also in November, Odilo Globocnik was put in charge of all issues regarding the Jews in the Lublin area, representing the SS as the areas SS and Police Leader. Globocnik set up a department led by a Dr. Hofbauer to plan the settlement of the expected Jews, the original Lublin Reservation comprised an area of 300 to 400 square miles located between the Vistula and San rivers southeast of Lublin. Adolf Eichmann, then head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was the first to realize the Nisko Plan by deporting Jews to the Lublin Reservation. Eichmann also set up a camp in Nisko, a town on the western border of the Lublin district. The first Jews were shipped to Lublin on 18 October 1939, the first train loads consisted of Jews deported from Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
31.
Invasion of Poland
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The campaign ended on 6 October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty. German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west the morning after the Gleiwitz incident, as the Wehrmacht advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the Polish–German border to more established lines of defence to the east. After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast where they prepared for a long defence of the Romanian Bridgehead and awaited expected support and relief from France and the United Kingdom. While those two countries had pacts with Poland and had declared war on Germany on 3 September, in the end their aid to Poland was very limited. The Soviet Red Armys invasion of Eastern Poland on 17 September, in accordance with a protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Facing a second front, the Polish government concluded the defence of the Romanian Bridgehead was no longer feasible, on 6 October, following the Polish defeat at the Battle of Kock, German and Soviet forces gained full control over Poland. The success of the invasion marked the end of the Second Polish Republic, the Soviet Union incorporated its newly acquired areas into its constituent Belarusian and Ukrainian republics, and immediately started a campaign of sovietization. In the aftermath of the invasion, a collective of underground resistance formed the Polish Underground State within the territory of the former Polish state. Many of the exiles that managed to escape Poland subsequently joined the Polish Armed Forces in the West. On 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party, under its leader Adolf Hitler, as part of this long-term policy, Hitler at first pursued a policy of rapprochement with Poland, trying to improve opinion in Germany, culminating in the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934. Earlier, Hitlers foreign policy worked to weaken ties between Poland and France, and attempted to manoeuvre Poland into the Anti-Comintern Pact, forming a front against the Soviet Union. The Poles feared that their independence would eventually be threatened altogether, the so-called Polish Corridor constituted land long disputed by Poland and Germany, and inhabited by a Polish majority. The Corridor had become a part of Poland after the Treaty of Versailles, many Germans also wanted the city of Danzig and its environs to be reincorporated into Germany. Danzig was a city with a German majority. It had been separated from Germany after Versailles and made into the nominally independent Free City of Danzig, the series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier. Poland participated with Germany in the partition of Czechoslovakia that followed the Munich Agreement and it coerced Czechoslovakia to surrender the region of Český Těšín by issuing an ultimatum to that effect on 30 September 1938, which was accepted by Czechoslovakia on 1 October. This region had a Polish majority and had been disputed between Czechoslovakia and Poland in the aftermath of World War I, the Polish annexation of Slovak territory later served as the justification for the Slovak state to join the German invasion. Poland rejected this proposal, fearing that after accepting these demands, it would become subject to the will of Germany
32.
Involuntary euthanasia
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Involuntary euthanasia is contrasted with voluntary euthanasia and non-voluntary euthanasia. Involuntary euthanasia is widely opposed and is regarded as a crime in all legal jurisdictions, reference to it or fear of it is sometimes used as a reason for not changing laws relating to other forms of euthanasia. Euthanasia became a subject of discussion in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Felix Adler, a prominent educator and scholar, issued the first authoritative call in 1891 for the provision of lethal drugs to terminally ill patients who requested to die. In 1906, Ohio considered a law to such a form of euthanasia. While much of the focused on voluntary euthanasia, other calls for involuntary euthanasia were vocalized as well. In 1900, W. Duncan McKim, a New York physician and author published a book titled “Heredity, in January 1938, the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia was formed, and was renamed the Euthanasia Society of America later that year. It advocated for the legalization of euthanasia in the United States, ann Mitchell is also credited with structuring the ESA as a eugenics project. ESA’s first president was Charles Potter, an ex-Baptist minister who advocated for coercive eugenic sterilization, the ESA initially advocated for both voluntary and involuntary euthanasia of people with severe disabilities. The ESA continues to exist today. Adolf Hitler enacted the Aktion T4 program in October 1939 to euthanize “incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught and this program was also designed as part of a larger, “Final Solution” eugenics program. Within months of enactment, the Nazis expanded its definition of who could be euthanized to include those who were of a certain ethnicity as well as economic level, many people who did not want to be euthanized by this enacted program were murdered anyway against their will. Six killing centers were constructed after T4’s enactment, with one of the most notable being the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre, at these centers, people deemed handicapped or “unfit” by “medical experts” were put to death. For example, gas chambers were disguised to look like showers, often at these centers, mass euthanasia via gas chambers took place. Approximately 200,000 people were killed over a six-year span due to the T4 program, the T4 euthanasia institutions were shut down by Allied troops in 1945
33.
Schutzstaffel
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The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party in Nazi Germany. It began with a guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed, under his direction, it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance. The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS and Waffen-SS, the Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of combat units of troops within Nazi Germanys military. A third component of the SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, ran the concentration camps, additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst organizations. The SS was the organization most responsible for the killing of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews. Members of all of its branches committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II, the SS was also involved in commercial enterprises and exploited concentration camp inmates as slave labor. After Nazi Germanys defeat, the SS and the NSDAP were judged by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be criminal organizations, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS officer at the time, was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and hanged in 1946. By 1923, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler had created a volunteer guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz to provide security at their meetings in Munich. The same year, Hitler ordered the formation of a bodyguard unit dedicated to his personal service. He wished it to be separate from the mass of the party, including the paramilitary Sturmabteilung. The new formation was designated the Stabswache, originally the unit was composed of eight men, commanded by Julius Schreck and Joseph Berchtold, and was modeled after the Erhardt Naval Brigade, a Freikorps of the time. The unit was renamed Stoßtrupp in May 1923, the Stoßtrupp was abolished after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt by the NSDAP to seize power in Munich. In 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to organize a new bodyguard unit and it was tasked with providing personal protection for Hitler at NSDAP functions and events. That same year, the Schutzkommando was expanded to an organization and renamed successively the Sturmstaffel. Officially, the SS marked its foundation on 9 November 1925, the new SS was to provide protection for NSDAP leaders throughout Germany. Hitlers personal SS protection unit was enlarged to include combat units
34.
Life unworthy of life
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The phrase life unworthy of life was a Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which, according to the Nazi regime of the time, had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be euthanized by the state, usually through the compulsion or deception of their caretakers, the term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and it is similar to but more restrictive than the concept of Untermensch, subhumans, as not all subhumans were considered unworthy of life. The euthanasia program was adopted in 1939 and came through the personal decision of Adolf Hitler. It grew in extent and scope from Action T4 ending officially in 1941 when public protests stopped the program, the euthanasia of people with disabilities continued more discreetly until the end of World War II. According to Hoche, some living people who were brain damaged, mentally retarded, autistic, Hoche felt killing such people was useful. Some people were considered disposable. Later the killing was extended to people considered racially impure or racially inferior according to Nazi thinking, the concept culminated in Nazi extermination camps, instituted to systematically kill those who were unworthy to live according to Nazi ideologists. It also justified various human experimentation and eugenics programs, as well as Nazi racial policies, there followed the killing of impaired children in hospitals, and then the killing of impaired adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended to impaired inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves
35.
German language
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German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and it is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish and it is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide. The German speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of publication of new books. German derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, a portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. With slightly different standardized variants, German is a pluricentric language, like English, German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he based his translation primarily on the standard bureaucratic language used in Saxony, also known as Meißner Deutsch. Copies of Luthers Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics initially rejected Luthers translation, and tried to create their own Catholic standard of the German language – the difference in relation to Protestant German was minimal. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that a widely accepted standard was created, until about 1800, standard German was mainly a written language, in urban northern Germany, the local Low German dialects were spoken. Standard German, which was different, was often learned as a foreign language with uncertain pronunciation. Northern German pronunciation was considered the standard in prescriptive pronunciation guides though, however, German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire and its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain, others, such as Pozsony, were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb, the most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860, in 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a standardization of the German language in its written form
36.
Right to life
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The right to life is a moral principle based on the belief that a human being has the right to live and, in particular, should not be killed by another human being. The concept of a right to life arises in debates on issues of capital punishment, war, abortion, euthanasia, justifiable homicide and, by extension, public health care. Human rights activists oppose the death penalty, calling it cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, and Amnesty International considers it to be the ultimate, irreversible denial of Human Rights. The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in 2007,2008,2010,2012 and 2014 non-binding resolutions calling for a moratorium on executions. International law only allows law enforcement officers to take life where absolutely necessary to defend themselves. In 1966 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops asked Fr, james T. McHugh to begin observing trends in abortion reform within the United States. The National Right to Life Committee was funded in 1967 as the Right to Life League to coordinate its state campaigns under the auspices of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. James T. McHugh and his assistant, Michael Taylor, proposed a different plan. Anti-abortion advocates argue that humans have the same fundamental right to life from the moment of conception that humans have after their birth. Although pro-life advocates accept that women have a right to autonomy, they deny that right entitles the women to violate the prenatal right to life. Generally speaking, those identifying themselves as right to life believe abortion is morally unacceptable, the term right to choose is a rhetorical device used in the abortion debate by abortion-rights proponents. Many abortion rights advocates argue that humans are not human persons. Advocates of the right to choose may take either or both positions, generally speaking, those identifying themselves as pro-choice are advocates for legal elective abortion. At the same time, some advocates for legalized abortion state that they simply do not know for sure where in pregnancy life begins, some biologists however, have determined that the properties of life emerge at the cellular level. Other advocates have stated that they hold personal views against abortion but do not support putting those beliefs into law, some utilitarian ethicists argue that the right to life, where it exists, depends on conditions other than membership of the human species. The philosopher Peter Singer is a proponent of this argument. For Singer, the right to life is grounded in the ability to plan, bioethicists associated with the Disability Rights and Disability Studies communities have argued that Singers epistemology is based on ableist conceptions of disability. In 1444, the Poljica Statute declared right to live -for nothing existed since ever, there are exceptions for lawful executions and self-defense, arresting a fleeing suspect, and suppressing riots and insurrections
37.
Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
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Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland were established during World War II in hundreds of locations across occupied Poland. In most cases, the larger ghettos did not correspond to traditional Jewish neighborhoods, smaller Jewish communities with populations under 500 were terminated through expulsion soon after the invasion. The Nazi extermination program depended on killing centers as much as on the effectiveness of their railways, rail transport enabled the SS to run industrial-scale mass-extermination facilities and, at the same time, openly lie to their victims about the resettlement program. Jews were transported to their deaths in Holocaust trains from liquidated ghettos of all occupied cities, including Litzmannstadt, by the time Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was liberated by the Red Army, not a single Jewish ghetto in Poland was left standing. Only about 50, 000–120,000 Polish Jews survived the war on native soil with the assistance of their Polish neighbors, in total, according to USHMM archives, The Germans established at least 1000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. Also, not all ghettos are listed due to their transient nature. Permanent ghettos were created only in settlements with connections, because the food aid was completely dependent on the Germans. Throughout 1940 and 1941, most ghettos were sealed off from the outside, walled off or enclosed with barbed wire, and many Jews found leaving them were shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles, the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. In documents and signage, the Nazis usually referred to the ghettos they created as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, the quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin, where the Final Solution was set in place. The settlements listed in the Polish language, including cities, had all been renamed after the 1939 joint invasion of Poland by Germany. Renaming everything in their own image had been one way in which the sought to redraw Europes political map. All Polish territories were confiscated as either Nazi zones of occupation, Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah without visas or exit permits upon the conclusion of World War II. By contrast, Stalin forcibly brought Soviet Jews back to USSR along with all Soviet citizens, german camps in occupied Poland during World War II Nazi crimes against the Polish nation Timeline of Treblinka
38.
Operation Reinhard
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The operation marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust with the introduction of extermination camps. As many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, extermination camps set up specifically for Operation Reinhard, the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were established in 1933 as soon as the National Socialist regime developed. They were used for coercion, forced labour, and imprisonment, the camp system expanded dramatically with the onset of the Second World War, in 1939. The new network of Nazi concentration camps built by SS in Germany, Austria, Poland, some of the most notorious slave labour camps included Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz, among other locations. The Nazis had decided to undertake the European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish Question in January 1942 during a meeting of German leaders called by Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. The newly drafted Operation Reinhard would be a step in the systematic liquidation of the Jews in occupied Europe. Within months, three top-secret camps were solely to efficiently kill thousands of people each day. These camps differed from the likes of Auschwitz and Majdanek, because the latter operated as forced-labour camps initially, unlike mixed extermination camps, the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard took no prisoners and victims were killed on arrival. A very few survived by successfully escaping, the SS officers responsible for the Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl, were all given key roles in the implementation of the Final Solution in 1942. The origin of the name is debated by Holocaust researchers. Various German documents spell the name differently, some with t after d, yet a different spelling was used in the Höfle Telegram. Heydrich was attacked by British-trained Czechoslovak agents on 27 May 1942, the earliest memo spelling out Einsatz Reinhard was relayed two months later. However, Höss theory cannot be proven by surviving documents, Heydrich himself had spelled his first name both Reinhard and Reinhardt throughout the 1930s according to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Notably, the order preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months, the new camp was operational by March 1942, with leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organisation Todt. Globocnik was given control over the entire programme. Each death camp was managed by between 20 and 35 officers from the Totenkopfverbände sworn to secrecy, and augmented by the Aktion T4 personnel selected by Globocnik. The extermination program was designed by them based on experience from the forced euthanasia centres. The SS called their volunteer guards Hiwis, an abbreviation of Hilfswillige, according to the testimony of SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand during his 1981 war crimes trial in Hamburg, only 25 percent of recruited collaborators could speak German
39.
Operation Barbarossa
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Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which was launched on Sunday 22 June 1941. In the two leading up to the invasion, the two countries signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2, 900-kilometer front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles, the offensive marked an escalation of the war, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition. Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow and was pushed back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmachts strongest blows and forced the unprepared Germans into a war of attrition, the Wehrmacht would never again mount a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet–Axis front. The failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue. The failure of Operation Barbarossa proved a point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were not granted protections stipulated in the Geneva Conventions, a majority of them never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.1 million of the prisoners to death as part of a Hunger Plan that aimed to reduce the population of Eastern Europe, over a million Soviet Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen death squads and gassing as part of the Holocaust. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his commanders that the next war would be purely a war of Weltanschauungen. Totally a peoples war, a racial war, on 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world. The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen, Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germanys destiny was to turn to the East as it did six hundred years ago. Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the Mongolian race threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood, German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the partisan struggle. The main guideline policy for German troops was Where theres a partisan, theres a Jew, many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human
40.
Einsatzgruppen
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Einsatzgruppen were Schutzstaffel paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II. As ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related auxiliary troops killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. The total number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust is estimated at 5.5 to 6 million people, after the close of World War II,24 senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947–48, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. Fourteen death sentences and two sentences were handed out. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were tried and executed by other nations. The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and operated by the Schutzstaffel before, the Einsatzgruppen had its origins in the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Heydrich to secure government buildings and documents following the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938. Originally part of the Sicherheitspolizei, two units of Einsatzgruppen were stationed in the Sudetenland in October 1938, when military action turned out not to be necessary due to the Munich Agreement, the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to confiscate government papers and police documents. They also secured government buildings, questioned senior civil servants, and arrested as many as 10,000 Czech communists, from September 1939, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt had overall command of the Einsatzgruppen. Action T4 mainly took place from 1939 to 1941, but the killings continued until the end of the war, initially the victims were shot by the Einsatzgruppen and others, but gas chambers were put into use by spring 1940. In response to Adolf Hitlers plan to invade Poland, Heydrich re-formed the Einsatzgruppen to travel in the wake of the German armies, membership at this point was drawn from the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the police. Heydrich placed SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best in command, who chose leaders for the forces and their subgroups, called Einsatzkommandos. Some had previously been members of groups such as the Freikorps. There must be no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen — lists of people to be killed — had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939. The Einsatzgruppen performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Ordnungspolizei also shot civilians during the Polish campaign. Approximately 65,000 civilians were killed by the end of 1939, in addition to leaders of Polish society, they killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani people, and the mentally ill. Psychiatric patients in Poland were initially killed by shooting, but by spring 1941 gas vans were widely used, seven Einsatzgruppen of battalion strength operated in Poland. Each was subdivided into four Einsatzkommandos of company strength, many senior army officers were only too glad to leave these genocidal actions to the task forces, as the killings violated the rules of warfare as set down in the Geneva Conventions. However, Hitler had decreed that the army would have to tolerate, some army commanders complained about unauthorised shootings, looting, and rapes committed by members of the Einsatzgruppen and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, to little effect
41.
Wehrmacht
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The Wehrmacht was the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1946. It consisted of the Heer, the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe, after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, one of Adolf Hitler’s most overt and audacious moves was to establish the Wehrmacht, a modern armed forces fully capable of offensive use. In December 1941, Hitler designated himself as commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht formed the heart of Germany’s politico-military power. In the early part of World War II, Hitlers generals employed the Wehrmacht through innovative combined arms tactics to devastating effect in what was called a Blitzkrieg, the Wehrmachts new military structure, unique combat techniques, newly developed weapons, and unprecedented speed and brutality crushed their opponents. Closely cooperating with the SS, the German armed forces committed war crimes and atrocities. By the time the war ended in Europe in May 1945, only a few of the Wehrmacht’s upper leadership were tried for war crimes, despite evidence suggesting that more were involved in illegal actions. The German term Wehrmacht generically describes any nations armed forces, for example, the Frankfurt Constitution of 1848 designated all German military forces as the German Wehrmacht, consisting of the Seemacht and the Landmacht. In 1919, the term Wehrmacht also appears in Article 47 of the Weimar Constitution, establishing that, from 1919, Germanys national defense force was known as the Reichswehr, a name that was dropped in favor of Wehrmacht on 21 May 1935. In January 1919, after World War I ended with the signing of the armistice of 11 November 1918, in March 1919, the national assembly passed a law founding a 420, 000-strong preliminary army, the Vorläufige Reichswehr. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced in May, the army was limited to one hundred thousand men with an additional fifteen thousand in the navy. The fleet was to consist of at most six battleships, six cruisers, submarines, tanks and heavy artillery were forbidden and the air-force was dissolved. A new post-war military, the Reichswehr, was established on 23 March 1921, General conscription was abolished under another mandate of the Versailles treaty. The Reichswehr was limited to 115,000 men, and thus the armed forces, under the leadership of Hans von Seeckt, though Seeckt retired in 1926, the army that went to war in 1939 was largely his creation. Germany was forbidden to have an air-force by the Versailles treaty, nonetheless and these officers saw the role of an air-force as winning air-superiority, tactical and strategic bombing and providing ground support. That the Luftwaffe did not develop a strategic bombing force in the 1930s was not due to a lack of interest, but because of economic limitations. The leadership of the Navy led by Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, officers who believed in submarine warfare led by Admiral Karl Dönitz were in a minority before 1939. By 1922, Germany had begun covertly circumventing the conditions of the Versailles Treaty, a secret collaboration with the Soviet Union began after the treaty of Rapallo. Major-General Otto Hasse traveled to Moscow in 1923 to further negotiate the terms, Germany helped the Soviet Union with industrialization and Soviet officers were to be trained in Germany
42.
Wannsee Conference
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The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to camps in the General Government. At Wannsee, Heydrich emphasized that once the mass deportation was complete, a secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was formally Jewish and thus determine the scope of the genocide. One copy of the Protocol with circulated minutes of the meeting survived the war and it was found by Robert Kempner in March 1947 among files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. It was used as evidence in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, the Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust memorial. Legalized discrimination against Jews in Germany began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, violence and economic pressure were used by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. Discrimination against Jews, longstanding but extralegal throughout much of Europe at the time, was codified in Germany immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April of that year, excluded most Jews from the legal profession, similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Violence and economic pressure were used by the regime to force Jews to leave the country, Jewish businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of access to government contracts. Citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks and boycotts of their businesses, the Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of German or related blood were defined as citizens, thus, Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. A supplementary decree issued in November defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two if the Jewish faith was followed. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germanys 437,000 Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia should be destroyed. The Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen —lists of people to be killed—had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939, the Einsatzgruppen performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a paramilitary group consisting of ethnic Germans living in Poland. Members of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the Ordnungspolizei also shot civilians during the Polish campaign, approximately 65,000 civilians were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, they killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani people, the resulting Generalplan Ost called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, food supplies would be diverted to the German army and German civilians. Cities would be razed and the land allowed to return to forest or resettled by German colonists, according to the historian Timothy Snyder,4.2 million Soviet citizens were starved by the Nazis in 1941–1944 as a result of Backes plan. Harvests were poor in Germany in 1940 and 1941 and food supplies were short, at the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union had already been underway for some months
