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Victims of Nazi Hatred

Introduction

The Nazis had a plan for German Society which valued same-ness and not diversity. Their goal was to make Germany an exclusively “Aryan” national, and they had an ‘ideal’ image of a German citizen – strong and healthy, fair-skinned, blond haired and blue-eyed. Propaganda films were made to show the model of the ‘perfect’ young German men and women. Nazi ideology stated that not all humans were equal, some were even considered “untermenschen” (sub-human) if they did not fit the ideal. The Nazis hated anyone that was ‘different’, including those who fitted the Aryan concept of normality but had different views or thoughts which did not adhere to Nazi ideology.

Jews

Jews were singled out for systematic persecution and deliberate mass extermination. The Nazis used historical anti-Semitism which had existed since ancient times to justify the removal of human rights from Jewish people. Ultimately, this led to the application of an industrial method to the extermination of 6 million European Jews.

As soon as they came to power in 1933 Hitler and the Nazis began their persecution of German Jews by controlling and restricting their lives.

On April 1 1933 Jewish doctors, lawyers, and shops were boycotted. Six days later the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” was passed, banning Jews from government. In 1935 Jews were forbidden to join the army and anti-Jewish propaganda appeared in shops and restaurants.

In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, including the “Law for the protection of German Blood and Honour” which prohibited (under the threat of hard labour) marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew and the “Reich Citizenship Law” which stated that all Jews, including quarter and half Jews were no longer citizens and lost all citizens’ rights including the right to vote. The anti-Jewish legislation continued – Jews were banned from all professional jobs which prevented them from influencing education, politics, higher education and industry. Further laws included banning Jewish businesses from receiving government contracts, banning Jewish patients from attending ‘Aryan’ doctors, stopping Jewish children from attending public schools. On August 17 1938 it was decreed that Jews had to add either “Israel” or “Sarah” to their names and on October 5 a large ‘J’ was imposed on all Jewish passports. On 23rd November 1939, Jews in Nazi occupied countries were forced to wear yellow stars or armbands to make them recognisable to the authorities.

On 9th November 1938, the Nazis initiated pogroms (an organised persecution of a particular group) against the Jews in all Nazi territories. Over the course of 24 hours, approximately 91 Jews were murdered, 30,000 were arrested and 191 synagogues were destroyed. Many Jewish shops and businesses were looted and vandalised. This night became known as “Kristallnacht” (The night of the broken glass), named after the glass from the windows of the shops and synagogues which were looted, burnt and destroyed during the pogrom.

It is estimated that up to 6 million Jews were killed between 1933 and 1945 under the Nazi regime.

Roma and Sinti (Gypsy)

Europe’s Gypsies were targeted by the Nazis for total destruction. The “Porrajmos” (literally “The Devouring”) is the term used to describe the genocide of Europe’s Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) population by the Nazis. Upward of 200,000 Gypsies were murdered or died as a result of starvation or disease. Many more were imprisoned, used as forced labour or subject to forced sterilisation and medical experimentation.

Prior to the Nazi’s taking power, Roma and Sinti men, women and children suffered under discriminatory laws, a Bavarian law of 1926 which enforced the systematic registration of all Gypsies. The Nazis built on these existing laws in their bid to wipe out the Roma and Sinti population.

In June 1936, a Central Office to “Combat the Gypsy Nuisance” opened in Munich and later that year, Berlin police were given the authority to conduct raids against Gypsies so that they would not mar the image of the city as the host of the summer Olympic Games.

Between 1939 – 1940 labour camps for “people avoiding work and living off crime” were set up in the Czech Republic. Roma and Sinti men, women and children were also sent to camps in Lety and Hodonin, and, in 1940, statistics about “Gypsies, mixed Gypsies and people with Gypsy style of life” were officially collected, those found to adhere to any of these were sent to the camps. Out of c.2500 internees at these camps, over 50% were deported to Auschwitz, many more died due to the starvation and maltreatment within the camps.

In June 1938, “Gypsy Clean-up Week” took place throughout Germany, in which Roma and Sinti men, women and children were targeted for persecution, hatred and imprisonment.

The experience of Europe’s Gypsy population has parallels with that of the Jewish people. Both were targeted on the grounds of their race and had previously suffered centuries of discrimination. The Nuremberg Laws which prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans and enshrined the loss of citizenship rights were also applied to Gypsies. As with Jewish children, Gypsy children were banned from public schools and Gypsies found it increasingly difficult to maintain or secure employment.

As the war began the persecution of Gypsies intensified. Deportations of Gypsies to ghettos including Lodz and to concentration camps including Dachau, Mauthausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau which had a specific “Gypsy Camp” began.

On 26th February 1943, the first transport of Roma and Sinti men, women and children arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the 23,000 Gypsies imprisoned within the camp, it’s estimated that around 20,000 were murdered.

On the 2nd August 1944 the Zieguenlager (Gypsy Camp) at Auschwitz was liquidated and 2897 Roma and Sinti were exterminated in the gas chambers. The surviving prisoners were deported to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck concentration camps for forced labour.

Despite the atrocities committed against Gypsies by the Nazi regime their experiences were only fully recognised by the West German Government in 1981 and the Porrajmos is only now becoming more widely known.

Gay Victims of Nazi persecution

Lesbian and Gay life in Germany began to thrive at the beginning of the twentieth century. Berlin in particular was one of the most liberal cities in Europe with a number of lesbian and gay organisations, cafés, bars, publications and cultural events taking place.

By the 1920’s, Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code (which criminalised homosexual acts) was being applied in an increasingly limited fashion. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science led the world in its scientific approach to sexual diversity and acted as an important public centre for Berlin Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered life. In 1929 the process towards complete decriminalisation had been initiated within the German legislature.

Nazi conceptions of race, gender and eugenics dictated the regime’s hostile policy on homosexuality. Within days of Hitler becoming Chancellor repression against Gay men and Lesbians commenced. On 6 May 1933, the Nazis violently looted and closed The Institute for Sexual Science, burning its extensive collection on the streets. Other organisations were shut down. The existing laws were toughened and the courts/police were encouraged to take draconian steps. Unknown numbers of German Gay men and Lesbians fled abroad, entered into marriages in order to appear to conform to Nazi ideological norms, and experienced severe psychological trauma. The thriving Gay culture in Berlin was lost.

The police established lists of homosexually active persons. Records from 1937-1940 include the names of over 90,000 suspects. Significant numbers of Gay men were arrested, of whom an estimated 50,000 received severe jail sentences in brutal conditions. Most homosexuals were not sent to concentration camps but were instead exposed to inhumane treatment in police prisons. There they could be subjected to hard labour and torture, or be executed or experimented upon. The Nazis dehumanised the inmates in their camps and some of their prisons by giving them a symbol, which coded them according to the reason for their detention, and assigned them a number to replace their name. Some 10-15,000 people were deported for being Gay to concentration camps. Many, but not all, were assigned pink triangles. Most died in the camps often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to other gruesome medical experiments. Collective murder actions were undertaken against Gay detainees, exterminating hundreds at a time. Some people belonged to more than one targeted group. For example, there were Jewish Gays who wore a yellow triangle and a pink triangle together.

During the redrafting of Paragraph 175 in Germany, there was much debate about whether to include Lesbianism, which had not been recognised in the earlier version. It was decided not to and so Lesbians were not targeted in the same way as Gay men. In Austria, after anschluss (the annexation of Austria into greater Germany under the Nazi regime), a similar debate led to the inclusion of Lesbianism in the penal code. Lesbians suffered the same destruction of community networks as Gay men. They were allowed to play no role in public life and therefore they often experienced a double economic disadvantage.

After the war, the Allies chose not to remove the Nazi-amended Paragraph 175. Neither they, nor the new German states, nor Austria would recognise homosexual prisoners as victims of the Nazis – a status essential to qualify for reparations. Indeed, many Gay men continued to serve their prison sentences.

People who had been persecuted for being Gay had a hard choice: either to bury their experience and pretend it never happened – with all the personal consequences of such an action – or to try to campaign for recognition in an environment where the same neighbours, the same law, same police and same judges prevailed. Unsurprisingly very few victims came forward. Those who did – even those who had fought the Nazis and survived death camps – were thwarted at every turn. Few known victims are still alive but research is now beginning to reveal the hidden history of Nazi homophobia and post-War discrimination.

Disabled Victims and the T4 Euthanasia Programme

Mentally and physically Disabled people were targeted for various forms of discrimination by the Nazi party, including total annihilation, persecution, imprisonment, sterilisation and other forms of brutality. From 1939 – 1941 the Nazis carried out their ‘T4’ programme (so called because Tiergartenstrasse 4 was the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care in Berlin).

People with physical disabilities, mental health needs and chronic illnesses were deemed to be damaging to the common good by the Nazi party. In 1933 the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” allowed for the forced sterilisation of those regarded as “unfit” including people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Black people, Gay men and female prostitutes were also subject to forced sterilisation. Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly and special schools were targeted to select people for sterilisation. It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1939 360,000 individuals had been subject to forced sterilisation.

In 1939 the killing of Disabled children and adults began following a request to Hitler by the parents of a severely deformed child asking for permission for their child to be killed. Hitler agreed and this was used as the precedent to establish a programme of killing children with severe disabilities. From August 1939 the Interior Ministry, which had previously run the sterilisation programme, required doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities. All children under the age of three who were suffering from illnesses or disabilities such as Downs Syndrome, Hydrocephaly, Cerebral Palsy or “suspected idiocy” among others were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the “euthanasia” of each child.

Many parents were unaware of the fate of their children, instead being told that they were being sent for improved care. After a period of time parents were told their children had died of pneumonia and their bodies cremated to stop the spread of disease.

Following the outbreak of war in September 1939 the programme expanded with less emphasis on assessment and approval. Adults with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin were included in the programme. As with children, a panel of three medical experts had to pass judgement on whether or not adults would live or die.

The first adults to be killed were Poles from asylums in western Poland. This soon spread. Six killing centres were established to speed up the process, the previous methods of killing people by lethal injection or starvation being too slow to cope with large numbers of adults. The first experimental gassings took place at the killing centre in Brandenberg and thousands of Disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

The model used for killing Disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It is estimated that close to 250,000 Disabled people were murdered under the Nazi regime.

Black experience

Today the majority of people are aware of the Nazi policy towards the Jews and there is an increasing awareness of the fate of Roma and Sinti people. However many are not so conscious of the treatment of Black and mixed race Europeans. Although there was no systematic elimination of this racial minority it is clear that many were persecuted, alienated and even murdered during this period. In the 1920s, there were 24,000 Black people living in Germany.

Following World War l and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allies occupied the Rhineland in western Germany. The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were Black, in these occupation forces exacerbated anti-black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against Black soldiers depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases. The Nazis, at the time a small political movement, viewed them as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardisation.” Nazi propaganda posters, showing friendship across racial groups, referred to “A loss of racial pride”. African German mixed race children were marginalised in German society, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military.

When the Nazi’s came to power, one of the first directives was aimed at these mixed-race children. Underscoring Hitler’s obsession with racial purity, by 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilised, in order to prevent further “race polluting”, as Hitler termed it.

Hans Hauck, a Black survivor of Nazi racial policies and a victim of the mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film “Hitler’s Forgotten Victims” that, when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, as long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.

To help usher in the Nazi dream of a pure, blond haired, blue-eyed race, Black Germans, like Jews, Roma and Sinti, Gay people and those with any criminal record were called ‘asocial’. Many Black people found they no longer had jobs and that they were excluded from many aspects of life.

European and American Blacks were also interned in the Nazi concentration camp system. Lionel Romney, a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Jean Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian national, was incarcerated in the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps in Germany. Jean Voste, an African Belgian, was incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp. Bayume Mohamed Hussein from Tanganyika (today Tanzania) died in the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin.

Black prisoners of war faced illegal incarceration and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention (international agreement on the conduct of war and the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers). Lieutenant Darwin Nicholas, an African American pilot, was incarcerated in a Gestapo prison in Butzbach. Black soldiers of the American, French, and British armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps. Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo.

As the war progressed and prisoners of war were taken, the Nazi regime separated Black prisoners from white ones, though it should also be pointed out that soldiers from the USA were already segregated within the US army. Once taken prisoner by Hitler’s troops, Black prisoners received harsher treatment and less food than white POW’s and whilst most white POWs were imprisoned many of the Black soldiers either worked until they died or were executed.

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned and murdered for their refusal to swear allegiance to the Nazi regime or to participate in fighting. Jehovah’s Witnesses were unique in that they could secure their own release by renouncing their faith. Most refused and faced continued imprisonment or execution.

Approximately 2,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses died under the Nazi regime, 250 of whom were executed for refusing to take part in armed conflict.

“Asocials”

The Nazi’s incarcerated and murdered those they deemed to be “asocial”, this group included those who were politically opposed to national socialism, such as Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Trade Union leaders and those who were imprisoned due to criminal activity.

In order to identify these prisoners within a camp, the Nazi’s used a badge system – criminals wore a green triangle, political opponents a red triangle and black for non-conformists (including vagrants and in some cases, the Roma and Sinti).

Non-Jewish Poles and Slavic Prisoners of War

The Nazis viewed Poles and other Slavic peoples as inferior, and slated them for subjugation, forced labor, and eventual annihilation. Poles who were considered ideologically dangerous (including thousands of intellectuals and Catholic priests) were targeted for execution in an operation known as AB-Aktion. Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labor. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. It is estimated that the Germans killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II.

In the German-occupied Soviet Union, the Commissar Order (issued to the German army by the Armed Forces High Command) targeted Red Army political officers to be murdered. During the autumn and winter of 1941-1942, German military authorities and the German Security Police collaborated on a racist policy of mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war: Jews, persons with “Asiatic features,” and top political and military leaders were selected and shot. Around three million others were held in makeshift camps without proper shelter, food, or medicine with the deliberate intent that they die.

During the period of 1933-1945, it is estimated that 11,000,000 people were killed under Nazi hate-policies for being “different”.

Final solution promulgated

Following the outbreak of the Second World War the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jewish population by imprisonment in ghettos and actions designed to reduce and restrict the rights of Jews.

On July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Goering authorised SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a “complete solution of the Jewish question.” By September of that year thousands of Jews had been murdered in mass shootings or gassings by mobile killing units and 6 killing centres – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau were established over the following months.

The “Final Solution” called for and worked towards the complete extermination of the Jewish people. Approximately 6 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered between 1933 and 1945.