A BRIEF HISTORY OF WORLD WAR 2 AND THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE
JEWS.
AFTER WORLD WAR 1
The First World War started in 1914 and ended with Germany’s
defeat in 1918. The carnage of that war was on a scale that
had never been seen before in modern fighting history. The Versailles’
Treaty was signed in 1919 in Paris, establishing the terms of
peace. The treaty also found that Germany was totally responsible
for starting the war and it ordered them to pay for all the
damage the Allies had suffered. The total bill was 132 billion
gold marks. The debt was to be paid at six per cent interest
over 37 years. The annual repayments amounted to two billion
gold marks, plus twenty six percent of Germany’s exports.
A British economist, John Maynard Keynes judged that these payments
were three times more than Germany could afford. The suffering,
as a result of the financial burden and humiliation this caused
Germany, created an atmosphere of deep public resentment towards
the rest of Europe, which Hitler and his Nazi Party exploited
to the full and was an important part of their election campaigning.
By 1921 the German government declared that it was unable to
manage the payments that were due. By 1923 the state of the
German economy had worsened. The New York stock market crash
of 1929 set off an international economic crisis that devastated
Germany, which was already financially fragile. Throughout these
years Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) Party,
campaigned tirelessly, promising that when he and his government
came to power they would repudiate the Versailles’ treaty
and restore Germany’s pride and prosperity.
ADOLF HITLER
Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889 in Braunau, an Austrian
town on the German border. He grew up in an authoritarian household.
His father, a customs officer, was quick tempered and strict,
whilst his mother spoilt him. He dropped out of school at 16,
hoping to become an artist. But in 1907 having failed to get
into the Vienna Academy of Art, he spent the next 5 years living
in men’s hostels, trying unsuccessfully to make a living
by hawking his sketches round local cafes and pubs.
When World War 1 began Hitler joined the German Army. He spent
four years as a despatch runner on the Western Front, carrying
orders on foot or by bicycle, from regimental commanders to
leaders at the front. It was often dangerous duty. In 1914 he
was promoted to corporal and two years later he was wounded.
He was decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class.
After the war Hitler was employed in the Political Department
of the District Army Command in Munich. He was regarded as something
of an expert on Jewish issues, and was told to deal with a letter
wanting clarification on the Jewish question. Hitler’s
reply dated September 1919 gave his first explicit writings
about the ’Jewish question’. ‘Jewry is unqualifiedly
a racial association not a religious association,’ Hitler
wrote, ‘It’s influence will bring about the racial
tuberculosis of the people.’ His letter continued,’
Rational antisemitism, however, must lead to a systematic legal
opposition and elimination of the special privileges which Jews
hold……It’s final objective must unswervingly
be the removal of the Jews altogether.’
In 1921 Hitler became the National Socialist (Nazi) party’s
first chairman with dictatorial powers. Three years later he
and his Nazi followers attempted to overthrow the Bavarian Government,
but the coup failed and Hitler was tried for treason and served
nine months in jail. It was during his imprisonment that he
dictated to his friend Rudolf Hess his now famous book, ‘Mein
Kampf’ (My Struggle). The two volumes were published in
1925/26. They contained the core of Hitler’s vision. By
1945 the book had sold ten million copies. In Mein Kampf Hitler
inflames antisemitism. He writes that the best and most desirable
race was the Nordic-Aryian-German ‘master race’
and that the German people must eliminate the Jews, promising
that the Nazis would do so. By 1932 the Nazi party, who were
fascists, had more than 1.4 million members.
FASCISM
Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology. The word ‘Fascist’
was first used by Benito Mussolini’s government in Italy
in 1920. Governments considered to be fascist came to power
in Germany, Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. The governments were
antidemocratic and anti-Marxist. Some, but not all fascist movements
incorportated antisemitism into their political platform.
HITLER & ANTISEMITISM
Antisemitism was a word coined by a German journalist, Wilhelm
Marr, around 1867. It was used it so that Judenhass, or Jew-hatred
could be discussed in polite society.
Approximately nine million Jews lived in Europe. By 1933 there
were half-a million German Jews. Like many other Jews in Western
Europe they had adopted the culture, but not the religion of
their non-Jewish neighbours. Thousands of Jews served in the
German army in World War 1, many were decorated for bravery.
From 1905 to 1933 Jews won 11 of the 37 Nobel Prizes awarded
to Germans.
In the early 1930’s Germany was suffering the effects
of a world wide economic depression. Millions were out of work,
leading to social unrest which undermined the confidence in
the then government, the Weimar Republic. Many ordinary Germans
were still bitter about their defeat in World War 1 and the
way the victors had treated them. The national shame plus the
unsettled state of the economy had left Germany wanting decisive
leadership and national rebirth. By 1932 the National Socialists
(Nazis) were now the largest political party in Germany. Fearing
continued chaos the German president Paul von Hindenburg, then
85, appointed Hitler as the head of a coalition government.
Hindenburg and his conservative advisors hoped that Hitler would
restore social order. But the plan backfired and six months
later Hitler’s decrees were law and civil rights had disappeared.
The Nazis became the only legal political party. Suspected political
opponents were sent to concentration camps such as Dachau. As
early as1933 there were 50 concentration camps in Germany and
more than 25,000 Socialists, Communists and Jews were sent to
them.
Hitler had long been convinced that Jews posed the most deadly
threat to German life, as he had written in his book, ‘Mein
Kampf’. Nazi ideology required the elimination of the
Jews. Soon after taking power, Hitler began implementing the
antisemitism that was the centre of his party’s policy.
The Jews were hit hard by the Nazi take over. First there was
the nation wide boycott of Jewish businesses, when Nazi Storm
troopers posted up signs that advised ‘Don’t buy
from Jews’, and ‘The Jews are our Misfortune’.
Storm Troopers stood menacingly in front of the homes of Jewish
doctors and lawyers warning people not to enter, whilst at the
same time beating up, harassing and humiliating Jews on the
street. Jewish doctors were barred from state hospitals, pharmacy
licenses were no longer available to Jews and Jewish lawyers
were restricted in their practise. This increased pressure forced
Jews to sell their businesses at 30 to 60% of their real value.
German Jews were forbidden to farm, banned from working in journalism,
art, literature, music, broadcasting and theatre. Jews were
forced to carry identity cards. The Jewish Star of David had
to be shown outside buildings where Jews lived. Jews were forced
on their knees to scrub pavements. Jewish passports were stamped
with the letter ’J’ to identify Jews and stop them
from passing as Christians and crossing the boarder into Switzerland.
All Jewish students were expelled from German schools, they
were only allowed to attend Jewish schools. Parks and swimming
pools were banned to Jews. Jewish men in Germany were ordered
to take the middle name, ‘Israel’, Jewish women
must take the middle name ‘Sara’.
ESCAPE
Being robbed of their liberty and their livelihoods about 37,000
German Jews managed to flee from Germany in 1933. But the cost
of escape was high and not everyone could afford to leave. For
the elderly it was often physically impossible and terrifying,
so most Jews had no choice but to remain, hoping that the discrimination
would pass. But the opposite happened. Within Germany and throughout
the world, it was no secret that Hitler’s regime had started
a systematic process of persecuting and segregating Jews, they
were being excluded from every aspect of German life. By 1937,
more than 60% of Jewish children had been banned from German
schools. The forced imprisonment of Jews in concentration camps
continued.
Forced emigration was not solving the Nazi’s ‘Jewish
problem’. Franz Mayer, a Jewish leader described emigration
as follows. ’You put in a Jew one end, with property,
a shop, a bank account, and legal rights. He comes out the other
end with out property, without privileges, without rights, with
nothing except a passport and an order to leave the country
within a fortnight, otherwise he will find himself in a concentration
camp.’ Within six months of the German Anschluss, Eichmann
expelled 45,000 Jews from Austria. A year later 100,000 Jews,
nearly 50% of Austria’s Jewish population had left.
In 1938 US President Franklin D Roosevelt called for an international
conference to deal with the refugee situation. Although representatives
expressed sympathy for Jewish refugees the doors of their countries
remained firmly shut. The Nazi’s realised that forced
immigration was not the way of solving their Jewish problem’.
THE STUDENT
In 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a 17 year old Jewish student living
in Paris, heard that his family had been forced, with other
Polish Jews to leave their home in Hanover, Germany and they
ended up in a concentration camp on the Polish boarder. On November
7th as an act of reprisal, the young Grynszpan went to the German
Embassy in Paris and shot Ernst von Rath, a diplomat, who died
2 days later. Grynszpan was arrested.
KRISTALLNACHT – Night of Broken Glass
Hitler decided to take revenge on the Jews for Rath’s
murder. On November 9th synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, hospitals,
businesses, shops and homes across Germany were looted, destroyed,
and set on fire. This event was known as Kristallnacht, (The
Night of Broken Glass). Jews were killed and beaten up, thousands
were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht
ended any idea that Jews may have anything resembling normal
Jewish way of life under the Third Reich.
THE KINDERTRANSPORT
By 1938 many countries had closed their boarders to Jewish immigrants
fleeing from the Nazis, but in November the British Government
allowed unaccompanied Jewish children into Britain. These transports,
carrying children without their parents were known as the Kindertransport.
The children came from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The transports were organised and sponsored with the help of
British Jews, the Quakers and other voluntary agencies. These
transports only stopped in September 1939 when Great Britain
declared war on Germany. By then almost 10,000 children had
escaped the Nazi’s in what became the biggest exodus of
children from Nazi occupied territory. In the US the Senate
declared they would not take children as they decided it was,
‘Against the will of God to separate children from their
parents’.
THE GERMAN OCCUPATION.
In March 1938 Germany crossed the border into Austria, making
it part of the German Reich. One hundred and ninety thousand
Austrian Jews were overnight subjected to the terrors of the
Nazi anti-Jewish laws. Seven months later Germany occupied the
Czech Sudetenland. On March 15th 1939 German troops marched
into Prague and Hitler delivered 120,000 Jews into the ruthless
hands of the SS. Forced to escape again, many fled to Poland
and Hungary. Within six months more than 30,000 Jews were forced
to emigrate. Of the 90,000 who remained only 10,000 would finally
survive Nazi rule. The Nazis quickly got on with the business
of stripping Czech Jews of their livelihoods, just as they had
done earlier to the German and Austrian Jews. They froze their
bank accounts, their businesses were shut down and their property
confiscated.
RATIONING
In August 1939 the German economy shifted to a war footing.
The Nazi government issues restrictive ration cards to gypsies
and resident aliens. Ration cards for Jews meant being restricted
to a starvation diet of 200 to 300 calories per day.
WORLD WAR 2
On September 1st 1939, German forces overran western Poland,
instigating Word War 2. Two days later on September 3rd Great
Britain and France declared war on Germany. German Forces occupied
western Poland and on September 17th the Soviet Union invaded
Eastern Poland. The following day Reinhard Heydrich ordered
that all Jewish communities in Poland and Germany were to be
dissolved, and the deportation of Jews to ghettos and concentration
camps was to be accelerated. The death sentence was passed on
Jews who refused to report for deportation.
THE STAR OF DAVID.
Polish Jews over the age of ten were forced to wear a Star of
David armband on the right sleeve of indoor and outdoor clothing.
German Jews wore a yellow star armband inscribed with the word,
‘Jude’. Armbands in the Warsaw ghetto featured a
blue star and Greek Jews wore a badge with an identity number,
Russian Jews a yellow badges on the their chest and back. This
was to identify Jews not only to the Nazis, but to everyone,
everywhere they went. The penalty for not wearing an armband
was summary execution. Jews were beaten and murdered and sent
to concentration camps, for no reason. Two years of forced labour
was made compulsory for all male Jews between the ages of 14
and 60.
GHETTOES
In 1939 Jews were forced by the thousand into ghetto areas.
Thousands of Czech Jews were deported in ghettos in Poland.
They could take only with them what they themselves could carry,
or would fit onto a cart. The ghettos were separated, guarded,
walled off areas where Jews were forced to live in vastly overcrowded,
unhygienic, squalid conditions. Four to five people were crammed
into each room, creating a situation where privacy was non-existent
and sanitary conditions were appalling. They were given only
meagre food rations and there was no paid employment. Those
precious possessions that they had bought into the ghetto with
them they were soon trying to sell, or burn to keep warm. Many
were forced into slave labour for the Germans. Death from disease
and starvation was rampant, especially for the elderly and children.
Lodz, in Poland was the first ghetto to be established by the
Nazis in October 1939, 170,000 Jews were forced to live there.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 490,000 Jews. It was
sealed in 1940. Krakow and Lublin were among the many ghettos
established in Poland. There were ghettos in Minsk, (Soviet
Union) Kovno and Vilna (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia). The only
way to ‘escape’ from the ghetto was via one of the
regular Nazi deportations to extermination/slave-labour camps.
During 1942/43 the Nazis ‘liquidated’ the ghettos
by deporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to the death camps.
The aim of the Nazis to was kill Jews as fast as possible. This
they hoped would be achieved by starvation, squalor and disease
in the filthy overcrowded ghettos. People did die in their thousands,
but not in large enough numbers and not fast enough for the
Nazis.
THE JEWISH QUESTION
Reinhard Heydrich had been commissioned to handle the ‘Jewish
question’ in ways that went beyond, ‘emigration
and evacuation’. He had already ordered the ghettoization
of Polish Jews and had organised the mass deportations of Jews
in Eastern Europe. In January 1942 in Berlin, Heydrich convened
the Wannsee Conference, which was attended by many top Nazi
leaders. At this meeting they co-ordinated the plans for the
‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’.’
This had already begun in late 1941. According to the protocol
of the meeting, five million Jews in the USSR (now Russia) were
marked for death, this included three million in the Ukraine,
700,000 in the Unoccupied zone of France, 5600 in Denmark, and
200 in Albania. Figures are also given for nations not yet under
Nazi control, including England (330,000) Spain (6000), Switzerland
(18,000), Sweden (18,000), and Turkey (55,000). The total meeting
time for the Wannsee Conference was less than 90 minutes.
THE DEPORTATIONS
By 1942/43 the Nazis had stepped up the deportations from the
ghettos to the gas chambers. The rumours that the gas chambers
existed were every day talk in the filthy ghetto streets. No
one, no members of any family, had ever heard a word from any
of those thousands of Jews who had been rounded up by the trainload
and deported. People began to realise they had to escape.
WHO WILL HIDE US?
But life outside the ghetto for a Jew was extremely dangerous.
Antisemitism was rife and the Nazis had passed a law that hiding
Jews was punishable by death. Despite this, many people made
plans to escape and go into hiding. They were plans made in
a hurry, desperate arrangements made with Polish non-Jews, who
were often old friends, employers or even total strangers, all
of them were Christians who lived outside the ghetto. They agreed
to hide mostly children, sometimes with their mothers. Those
who risked death by hiding Jews were generally poor peasants
and farm workers, and they were paid. Jews who were better off
and had managed to smuggle gold coins, jewellery and money into
and out of the ghetto used this to pay their rescuers. The question
‘what would happen when the money ran out and the hiding
had to continue?’ didn’t bear consideration, not
in this atmosphere of panic and fear. Although some in hiding
were thrown out when the money ran out, many were kept hidden
even when they had nothing to offer in return. Those in hiding
were fed and their rescuers risked being denounced to the Nazis
by unusual behaviour such as buying 3 potatoes instead of their
usual one. Many took in very small children and passed them
off as their own, often keeping them when the war ended. Many
Catholic Nuns in convents hid Jewish children and were not exempt
from being searched by the SS. Some Jews had bought forged papers,
stating they were Christians. But often these forgeries weren’t
good and didn’t stand up to Nazi scrutiny.
CHILDREN IN HIDING
The children were lucky if they escaped with their parents,
most children were sent out of the ghetto alone. They usually
escaped at night through a hole in the ghetto wall, or they
would slide down into the ghetto sewers, often as the Nazis
were organising a roundup of the ghetto inhabitants. The sewers
were an escape route to the outside world, beyond the ghetto
wall. Some had pre-planned their escape by digging into the
sewers, and paying a sewer worker to hide them inside the miles
of tunnels, where they would live in the rat infested filth.
The Nazis knew Jews hid there and frequently bombed the sewers.
Children, some as young as 7 escaped alone, their escape was
often organised by a desperate relative, who told them that
once outside the wall, they would be met by a stranger who would
take them to a hiding place or run off with the money and leave
the child. Children who had lost their families to the deportations,
escaped alone onto the dangerous streets where they were vulnerable
and exposed. Those Jews who were blond haired and blue eyed
stood a greater chance of surviving ‘above ground’.
They slept in toilets and stole food, some found domestic work.
Children frequently headed for the countryside where there were
farms that needed labour. Or they survived by stealing food
and hiding in barns. Anyone in hiding above or below ground
was prey to blackmailers and denouncers.
No one knows exactly how many Jews went into hiding, but it
is estimated that during the course of the war, from 1939 till
the Germans surrendered in 1945, some 400,000 Jews were hidden.
Many of those who survived in hiding, having left family members
behind who they never saw again suffered ‘survivor’s
guilt’. Young children grew up feeling this guilt, even
though it was their parent’s last loving act to make arrangements
for their children to hide.
LIVING IN THE DARK.
Life in hiding was not easy, comfortable or safe. Hiding places
were scarce. The hidden lived in appalling conditions, underground,
in dark windowless rooms, caves, barns, empty apartments. They
were hidden in cramped spaces, covered in lice and fleas, hungry,
silent - noise would betray them so babies were often given
away to Polish families by desperate parents who could not go
into hiding with a crying baby. Many hid and often lived for
years in sewers. The sewers were frequently bombed. Those in
hiding felt isolated and alone, there were few people they could
trust. Twenty fours hours a day they were hunted. They often
had to risk going outside to move to from one hiding place to
another. This was very dangerous. The children were totally
dependent on whoever was hiding them to bring food, a candle,
and a waste bucket. Jews who didn’t look Jewish and had
money were more likely to survive in hiding, some living openly.
HIDING BOYS
Because Jewish males are circumcised it was easier for the Nazis
to reveal their true identity, there was no way it could be
denied. Because of this Jewish boys had a harder time finding
people willing to help hide them. Non Jews were less eager to
risk taking in these boys and pass them off as their own child,
when they could easily be identified as being Jews simply by
the fact they were circumcised. Nazi’s frequently forced
Jewish males, adults and children, at gunpoint to remove their
trousers, as a basic requirement of a search. Non Jews were
happier to hide girls as they could pass them off as their own
children. In desperation many Jews gave up their young children
for hiding with a non Jewish family, agreeing the child would
be returned to them after the war. What invariably happened
was either the family were denounced by a neighbour and they
were all murdered for hiding a Jew or the family refused to
return the child to it’s rightful parents.
Many escapees both adults and children were hidden by the partisans,
who lived and fought together in the forests.
A little more than 40% of those in hiding lived to see the end
of the war. The chances of survival were therefore not good.
Half or more of those who fled may have perished, but so did
99% of those who did not go into hiding.
THE FINAL TOLL.
The war in Europe came to an end on May 7th 1945, at Rheims,
France where the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany was
signed. Hitler had already committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker
on April 30th. More than 35 million people, civilian and military,
lost their lives in the Europe of World War 2. The Nazis murdered
almost 12 million people including nearly 6 million Jews and
millions of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Slavs, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, homosexuals, Communists and the mentally handicapped,
all singled out for Holocaust-related persecution and murder.
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