It wanted to make life so difficult for the Jews that they would leave Germany. . schools, but it was not until that all Jewish children were banned from attending German schools. . What was life like in Nazi Germany for Ruth's family?.
Table of contents
- CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST
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- Persecution and Genocide Under the Nazis 1933 - 1945 - non interactive version
- Anti-Jewish decrees
Two camps - Auschwitz and Majdanek - operated a selection policy where the fittest were chosen for slave labour, while babies, small children and their mothers were sent straight to the gas chambers. Teenagers had a better chance of surviving selection, particularly if they claimed to have a skill. Long term survival was rare and most of those selected to work died eventually of exhaustion and disease.
The conditions were so extreme that even the fittest people rarely survived more than a few months in the camps. Some children were kept back from the gas chambers so they could be used for horrific medical experiments. In their "search to retrieve 'Aryan blood,'" SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union to be kidnapped and transferred to the Reich to be adopted by racially suitable German families.
Although the basis for these decisions was "race-scientific," often blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the "opportunity" to be "Germanized. This figure includes more than 1. The Nazis, obsessed with the notion of creating a 'biologically pure', 'Aryan' society, deliberately targeted Jewish children for destruction, in order to prevent the growth of a new generation of Jews in Europe. Some of the children under threat spent years hiding from the Nazi authorities - either by hiding physically in barns, attics and cellars, or by taking on false identities.
There are a few examples of resistance movements working to move children to safety. Poetry Corner Your views. After , there are four basic patterns that can describe the fate of Jewish children in occupied Europe: By the end of the war only a few thousand Jewish children had survived the camps. These Jews could not be forced to emigrate, given their number and the increasingly difficult conditions for emigration. At the same time, the Nazis were not yet ready to proceed to the actual goal of the final solution of the Jewish question - the physical liquidation of Jews.
As a temporary solution, it was decided to concentrate and ghettoise the Jewish population. Jews were to be concentrated in cities with good railway connections, so that they could later be deported further. The Nazis consciously renewed the medieval concept of the ghetto - a closed quarter of the city designated for Jews. Unlike the ghettos of the Middle Ages, however, these were designed to be merely temporary, a transition point on the path to extermination. The difference between concentration camps and ghettos was meant to be that the ghettos had autonomous Jewish administrations.
In reality, however, these autonomous administrations were merely illusory, serving as tools for the Nazis. The Jews who sat in these administrative councils were in a difficult position. On one hand they tried to make life in the ghetto bearable, organising food supplies, medical care and children's education, while on the other hand they were required to implement all the Nazis' orders, including the assembly of transports for the extermination camps.
Before being gathered together in the ghetto, Jews were stripped of most of their property, their flats and other property were confiscated, and their means of earning a living destroyed.
CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST
By being concentrated in the ghetto, they had their contact and relationships with the rest of society severed. The largest ghettos grew in cities with a significant Jewish population: Warsaw , Lodz and Lvov. They were incredibly overcrowded, and their hygienic conditions were terrible. Their inhabitants suffered from lack of food and medicine.
Despite their best efforts, the Jewish councils were unable to solve these problems, and many old people and children died in the ghettos themselves. It will soon also entrap Roma and Sinti 'Gypsies'. This measure emerged from the dangerous blurring of racial-biological thinking and criminology. Certain German theorists claimed that the habit of committing crime was a hereditary trait. Such measures were popular with many Germans, who saw them as restoring law and order to a society losing its cohesion.
The attack on marginal social groups also played to widespread prejudice. A supplementary decree to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny makes it compulsory for physicians to report those of their patients who are 'hereditarily diseased' to the authorities. The Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy discusses forced sterilisation as a way of solving the so-called problem of the 'Rhineland Bastards' racially-mixed Germans.
They decide they cannot sterilise black children without Hitler's authorisation. By , however, the Gestapo will have formed 'Special Commission No. Nazi rabble-rouser Julius Streicher brings out a special issue of his paper, Der Sturmer, reviving the medieval charge known by Jews, and anti-anti-Semitic non-Jews, as the 'blood libel' that Jews kill Christian children.
This gives him the excuse to order a central register of all men known to engage in homosexual activities. Amendment to the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny enables compulsory abortions to be carried out on 'hereditarily ill women or women who become pregnant by a hereditarily ill partner' up to 6 months into their pregnancy. Paragraph of the criminal code is amended to include any form of 'criminal indecency' between men, and behaviour likely to offend 'public morality'. This amendment will lead to increased arrests of homosexual men, who will often then be given the full sentence of ten years imprisonment for their alleged offence.
The Reich Citizenship Law reduces Jews to subjects with limited civil rights. The Law for the Protection of the Blood prohibits marriages and extra-marital relations between 'Aryans' and 'non-Aryans' Jews, Sinti and Roma, people of African descent. Two measures were announced by Hitler to the party rally in Nuremberg. They were known in combination as the Nuremberg Laws, and created an apartheid state in Germany.
Under the Reich Citizenship Law Jews lost many of their civil rights, and were reduced to second-class status. The Law for the Protection of the Blood prohibited marriages and extra-marital relations between the majority population and 'non-Aryans' this term mainly referred to Jews. But the Nazi race experts found it impossible to prove scientifically that Jews were a 'race' and fell back on a blend of religious and racial definitions of who was a Jew.
The Reich Citizenship Law was the basis of a series of measures that stripped Jews of any residual rights, their jobs, property - and finally their lives. A circular is issued by the Ministry of Interior, requiring couples to provide 'testimonials of fitness to marry'. Many die from disease as a result. There are similar round-ups in other German towns. Heinrich Himmler orders that 'professional or habitual criminals and those who offend public decency should be taken into protective custody'.
For Himmler these are catch-all terms, to cover anyone he considers a threat to society. This is his initiative alone, there is no ministerial decree to support this order. Many in this category will subsequently be sent to labour camps. Heinrich Himmler instructs the Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance, which he set up in under the auspices of the Criminal Police national headquarters, 'to evaluate the findings of racial-biological research' on the Sinti and Roma.
A Ministry of the Interior circular on 'the preventative fight against crime' enables any 'asocial' with minor but repeated infractions of the law to be placed in 'preventive custody'. Homosexual men are now also sent to concentration camps if they are arrested. Germany occupies and later annexes Austria an event known as the Anschluss , to wild acclaim from most Austrians. While Jews are abused on the streets of Vienna, and their homes are looted, all the anti-Semitic laws passed in Germany from to are instantly applied in Austria.
About , Jews lived in Austria when it was occupied and annexed by Germany. For days after the German take-over, Austrians engaged in a frenzy of violence and looting against the Jews. In panic, thousands tried to emigrate. This office gave Jews the necessary exit papers, in return for which they were effectively stripped of all their assets and left as penniless refugees. Hundreds of Jews, despairing of the future and unable to emigrate, committed suicide in Vienna.
First major arrests of the 'asocials'. Hundreds are sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. By the end of the year, 8, homosexual men will also have been arrested. Hitler and many in his entourage were homophobic. They believed that homosexual men weakened the German Volk or race , and deemed them 'asocial'. Homosexual men had been victimised under previous governments, but the Nazis cracked down on this way of life with a new, terrifying vigour.
Thousands of homosexual men were arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. By the end of the year, 8, had been arrested. This is part of the 'Aryanisation' drive that is progressively eliminating Jewish-owned businesses by forced sales or closures. Sackings and 'Aryanisation' will cause massive unemployment and hardship amongst German and Austrian Jews, in the run-up to World War Two, with 60, in receipt of relief from the Jewish community, helped by Jews abroad, during Police are issued with arbitrary arrest quotas to fulfil. Only males capable of work are to be arrested.
Subsequently they will be sent to concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Many Jews and Sinti and Roma will also be arrested as part of this campaign. By 15 June, 1, German Jews will be imprisoned in camps. Although Hitler was not too concerned about Sinti and Roma 'Gypsies' , many top Nazis shared the widespread public prejudice against them and saw the authoritarian methods of the government as an opportunity to clamp down on travelling people.
The Sinti and Roma groups fell foul of the law under numerous headings - they could be called 'asocial', accused of being 'workshy', or charged with 'hereditary crime'. Politicians from several countries meet at Evian, in France, in an attempt to manage the refugee crisis.
The event is prompted by the exodus of tens of thousands of Jews from Austria and Germany. No country is willing to accept Jewish refugees. The British Dominions report that they lack space or jobs for Jews. Britain, which controls Palestine, closes the country to Jewish emigrants after violent protests by the Arab population against the arrival of over , Jews since This conference will turn out to be fruitless.
Separate park benches are designated for Jews and 'Aryans', as a form of apartheid spreads through all those social and recreational facilities that Jews are still permitted to use. Until , it was Nazi policy to get Jews out of Germany and the territory under German control by emigration - at first voluntary and later forced. About , emigrated from Germany between and , but this was considered too slow by radicals in the Nazi ranks.
In March , the young SS officer Adolf Eichmann, was sent to Vienna to bring order to the chaotic process of organising the emigration. Eichmann forced local Jews to suggest ways of speeding things up, and on this basis established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. It brought under one roof all the agencies a prospective emigrant needed to visit in order to get the correct papers. Jews got the necessary exit papers only after they were stripped of all their assets and turned into penniless refugees. Eichmann also used terror to encourage Jews to leave.
Thus, with its ruthless bureaucratic efficiency to help, his system contributed to the forced emigration of over 50, Jews within five months. His bosses were so impressed, they set up offices in Berlin and Prague modelled on his system. To avoid the imposition of visa restrictions on Germans by those countries, notably Switzerland and Britain, scared of an influx of Jewish refugees, the German government orders that from Jews must use the first names Sara or Israel. Their passports are to be stamped with a red J - for Jude Jew - so that Swiss and British immigration officials will be able to spot would-be asylum seekers.
After an international crisis, with Hitler threatening war, Germany is allowed by Britain and France to annex the Sudeten border region of Czechoslovakia, where ethnic Germans live. Jews flee the area. The Polish government refuses to admit them, and they remain in makeshift refugee camps in 'No-mans land'. A young Polish Jew called Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents have been stranded between Poland and Germany see previous headline , goes into the German Embassy in Paris and shoots Ernst vom Rath, a minor functionary there.
Vom Rath will die from the gunshot wounds two days later. Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler's approval, engineers a massive pogrom against the Jews throughout Germany and Austria. It will be called Kristallnacht the 'Night of Broken Glass' by the Nazis, after the devastation and piles of smashed shop windows that are its result. He was motivated by anger at the treatment of his parents, who were among 17, Polish Jews rounded up by the German authorities on 28 October They were dumped at the Polish frontier to pre-empt measures by the anti-Jewish Polish government to revoke their nationality and prevent their legal emigration from Germany.
When he heard of the shooting Joseph Goebbels saw it as an opportunity to take the lead in anti-Jewish actions. With Hitler's approval he unleashed the SA Sturm Abteilung - Hitler's brown-shirted Storm Troopers - on the Jews, inciting his followers to burn synagogues and destroy Jewish-owned property as an expression of German outrage against Grynszpan's deed.
In a night and day of terror, 1, synagogues were set alight, 7, businesses were destroyed, 26, Jews were sent to concentration camps, and 91 Jewish men were murdered. Heinrich Himmler, head of the police and the SS was not consulted, nor was Hermann Goering who was in overall charge of the German economy. Both were annoyed by the pogrom - though not out of sympathy for the Jews. Two days later Goering convened a meeting at which he reasserted control over 'Jewish policy' and criticised Goebbels for triggering so much wanton destruction. Goering decreed that German Jews would be forced to pay a one billon RM fine to 'atone' for the death of vom Rath.
Jews were ordered to cover the cost of the damage so that German insurance companies would not have to pay for it. The meeting also agreed to extend measures to exclude Jews from German economic and social life. This process, known as 'Aryanisation', went into top gear and resulted in the confiscation of most of the remaining Jewish-owned businesses.
A hail of decrees banned Jews from schools, theatres, cinemas, concerts and restaurants. Racial laws are introduced in Italy by the Italian government, on instructions from Mussolini. The ill treatment of Italians of mixed race will end in May , long before the end of the war. Hermann Goering convenes a top-level meeting of state officials to follow-up on Kristallnacht the 'Night of Broken Glass', when Jews and their property were attacked throughout Germany. The following decisions are declared: Jews are to be held collectively responsible for the assassination of vom Rath, and are to pay one billion RM to 'atone'.
Jews must cover the cost of the damage, so that German insurance companies will not have to pay out. The exclusion of Jews from German economic and social life is to be accelerated. In a speech to the German parliament Hitler proclaims, 'If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the earth and thus a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
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Germany invades Czechoslovakia, occupies the regions of Bohemia and Moravia called the Protectorate , and sets up Slovakia as a puppet-state. Regulations are promulgated to enable local authorities in Germany to evict Jews from their homes, and to concentrate them in segregated housing. The first of three anti-Jewish laws is passed in Hungary, squeezing Jews out of education, the economy and public life, causing hardship and fanning anti-Semitism. The Central Office for Jewish Immigration is established in Prague, under Adolf Eichmann, but large-scale Jewish emigration is almost impossible, due to world-wide immigration restrictions against Jews.
The first state-sanctioned euthanasia is carried out, after Hitler receives a petition from a child's parents, asking for the life of their severely disabled infant to be ended. This happens after the case has been considered by Hitler's office and by the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious and Congenitally Based Illnesses, whose 'experts' have laid down the basis for the removal of disabled children to special 'paediatric clinics'.
Here they can be either starved to death or given lethal injections. At least 5, infants will eventually be killed through this programme. All doctors are required to report all cases of deformed newborn infants to the authorities. This order will later be extended to include children and teenagers. Invasion of Poland by Germany. This is accompanied by random killings of Jews and Polish civilians, mainly by Waffen-SS SS military formations and Einsatzgruppen special SS units, with security and intelligence tasks.
A severe night-time curfew is imposed against German Jews. Later they will be forbidden radios, telephones, bikes, typewriters, access to libraries. Of the , Jews living in Germany in , , have already emigrated. Many of the remainder are middle-aged or elderly, are poor, or are married to 'Aryans'. Himmler orders all 'insurgents' in Poland for Himmler this means anyone that the 'Einsatzgruppe' considers a threat to society to be shot.
Occupation of Lublin, Poland. Population includes 40, Jews. Polish Jews are seized to be taken to forced labour camps, Jewish property is confiscated, and Jews are ordered to wear yellow star badges, to denote their Jewish status. Synagogue services in Poland are prohibited, and some synagogues are destroyed. Economic sanctions are promulgated against the Jews in Lodz, Poland.
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Reinhard Heydrich holds a conference on racial policy for Poland. Within three weeks of the German invasion of Poland, Hitler's forces had overwhelmed the Polish army and split the country with the Russians who were, temporarily, their ally. As a result, 1. Hundreds were shot or mistreated, mainly by SS units, in the first weeks of the Occupation. Heydrich told a key gathering of SS officers that Jews would be deported out of areas of Poland annexed to Germany. They would be concentrated in cities prior to being moved eastwards to a 'reservation' in the Lublin area.
Each Jewish community would be forced to set up a Jewish Council, Judenrat, to implement Nazi decrees and hand over Jewish property and assets. Heydrich ordered a census of Polish Jews, and a survey of the workforce and of Jewish property throughout Poland. Heydrich was also responsible for clearing Roma and Sinti 'Gypsies' out of Germany and dumping them in Poland. Mass killing of patients in mental hospitals spreads to German-occupied Poland, and to territory annexed to Germany.
Poland is formally partitioned between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Thousands of Jews flee to Soviet zone. Hitler issues an amnesty for those Einsatzgruppen members who murdered Jews in Poland.
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Later SS units are removed from army jurisdiction. Hitler envisaged the reorganisation of Germany and all conquered territory on racial-biological lines. He wanted the German-annexed areas of Poland cleared of Poles and Jews and resettled with ethnic Germans brought 'home to the Reich' from regions of eastern Europe where they had lived for centuries. Heinrich Himmler was named Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of the German People, and placed in charge of the programme. It was implemented by various agencies of the SS. Between and , about , Poles and some 65, Jews were brutally evicted under this policy to make way for , ethnic Germans.
But the programme caused huge problems and eventually provoked the Nazis to attempt a more radical solution of the 'Jewish question'. Himmler envisaged using the area of south-west Poland called the Generalgouvernement, administered by Hans Frank, as a dumping ground. And there wasn't enough transport to move all these people around.
Persecution and Genocide Under the Nazis 1933 - 1945 - non interactive version
As a result, the Jewish population in occupied Poland was forced into segregated districts of the cities in which they lived, until somewhere could be found for them. Eventually, these districts were walled in and became ghettos. The first ghetto was established in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Jewish population 18,, on 8 October The first Jewish ghetto is established in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland.
Population includes 18, Jews. On this date Hitler is thought to authorise the euthanasia campaign or 'mercy killings' of the physically and mentally 'disabled' in Germany. Authorisation is backdated to 1 September to use war as 'cover'. Nazi eugenics and racial-biological thinking led to the systematic murder of those deemed 'useless mouths' or 'life unworthy of life' - individuals of no utility or value to the Volk.
By this date Hitler had already sanctioned the medicalised killing of a severely disabled child in July of this year. The case was considered by 'experts' who laid the basis for the systematic murder of disabled children in special 'paediatric clinics'. Then in August of this year, a programme of compulsory euthanasia was set in motion with Hitler's express approval. This was to be run under the auspices of the Reich Chancellery - Hitler's office. The operational headquarters was at Tiergarten 4, which led to the code-name T4.
The T4 operation eventually ran five 'clinics' in sanatoria and asylums across Germany. In these 'clinics' gas chambers were constructed to kill patients deemed 'unworthy of life' by the doctors and nurses who were supposed to care for them. A fleet of vans was chartered to carry the doomed inmates to the killing centres. They were led by nursing staff into changing rooms, undressed and then placed in sealed gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
Anti-Jewish decrees
Carbon monoxide gas was released into the chambers from pressurised bottles. Afterwards gold tooth fillings were extracted from the corpses, and they were cremated. Over 70, people were killed in this way. The T4 programme was poorly disguised, and rumours about it were widespread. Eventually it was halted because of a public protest by Bishop Cardinal Galen in a sermon on 3 August The Nazi authorities had, anyway, murdered most of those initially targeted. Compulsory 'euthanasia' continued in the concentration camps, under the codename 14f13, and in occupied territories.
In all , people were murdered in this way. Express letter sent from the new Reich Main Security Office which runs the SS , stating that the 'Gypsy question' in the Reich will be settled by confining Sinti and Roma to designated sites and encampments. Adolf Eichmann has already organised the forced 'resettlement' of 2, Jews to Poland - hundreds of whom have died in the process.
From today's date, however, this first attempt at mass deportation is halted, because all transport is needed for the resettlement of ethnic Germans, and because of army objections. Taking their cue from Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, SS officers in Germany, Austria and the occupied Czech lands organised the round-up and deportation of thousands of Jews to the planned dumping ground for 'racial undesirables' in south-east Poland, in the first of what were called 'territorial solutions' of the 'Jewish question'.
Adolf Eichmann took charge of the arrangements, during which the deportees were transported on trains from Vienna, Prague, Ostrava Protectorate and Kattowice annexed from Poland to Germany to Nisko, on the San River, in south-east Poland. This initial attempt at mass deportation was halted, because transport was needed for the resettlement of ethnic Germans and because the army objected to Jews being dumped near sensitive military zones.
Nevertheless, hundreds of those Jews who were deported to Poland died of brutal treatment by SS guards, exposure and disease. And Eichmann proved that with the minimum of effort, and at almost no cost, thousands of Jews could be deported simply by issuing orders and working through Jewish communal organisations. Generalgouvernement is established under Hans Frank in those areas of Poland not incorporated into the Reich.
The Judenrat Jewish Council in Warsaw is ordered to conduct a census: Population includes , Jews. The Gestapo begin rounding up Polish intelligentsia. Under the Occupation, 50, Polish priests, professors, officers, teachers and cultural figures will be shot or killed in concentration camps. Police are ordered to arrest all Sinti and Roma 'Gypsies' in Germany, and deport them to concentration camps.
The Polish Generalgouvernment orders all Jews under its jurisdiction to wear yellow star badges to denote their Jewish status, and also to mark Jewish businesses with yellow stars. SS special commandos extend the euthanasia campaign in annexed areas of Poland, and start to gas patients from Polish mental asylums, in specially adapted vans. Heinrich Himmler personally witnesses an 'operation'. Mass deportation of Poles and Jews from Warthegau, a district of Poland annexed to Germany, to the Generalgouvernemnt the area of south-west Poland not incorporated into the Reich area of Poland. This will leave land free in line with the policy of lebensraum for 'Aryan' Germans.
The region will be 'ethnically cleansed' of nearly 90, within weeks. The SS evict hundreds of Jews from their homes in Lodz, Poland, and send them to the site of a planned ghetto in the slum district of the city. The 'euthanasia campaign' gathers momentum in Germany, as six special killing centres and gas vans, under an organisation code-named T4, are used in the murder of 'handicapped' adults.
Over 70, Germans will eventually be killed in this act of mass murder - it is the first time poison gas will be used for such a purpose. Second wave of deportation of Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti 'Gypsies' from the incorporated Polish territories continues - in order to free up land for ethnic Germans. In this way, over 40, from the annexed areas will be forcibly 'resettled'.