Life and Death in the Ghettoes

The largest of the ghettoes was that in Warsaw.

Before the Nazis' arrival, Jews made up approximately a third of Warsaw's 1 million inhabitants. Following the Nazi occupation, Jews were transferred in from other areas, increasing their numbers from 330,000 to 450,000. But the Nazis crammed this huge number into a walled area that represented only 2.3 percent of the city. The poorest district was set aside for the Jews, and Jewish residents from all the other parts of the city were moved there forcibly. Before they were put inside, all their money and valuables were taken from them.

Life in the ghetto went on under terrible conditions. An average of seven families were crammed into one room. Very little food was given, and everyone lived on the edge of starvation. The buildings were crawling with rodents and insects. Every day, those living in the ghetto could be subjected to slaps, mockery and abuse from the Nazis, who made elderly Jews so weakened that they could barely walk wash the streets with soap and water and laughed at their suffering. People living in the ghettoes were beaten at random, and the Nazis would merrily yank the beards and ringlets of the elderly, which they let grow as a religious obligation. An average of 100 people a day died from hunger, sickness or maltreatment. The photographs of wretched children in the Warsaw ghetto clearly reveal the suffering of these innocents.

Jews who took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising were all put to death en masse. These Jews were murdered shortly after leaving the ghetto. Jews rounded up in the camps were stripped of everything they possessed, including their money .

The memories of one Jew who lived in the Warsaw ghetto reveal the true situation in the city:

The oppression began as soon as the Germans entered the city, with the killing of 34 innocent Jews. The German SS were just looking for excuses to kill Jews. The SS asked a gentile where the Jews were living. He indicated Itzhak Goldfliess' house. The SS entered my friend's house and killed his parents, wife and two children. On the first Sabbath of the occupation, the Germans rounded up all the Jews and ordered them to dig a long, wide ditch in the city centre. They were then told to go home, put their Sabbath clothes on and come back. To the great surprise of everyone, the Jews were then made to line up in that filthy trench. They were made to spend a whole day in it, which was full of sewage. The Germans beat them with sticks, and sometimes allowed the Ukrainians to attack them with sticks and pieces of wood. Whenever anyone tried to get out of the ditch, they would be beaten by German SS officers or Ukrainian civilians and made to get back in.108

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews were slaughtered in the Warsaw Ghetto, a place of starvation and poverty.

In 1942, some 300,000 people from the ghetto died, some from hunger and disease, others in the concentration camps where they were sent. In April 1943, some of the 60,000 or so Jews remaining in the ghetto began a doomed uprising. Even though they had almost no weapons, they fought the Nazis for exactly three weeks. In the end, the Nazis regained control and killed all the Jews they could find. Of the original 500,000 in the ghetto, only a handful of Jews remained alive.

In other ghettos set up by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed after suffering fear, terrible starvation, and torture.

In 1943, the last Jews remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto initiated an uprising against Nazi oppression, which the Nazis suppressed with terrible bloodshed.

The War Years and the Start of the Genocide

On March 15, 1936, Nazi armies invaded Czechoslovakia. On September 1, they invaded Poland. Great Britain and France declared war, and World War II had begun. The invasion of Poland brought a new dimension to the twisted Nazi ideas known as "the Jewish problem." That part of the country under German occupation (the rest was occupied by the Soviet Union) contained more than 1 million Jews. Successive decrees published by the Nazis confined these Jews to ghettoes, or in newly built concentration camps. All Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars of David on their clothes so they could be immediately identified.

Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to sew this symbol onto their clothing, proclaiming their Jewish identity.

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, gave orders for death squads known as SS Einsatzgruppen (SS Special Action Units) to search out Jews in the occupied territories. Death or worse awaited Jews in the ghettoes and the camps.

Toward the autumn of 1940, the Nazi armies occupied Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece. In addition to Italy and Japan—which had already formed an alliance with Germany—Hungary, Romania and Slovakia also declared themselves allies of Germany. The Nazi armies' largest invasion was of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. Within 12 weeks, the Germans had taken Kiev, and a month later had approached the outskirts of Moscow.

To sum up, in the first two years of the World War II, Hitler or his allies had captured most of the continent of Europe, from the French coast to Moscow, from Denmark to Greece. Shortly before their collapse in 1945, the Nazis initiated a ruthless genocide campaign in all their occupied regions. First Jews in particular and then—as we shall see—other ethnic and religious groups began to be systematically wiped out. Even after 1944, when it had become clear that Germany would lose the war, the Nazis continued their genocide. During that final stage of the conflict, in fact, the elimination of the Jews—and also of gypsies, Poles and Slavs, all members of the so-called "inferior race"—became the Nazis' principal aim. Hitler knew that he would lose the war, but wanted to eliminate all the Jews first. This genocide had several main "areas of implementation:"

1)   Ghettoes: These open-air prisons where Jews were kept were used to kill by degrees.

2)   Concentration camps were first established as places where Jews and others were kept as "slave laborers." In early 1942, however, the mass extermination of detainees began. A total of 11 million people (5.5 million Jews, 500,000 gypsies, 3 million Poles, 400,000 handicapped and hundreds of thousands of Russian, Slav and other prisoners of war) were systematically exterminated in these camps.

3)   Mass killings in occupied regions: Special German Army units, and particularly the SS Einsatzgruppen responsible for "finding and killing Jews," executed civilians in a great many places.

The Footsteps of the Jewish Holocaust

Children in Hitler's Germany were brought up with anti-Semitic teachings. Above: Children learning anti-Jewish slogans.

The Nazis systematically repressed those sections of society they regarded as enemies. At the top of their list came the Jews, whom Nazi ideology described as "the source of all evils in the world."

Even before they came to power, the Nazis' street gangs, known as the SA storm-troopers, had already staged attacks on Jewish homes and businesses. Once the Nazis came to power, the SA lost all restraint. An elderly Jew walking on the street or a little Jewish child going to school could easily be assaulted by the SA and other Nazi gangs. That same year, the Nazis initiated a boycott aimed at Jewish shops and businesses. All over Germany went up posters portraying Jews as terrible and ugly monsters, and carrying slogans reading, "Don't buy Jewish goods." In September that same year, a law was passed prohibiting Jews from owning land. In November, Jews were banned from being newspaper editors.

Further laws were passed in 1934, excluding Jews from trade unions and health insurance, and banning them from working as lawyers or judges. In 1935, all Jews were expelled from the army.

Under the Nürnberg Laws of 1935, Jews were no longer able to work in many areas of German society. Jews were prohibited from marrying Germans. In 1937, Jews were no longer permitted to be teachers, doctors or dentists, on the pretext that "They will physically or spiritually poison the German people." In November that year, the anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew began to be shown in cinemas all over Germany.

In schools, teachers warned their students of the so-called "Jewish menace." During lessons, Jews were insulted and maligned. The quotation below is a thought-provoking reflection of how Germany's society was brainwashed:

Mr. Birgmann's 7th form is very lively today. The teacher is talking about the Jews. Mr. Birgmann has drawn a number of shapes on the board, and everyone finds these unbelievably fascinating. Mr. Birgmann looks at his watch? "It is mid-day, children. We must now sum up what we have learnt. What were we last speaking about?"

Everyone puts their hand up, and Mr. Birgmann nods to Karl Scholtz, who is sitting in the front row.

"We were learning how to recognise Jews."

"Excellent! Can you tell us a bit more?"

Little Karl rises to his feet and points to the shapes on the blackboard: "It is easy to recognise Jews by their noses. Their noses look like a number '6,' and are called a 'Jewish six.' Some people who are not Jews have big noses, but theirs point upwards, not down. Such noses are called 'hooked' or 'eagle.' They are nothing like Jewish noses."

"Well done!" says the teacher. "Richard, come up and tell us more about how to recognise Jews."

The blond, cheerful Richard approaches the blackboard. "You can tell a Jew by his movements and behaviour. Jews always nod their heads forward. They also have a funny way of walking. They waddle. They move their hands when they talk. They have odd voices, as if they are talking through their noses. They have a nasty, sweet smell. You can always tell a Jew if you have a good sense of smell."

The teacher was quite satisfied.

"There you are, children. Watch out! If you remember all that when you leave school, the Jews will never be able to take you in!"

He turns the blackboard round, and one of the students reads out the poem written on it:

The Devil talks to us

From the face of a Jew.

Let us be free of the Jews,

Who are a plague in every land.

Let us be happy and joyful again.

All young people must fight.

These devils are deceitful!107

Enmity of Jews increased rapidly in a society educated along such lines. Every Nazi act of repression against the Jews met with society's approval. 1938 saw all Jewish-owned goods, property and money being registered, and new sanctions being imposed.

The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, one of the hundreds of synagogues demolished during Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes and shops were looted.

A new chapter in the oppression of the Jews opened on the night of November 9-10, 1938. The incidents were sparked off on November 7, when a 17-year-old Jewish Pole, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family the Nazis had mistreated, shot an official at the German Embassy in Paris. The Nazis used the incident as an act of provocation, and staged attacks on Jewish places of worship, houses and businesses all over Germany.

In one single night, 1,350 synagogues were destroyed. More than 90 Jews were killed, and some 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. 7,000 Jewish businesses were looted, and thousands of homes damaged. That night was called "Kristallnacht" (Night of Broken Glass) because of all the windows smashed in the looted buildings. The German government then managed to hold the Jews responsible for all that had gone on, and raised the amazing sum of 1 billion marks from Jews to pay for all the glass that had been broken.

In the wake of Kristallnacht, the oppression increased. When Germany united with Austria in 1938, some 200,000 Austrian Jews continued living in fear along with the 55,000 or so living in Germany. Yet the real savagery started with the outbreak of the war.

Nazi Ideology and Its Enemies

The Nazi Party was founded and grew in the 1920s, during which period Hitler and the other senior Nazis came to prominence. Yet the party's ideology definitely had a number of influential predecessors.

The deception of racism was Nazism's basic teaching. Its whole ideology rested on the premise of the superiority of the German race, which was threatened by "inferior races," and in order for that threat to be eliminated, a racist formula needed to be applied. The source of that ideology, in turn, was a 19th-century invention known as "social Darwinism"—nothing other than Darwin's theory of evolution applied to the social sciences. In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, and The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin suggested that living things developed as the result of a "racial struggle," and that nature made strong races superior to others. Darwin rejected the existence of any divine order and harmony in nature, instead advancing the lie that all living things and races were in a constant state of conflict. He also maintained the irrational and illogical idea that the white race, being superior to all others, would soon wipe them off the face of the Earth. Certain circles duly supported that idea for their own ideological reasons, despite the lack of any scientific proof.

Social Darwinism's perverted teachings, which regard human races as different species of animals, consider the use of the tooth-and-claw force seen among animals as entirely legitimate among human beings

In Europe, Darwin's theory led to a sudden resurgence of racism among some intellectual circles, who were generally opposed to people living by religious moral values. The British thinker Herbert Spencer adopted Darwin's theory—which had been expressed in more strictly biological terms—to the social sciences, thus giving rise to "social Darwinism." The most ardent supporters of this mistaken idea were the French writer Arthur Gobineau, widely regarded as the father of modern racism, and the British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who took Gobineau's racist theories to an even higher level of fanaticism. Despite his being a British subject, Chamberlain was a great admirer of all things German. Also an avowed enemy of the Jews, he maintained the deception that the white Aryan race of Indo-European origin was superior to the Middle Eastern Semitic peoples such as Jews and Arabs. He hated the people of Israel, and saw them as inferior to the Germans' pagan ancestors.

Chamberlain died in 1927, but on his death bed, he had a famous visitor: Adolf Hitler, who had formulated his Nazi ideology under the influence of the mistaken ideas of Chamberlain and of similar social-Darwinist ideologues. He took the title of his book Mein Kampf, in which he set out his racist views, from social Darwinism's thesis of "the fight between the races." In Hitler's wicked logic, all of world history had shaped itself around the German race:

1)   He believed in the lie that the German race was physically, mentally and culturally superior to all others, and held the idea that the Semitic and Slavic races were particularly inferior. In his view, the German race needed more room to live, which it needed to acquire by eliminating the Semitic and Slavic peoples to the east of Germany—Jews, Poles, and Russians, among others.

2)   Hitler attached great importance to the "purity" of the German race. In his perverse thinking, he thought that to maintain that so-called purity, physical precautions were essential (by preventing Germans from marrying people from other races), as well as cultural ones (all "non-German" ideas and beliefs had to be destroyed).

3)   His concept of racial purity included such inhumane acts as "improving" the German race, as if it were a breed of animal. To that end, people suffering from inherited diseases needed to be weeded out of society.

4)   The destruction of "non-German ideas" meant, in effect, the elimination of all thoughts and beliefs that failed to conform to Nazi ideology. According to the Nazis' beliefs, devout Christians, liberals and members of other religious sects were elements that needed to be disposed of.

Thus the ruthless, racist ideology of social Darwinism gave birth to the worst genocide and slaughter the world had ever seen.

In the following pages, we shall examine the innocent victims of Nazi savagery—first the Jews, the Nazis' main target, and then those other victims of "forgotten genocides," whose sufferings were no less than those of the Jews, but have been largely ignored.

The Jewish Holocaust

In 1933, darkness fell over Germany. The Nazi Party had come to power in a nation that for years had been the scene of street brawls, rallies filled with hatred, racist attacks and loud calls for war. Hitler, the Nazis' leader, had won the highest vote in the election and been declared chancellor. He was soon to become Germany's undisputed dictator.

The 13 difficult years from 1933 to 1945 brought ever-increasing savagery. The Nazis began by killing their political opponents, then set about murdering all those innocent handicapped and the mentally ill, whom they saw as being "harmful" according to their twisted theories of eugenics. They began oppressing and torturing Jews and other minorities living in Germany and then, in 1939, turned it into mass killings. The Nazis killed 11 million people in their terrible concentration camps, which turned into genocide machines where technology was systematically employed to sadistically murder babies, the elderly and the sick. Throughout the World War II, which the Nazis began for the sake of their sick ideology, they carried out countless mass killings in the countries they occupied, particularly in eastern nations whose members they perceived as belonging to "inferior races." A total of 55 million people died during that war, at least 30 million of them were innocent civilians killed by the Nazis. In short, between 1933 and 1945 the world was a place of hitherto unseen savagery.

All of mankind has a responsibility to ensure that such murders and genocide never happen again, and that such sick ideas are never again allowed to spread. It is therefore essential that the Nazi barbarities be remembered everywhere in the world, at every available opportunity, that their innocent victims not be forgotten and, of course, that the stupidity and rottenness of the concepts that gave rise to that savagery be fully exposed—as we shall be doing in this chapter.

Special Action 14f13

Monument to those killed under the euthanasia program Left: "Nazis also murdered 200,000 'sick.'" Milliyet report dated October 10, 2003 .

A German psychiatric hospital in 1925.

After slaughtering a great many "undesirable" and allegedly "useless" mentally ill people, the T4 program widened its sphere of activity under the code name 14f13. Previously restricted to mental hospitals and research institutes, the program was now directed toward German and Austrian prisoners who fell sick because of the conditions they were kept in, and towards Jews, Poles and Gypsies in the concentration camps. Operation 14f13 began in December 1941. Special commissions consisting of psychiatrists were added to the Berlin T4 team, and they selected sick and in their view, otherwise, undesirable individuals and sent them to concentration camps to empty out medical departments and sick centers. The patients selected were generally sent to one of six killing centers and killed there. The people selected from the concentration camps were generally classified according to their ability to work, and if unfit for hard labor, were sent to their deaths.

The Hadamar killing center's cemetery.

In 1943, children, too, began being killed in Hadamar, one of the death stations. In addition to the physically or mentally handicapped, these also included those in state shelters or orphanages.103

Hitler's Secret Death Warrant

fter Nazi Germany passed its racist laws, the time had come to obtain public acceptance of eugenic measures, especially euthanasia. Various propaganda methods, with films heading the list, were employed to bring people to believe the lie that there is no point in making great efforts to keep harmful people alive. Newspapers published reports and articles about how much money was being spent on the mentally handicapped, and how that money could be more usefully spent elsewhere. The campaign was initiated on such a scale that it even entered school textbooks.99

Germany's first euthanasia measures were taken at the end of 1938, at which time a certain Knauer from Leipzig wrote Hitler a letter, saying that he wanted a doctor to put an end to a child of his who was born blind, with only parts of its arms and legs and seemed to be an idiot. In response, Hitler sent his private physician, Professor Karl Brandt, to Leipzig, where the child was duly put to death.100

Hitler signed a document authorizing Karl Brandt and Reich-leader Philip Bouhler to permit euthanasia in special cases. The official permission, known as the "Führer-Order," read:

Reichsleader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M.D. are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who according to human judgement can upon most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness be accorded a mercy death. Signed - A. Hitler101

This authority, which made murder a part of daily life, formed the basis for crimes perpetrated by the psychiatrists of the Nazi Germany. Later, ironically, the defendants in the Nuremberg and other war crimes trials tried to depict it as an order and a mitigating factor in their crimes.

How Was the T4 Euthanasia Program Put into Practice?

Smoking chimney from the ovens used to burn the corpses at the Hadamar killing center.

In mid-1939 the final preparations for the program were initiated. In October, questionnaires about the mentally ill, prepared by advisors and the Psychiatry Committee, were sent out to hospitals and institutions. These sought the following information: "Name of patient, marital status, nationality, next of kin. Is patient visited on a regular basis? If so, by whom? With whom does financial responsibility lie? How long has patient been in hospital? How long has patient been ill? Diagnosis, main symptoms. Is patient bed-ridden? Is patient under restraint? Was patient admitted because of an incurable disease or condition? Is the patient war-wounded? And patient's race." Front groups operating under the T4 program distributed the questionnaires.

Under the T4 system, four front groups had been set up to carry out orders from the real T4 team, and in the event of any investigation, the groups would conceal the true source of the operations. Any hospital or family investigating a death warrant or the form of death found it impossible to reach anyone further back than the four front groups.

Working in parallel to these four groups was another group, whose members had become expert on the killing of children in particular. This group was named the Realms Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness due to Heredity and Constitution and had two other organizations in association with it. The Charitable Company for the Transport of the Sick was responsible for transporting patients to the killing centers. The Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care dealt with final arrangements and procedures.

Photographs from different angles of the Bernburg killing center.

One of the Nazis' heartless practices was to demand "expenses" from the families of the patients killed, although the families were unaware they were actually paying for their relatives' murder.

The questionnaires were filled in by the doctors or psychiatrists responsible for the patients in the asylum. The returned forms were evaluated by T4's own psychiatrists and other experts. No patients were examined or observed directly. The decision on whether or not a patient was to be killed was based on information in the questionnaires.

When the forms were first sent out, a number of mental hospitals and suitable buildings were re-arranged for use as killing sites and murder training schools. The death chambers inside the buildings were camouflaged as showers.

This is how this terrifying system functioned: After the questionnaires' responses were received, a notice was sent to the institutions caring for those patients selected for death, announcing that space was to be made available for war-wounded, or that patients were to be removed elsewhere to receive better treatment. One of the front groups collected these patients and transported them to one of the killing centers. There, they were exterminated within a few hours of their arrival.

The above picture shows a model of the Bernburg Psychiatric Hospital. Blue arrows indicate the route taken by patients on their way to the killing area, and the circled building contains the crematorium and gas chambers. Far right: Dr. Kathe Leichte, a professor in the field of social sciences, was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1940. In 1942, she was gassed to death by the Gestapo at the Bernburg Euthanasia Institute. Right: Margarita Singer, the daughter of a professor of zoology, was killed under the euthanasia program. In order to conceal the T4 operations, great efforts went in to making the death centers appear like ordinary mental hospitals. This was admitted at the Nuremberg trials by Viktor Brack, head of the 2nd unit of the KdF (a term used to refer to the Chancellery of the Führer) and one of the main figures responsible for the euthanasia program. Brack stated that on entering the death chambers, the patients carried towels and soap and thought they were going to have a real shower. Instead of water, though, they were "showered" with poison gas .

Not only the mentally incurable were butchered. As the practice of euthanasia gained pace, the Nazis began to include other "undesirables." Death warrants were issued for the mentally unstable, schizophrenics, the elderly and infirm, epileptics, and people suffering from Parkinson's disease, paralysis, multiple sclerosis, brain tumors and other organic neurological disorders. Children were killed in the same way, and orphanages and reformatories were investigated in detail to discover new victims.

One very important point must be made clear: 50% of those killed might have recovered had they been permitted to do so.102

High-level Nazis devoted to Hitler selected the students who carried out the killings, who were given very special training. At first they would watch the killings and, as their training progressed, they would take patients to the chambers and begin to switch on the poison gas. They would watch the victims in their death throes, and after death had been ascertained, they would ventilate the chambers and remove the bodies. They thus massacred thousands of innocent victims.

These murders were all carried out under tight security, with every possible precaution to prevent the slightest leak of information, because the people killed in these buildings were not members of "other races." Most were Germans and Austrians. If the German public ever learned that their compatriots were being killed in this way, the Nazis would find this difficult to explain, and so adopted all possible security measures.

The students, who had now turned into executioners of sorts, soon grew used to the murder procedures, and became immune to the pleadings, screams and writhings of the victims. During this process, their instructors closely observed their reactions and wrote reports about them. It was calculated that if students had no difficulty in killing members of their own race simply because they were sick, then it would be even easier for them to kill members of "inferior races," and they were trained for "wider ranging" practices in future. Students who were unable to bear these killings or who protested were sent to the front and placed in "suicide squads" by their unit commanders.

In order to become executioners, the students were trained to be cold-blooded, "flawless assassins"—to withstand the cries and writhings of the dying and the smell of burning human flesh and, to be able to speak to the people they were sending to their deaths as if they really were just going to the showers. They were rewarded and encouraged in various ways. In addition to these various incentives, they were also awarded the Iron Cross Second Class medals, for "Secret Reich matter."

Slowly the public became aware of what was going on in these institutes, and protests began. It was then announced that Hitler had issued an order for the killings to cease. They did not, however, and all that happened was a change of methods, involving either lethal injection or starvation, with the dead buried in mass graves. In this way, the savagery of euthanasia continued throughout the war.