Concentration Camps
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Survival and Resistance under the Nazism and the Islam Problematic Today Researcher and Editor: Philippe L. De Coster, B.Th.,D.D. Foreword We live in a time of unparalleled instances of democide, genocide and ethnocide. The Holocaust, the genocides in Darfur, Turkey, Cambodia, Tibet, & Bosnia, the disappearances in Argentina & Chile, the death squad killings in El Salvador, Stalin's purges, the killing of the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Islamic State and the Salafists, but the list goes on. Mass violence, torture, violations of fundamental human rights, and the mistreatment of human beings is not a new aspect of humanity; documentation of such events spans the historical record. Christianity since its creation in the first century of our time, they were as cruel like the Islamic State in name of the Islam today. However, technology has taken these cruelties to new levels. 2 It is imperative that a greater understanding of the psychological, cultural, political, and societal roots of human cruelty, mass violence, and genocide be developed. We need to continue to examine the factors which enable individuals collectively and individually to perpetrate evil/genocide and the impact of apathetic bystanders as fuel for human violence. While an exact predictive model for mass violence/human cruelty is beyond the scope of human capability, we have an obligation to develop a model that highlights the warning signs and predisposing factors for human violence and genocide. With such information, we can develop policies, strategies, and programs designed to counteract these atrocities. Nazi History Briefly At the beginning of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party exploited widespread and deep-seated discontent in Germany to attract popular and political support. There was resentment at the crippling territorial, military and economic terms of the Versailles Treaty, which Hitler blamed on treacherous politicians and promised to overturn. The democratic post-World War I Weimar Republic was marked by a weak coalition government and political crisis, in answer to which the Nazi party offered strong leadership and national rebirth. From 1929 onwards, the worldwide economic depression provoked hyperinflation, social unrest and mass unemployment, to which Hitler offered scapegoats such as the Jews. Hitler pledged civil peace, radical economic policies, and the restoration of national pride and unity. Nazi rhetoric was virulently nationalist and anti- Semitic. The ‘subversive’ Jews were portrayed as responsible for all of Germany’s ills. In the federal elections of 1930 (which followed the Wall Street Crash), the Nazi Party won 107 seats in the Reichstag (the German Parliament), becoming the second-largest party. The following year, it more than doubled its seats. In January 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, believing that the Nazis could be controlled from within the cabinet. Hitler set about consolidating his power, destroying Weimar democracy and establishing a dictatorship. On 27 February, the Reichstag burned; Dutch communist Marianus van der Lubbe was found inside, arrested and charged with arson. With the Communist Party discredited and banned, the Nazis passed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which dramatically curtailed civil liberties. In March 1933, the Nazis used intimidation and manipulation to pass the 3 Enabling Act, which allowed them to pass laws which did not need to be voted on in the Reichstag. Over the next year, the Nazis eliminated all remaining political opposition, banning the Social Democrats, and forcing the other parties to disband. In July 1933, Germany was declared a one-party state. In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ of June 1934, Hitler ordered the Gestapo and the SS to eliminate rivals within the Nazi Party. In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws marked the beginning of an institutionalised anti-Semitic persecution which would culminate in the barbarism of the ‘Final Solution’. Hitler’s first moves to overturn the Versailles settlement began with the rearmament of Germany, and in 1936 he ordered the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. Hitler became bolder as he realised that Britain and France were unwilling and unable to challenge German expansionism. Between 1936 and 1939, he provided military aid to Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, despite having signed the ‘Non-Intervention Agreement’. In March 1938, German troops marched into Austria; the Anschluss was forbidden under Versailles. Anglo-French commitment to appeasement and ‘peace for our time’ meant that when Hitler provoked the ‘Sudeten Crisis’, demanding that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany, Britain and France agreed to his demands at September 1938’s Munich conference. Germany’s territorial expansion eastwards was motivated by Hitler’s desire to unite German–speaking peoples, and also by the concept of Lebensraum: the idea of providing Aryan Germans with ‘living space’. At the end of the year, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted across Germany and Austria. Kristallnacht – a state-orchestrated attack on Jewish property – resulted in the murder of 91 Jews. Twenty thousand more were arrested and transported to concentration camps. In March 1939, Germany seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia; in August Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of non-aggression with the USSR. The next step would be the invasion of Poland and the coming of World War II. Genocide (Concentration Camps) The systematic policy of racial extermination carried out against Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War II stands out as one of history’s most horrifying events. This assault upon Europe’s Jewry began when Hitler came to power in 1933 and culminated in the terrible orchestration of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe’, in which six million Jews were killed. The Nazis targeted many groups for extermination, including Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled and homosexuals, all of whom were labelled as ‘undesirables’ with 4 no future in the Nazi state. However the scale of persecution and murder of Jews – presented in Nazi ideology as an insidious, lethal enemy of the Aryan ‘master race’ – was on a scale without comparison. The Nazis drew on a deeply ingrained tradition of anti-Semitism which permeated much of Europe in the 1930s. And although the Nazis adapted their rhetoric to meet the times, those who collaborated in the extermination of Jews across Europe were often responding to much older prejudices. From 1933 onwards, the Nazis implemented discriminatory policies against German Jews, most infamously under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which stripped them of German citizenship. In November 1938, Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) – an attack on Jewish property engineered by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels – resulted in the murder of 91 Jews, and the deportation to camps of more than 20,000. After Germany conquered Poland in 1939, the persecution reached terrifying new levels. Polish Jews were rounded up and forced to live in ghettoes, where disease and starvation were constant threats. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen (‘special operations groups’) followed in the wake of advancing German forces. These paramilitary death squads under SS command were made up of Nazi security forces and local volunteers. They orchestrated mass killings of defenceless civilians: Communists, intellectuals, gypsies, and above all Jews. At the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev, Einsatzgruppe C organised the war’s most notorious massacre, killing 33,771 Jews on 29 and 30 September 1941. The implementation of ‘Death Camp Operations’ began in December 1941, at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where a total of over 400,000 Jews were killed by the exhaust fumes of specially adapted vans. On 20 January 1942, at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the ‘Final Solution’ – the annihilation of European Jews - was set up as a systematic operation headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazis began transporting Jews to a network of concentration and extermination camps including Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the largest and most notorious, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where Jews would be either instantly killed or worked to death. A total of 1.1 million people (a million of them Jews) were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The horrific scenes of decaying corpses and emaciated prisoners which Allied troops found as they liberated Nazi camps led to difficult questions about Allied wartime policy towards Nazi genocide. Many felt that British and US politicians, aware of what was occurring in Nazi German concentration camps in German-occupied Poland, failed to act decisively for motives of political 5 expediency. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the leading officials who manned the camps were tried and executed, including Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, hanged in 1947. In addition, the term ‘genocide’ became part of international law, due to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Yet as events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have demonstrated, these steps failed to extinguish the tragic shadow of genocide from the world. Invasion Poland On 1 September 1939, 62 German divisions supported by 1,300 aircraft began the invasion of Poland. At 8pm on the same day, Poland requested military assistance from Britain and France. Two days later, in fulfilment of their April 1939 pledge to support the country in the event of an attack, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. The Anglo-French declaration of war may have been unexpected, but Hitler’s prediction that the campaign against Poland would be short and victorious was correct. At 6am on 1 September, as Warsaw was battered by the first in a succession of bombing raids, two German army groups invaded Poland from Slovakia in the south and Prussia in the north. The German air force, which had much more advanced aircrafts than the Poles, quickly established air supremacy by attacking and destroying the Polish air force in the air and on the ground. This allowed German bombers to attack road and rail junctions, as well as concentrations of Polish troops.