Chapter 19
Persecution
When discussing Hitler’s leadership of Germany, our primary association tends to point to both war and the ignominious concentration camp system. History, however, shows us that concentration camps existed long before Hitler came to power and were not conceived in Germany. Perhaps the reason the stigma still remains today is that at no time in human history, apart from the former Soviet Union’s less documented Gulag internment system, did a concentration camp network develop in such vast proportions.
The Dark Pages of History: Forced Labor, Persecution, Deportation, and Genocide
Throughout history, humanity has witnessed numerous cases of minority groups being subjected to forced exile, massacre, or genocide. From the sacking of Carthage in 146 BCE by the Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth-century America, seventeenth-century Ireland, and medieval Sicily, mass extermination has taken place in different parts of the world. The twentieth century saw numerous instances of persecution, forced deportation, and genocide on a global scale.
The National Socialist regime led by Hitler has been held responsible for the widespread use of slave labor, particularly within the concentration camp system in Germany and in occupied territories. However, the practice of forced labor is not limited to National Socialist Germany. The term “slave” originates from “Slav,” a member of the Slavic people, and the Romans exploited Slavic captives as slaves in the slave markets. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, the existing German concentration camp system grew dramatically with the influx of Slavic prisoners.
Slave labor has been a harsh reality since ancient times and prevalent across the world. Imperial powers have often forced it on minority groups, as seen in ancient Mesopotamia. Slavery was a major social institution in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China and was widely accepted by the religions of the time. The Byzantine Empire relied on forced labor for over a millennium as the backbone of its economic system in the Mediterranean.
From the 1400s, European ships transported enslaved Africans to Europe. The colonization of North and South America intensified the slave trade, with slaves being traded for manufactured goods in Africa and then sold to the colonists in the Americas, mainly for use in agriculture. The cycle continued with the return of tobacco, sugar, cotton, cocoa, and rum to Europe.1 The American colonies relied entirely on the unpaid labor provided by slaves. In the twentieth century, Belgium, China, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union sanctioned the use of slave labor on occasion.
The term “concentration camp” was first used to refer to the reconcentrados set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War.2 In 1896, General Valeriano Weyler of Spain initiated the first wave of the Spanish “Reconcentration Policy,” sending thousands of Cubans to concentration camps. Rural populations were required to move to designated camps located in fortified towns, and those who did not comply within eight days were shot. There the housing conditions were untenable, food was scarce, and disease and famine soon swept through the camps. By 1898, one-third of Cuba’s population had been forcibly interned, resulting in over four hundred thousand deaths.3
The use of concentration camps can also be seen in the “zones of protection” established by the United States during the U.S.-Philippine War4 and by the British for the internment of Afrikaans-speaking Boers and Black Africans.5 The Soviet Union’s gulags and Maoist China’s Laogai were responsible for the mistreatment, exploitation, and death of millions in the twentieth century.6
Types of German Concentration Camps and the Institutions of the Holocaust
Though every camp that operated during the Third Reich could be held accountable for causing deaths, the general term “concentration camp” can be somewhat misleading and easily confused with other types of camps or institutions of internment, persecution, and murder.
In Germany a concentration camp was a place of imprisonment and punishment initially created to isolate and “reeducate” political opponents of the Reich. Eventually, these camps were used to take in so-called asocials, such as beggars, the “work-shy,” and certain classifications of small-time or repeat criminals. Forced labor, harsh discipline, and breaking the will of the prisoners hallmarked such camps. Contrary to the general public’s belief, Jews represented a minority of the detainees in the Germany-based camps until the last couple of years of the war. Though gas chambers were built at some concentration camps on German soil—especially during the war years—they were used principally for the murder of weakened inmates rather than for systematic extermination.7
The implementation of ghettos was, in fact, the first wide-scale method of “concentrating” or “herding together” Europe’s Jewish community prior to their final expatriation to an undefined location (the Polish region of Lublin and the island of Madagascar were mentioned in some documents). The first ghettos were created in Polish cities, starting in 1939, and later Theresienstadt was established in Bohemia, while a series of temporary ghettos was set up in Hungary. Such ghettos served as centers of preselection of those victims that German officials either sent to forced labor camps or to be exterminated.8
Transit camps were large holding centers in countries other than the Soviet Union or Poland, in which Jews were already isolated in ghettos. These camps usually came under direct German administration, though the transit camp in Drancy, near Paris, was administrated by the local regime. It is noteworthy that, up until their occupation by German troops, Italy and Hungary refused to extradite their Jewish community, whereas some other countries willingly cooperated, such as Croatia (responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands at the Jasenovac Camp) and Romania (accountable for at least one hundred thousand deaths at makeshift ghettos and camps when they occupied the Transnistrian region of Ukraine).9
The genocide of the Jewish people did not begin in death camps. The large-scale murder of Jews, as well as of Red Army officers and Communist officials, took place through mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen (SS paramilitary death squads) in Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. By the end of 1941, these special task forces had decimated over one million people in the eastern territories—so many victims that the SS began to worry about the psychological repercussions these atrocities could have on their perpetrators. As a result, they introduced the implementation of systematic killing with specially equipped gas vans, as well as through the creation of death camps.10
Death camps, or extermination camps, were designed and operated specifically for that purpose and were purposefully located in Poland, far from the German population. Four camps (Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) were established solely for the purpose of liquidating people—principally Polish Jews. Also located in Poland, Majdanek-Lublin functioned as both a forced labor and an extermination camp, and the already existing forced labor and transit camp of Auschwitz was expanded to serve as an extermination camp as well. Two more killing centers existed in the east: Maly Trostenets in Belarus and Sajmiste in Serbia. Janowska Camp in Ukraine was not equipped with gas chambers but was responsible for the extermination of between one and two hundred thousand Jews.11
Six euthanasia centers were created in Germany and one in Austria to annihilate Germans with disabilities, in which some seventy thousand non-Jewish men, women, and children also met their deaths. Parallel to the euthanasia program in the Reich, SS units targeted Polish mental institutions in 1941, simply shooting all the patients, and for the rest of the war implemented a euthanasia policy in hospitals and institutions throughout German-occupied lands.12
“Protective Custody” and the Establishment of the German Camp System
Although the majority of German voters had supported candidates from opposing parties, Hitler’s National Socialists proceeded to target and arrest leaders and activists from these parties. With the support of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm members, the National Socialists used force to pursue and apprehend leading members of the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, trade union leaders, and left-wing intellectuals. By April 1933, approximately fifty thousand individuals had been arrested, and over one hundred thousand men and women were placed in protective custody that year alone. As state prisons became overcrowded, around eighty-five makeshift concentration camps were established nationwide to isolate and intimidate Hitler’s political opponents.13
As the temporary concentration camps, housed in prisons, empty factories, schools, or military barracks, were overflowing, Heinrich Himmler—at the time, head of Bavaria’s political police force—established a central concentration camp in a disused World War I ammunition factory. This first official camp, located a few kilometers outside of Dachau, a historic old town not far from Munich, opened its gates on March 22, 1933. Though the Dachau Concentration Camp officially fell under the jurisdiction of Bavarian state administration, its running operations in reality lay entirely in the hands of the SS. Himmler replaced the camp commander with a friend of his, Theodor Eicke, who later made an infamous name for himself in the camp system’s extensive eastern expansion in German-occupied territories.14
Contrary to the south, the Prussian (northern German) concentration camps were established by the state government authorities and employed civilian directors responsible for the camps’ administration and supply. Guard duty was allotted to the police force or members of the SS or the SA auxiliary police. Apart from Dachau, the main camps in Germany at that time were Oranienburg near Berlin, Kislau in the region of Baden, Moringen near Hannover, Sachsenburg near the city of Chemnitz, and Columbia-Haus at Berlin-Tempelhof.15
On Hitler’s forty-fifth birthday, April 20, 1934, Göring handed over directorship of the Prussian Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler. By so doing, Himmler succeeded in becoming the sole commander of the entire German political police force. In turn, he promoted Theodor Eicke to general inspector of concentration camps as well as head of the SS guard units. Now transferred to Berlin, Eicke was tasked with restructuring all the camps following the Dachau model. Over time, large numbers of political prisoners were released from the various camps. From fifty thousand in April 1933, the figure dropped to twenty-two thousand in October of the same year and nine thousand in April 1934. Most of the original makeshift or temporary camps were disbanded until only about three thousand detainees were still incarcerated in concentration camps at the end of 1934.16
Altering the Enemy Stereotype
Though the concentration camps had been built supposedly to reeducate and reintegrate tens of thousands of German citizens, by mid-1935 the total number of inmates stood at a mere 4,700—only slightly above the all-time low figure of three thousand a few months before. Now that the Reich’s political foes had been subdued through acts of terror and violence, Himmler and Heydrich issued directives to look for additional categories of prisoners.
As a first measure, the state police transferred detained Communist Party officials from the state prisons to concentration camps. In October 1935, Himmler brought the subject of Germany’s “asocial” citizens to Hitler’s attention. This was the first time the notion of “protecting” the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community) through the internment of so-called Volksschädlinge (those harmful to the people) was introduced to the general public.17 The term Volksschädling is a “pest” metaphor that was first used in various contexts at the beginning of the twentieth century. It gained usage as a term for people who were characterized as “harmful elements” because of their nonconformist behavior, usually with the intention to degrade them as vermin and to dehumanize them. From 1930 on, the term was also used for alleged traitors to the nation or to the “common good of the country.”
The new “enemies” of the people were henceforth to include “degenerates” in mind or body, those living off of society as selfish “parasites,” “subhumans” incapable of integrating into the community such as beggars, homeless, vagrants, “gypsies,” prostitutes and pimps, alcoholics, homosexuals, and those who “avoided” a working job. These categories, among others, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, applied to an extremely eclectic grouping of citizens whose lifestyle or behavior deviated somewhat from the accepted social norm. However, the police force enjoyed every legal right to send anyone it considered to be unfit to remain in society to a concentration camp. Being “asocial” was viewed as a precursor to criminality, and from the police’s perspective, incarceration was arguably a preventive measure in fighting crime. They regarded criminality not as a result of the perpetrator frequenting a criminal entourage but rather as a product of defective or criminal genes. Thus criminal “prevention” entailed the “eradication” of the “born” criminal and of “criminal clans.”18
Women in the Concentration Camp System
Right from the beginning in 1933, women were by no means spared persecution and camp imprisonment. Forerunners to the infamous Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, the Moringen women’s “protective custody” camp and the Lichtenburg women’s concentration camp, were instituted for female prisoners in the early years of the NS regime.19 In 1938, 40 percent of the women detained at the Lichtenburg concentration camp were categorized as “antisocial preventive detention prisoners,” and in May 1939, 974 women were transferred to Ravensbrück—among them 388 Jehovah’s Witnesses. Over the following years, Ravensbrück became the largest women’s concentration camp in the Reich with a total of some 120,000 women passing through its ominous gates, tens of thousands of whom did not survive.20
The Concentration Camps in the Press
From the early beginnings, Dachau—as the first official state camp—was a focus of the press. National Socialist propaganda depicted the camp system as an institution where the prisoners lived in extremely humane conditions. Here they were to learn ethics and the value of work, as well as to be reeducated with the aim of learning how to better integrate into society. In many cases, however, the camp authorities sought to portray camp inmates as repulsive, degenerate individuals who were better removed from German society. National Socialist propaganda attempted to portray many inmates as human “bastards” who were racially “inferior,” professional criminals, or enemies of the “people.” An essential part of the camps’ image was the publicizing of camp “tours” for German and foreign delegations. The aim of these tours was, first, to show off an orderly, clean, and modern establishment and, second, to convince the visitors of the racial or social “inferiority” of the prisoners.21
Camp Life
The German concentration camp network became an integral part of National Socialist repression. Through it, the authorities could remove citizens’ personal freedoms while evading legal procedures. The camps made use of barbaric torture practices and could liquidate the state’s opponents practically without a trace. Himmler’s Gestapo would not have been able to grow into the terror organization that it became without the camps’ gruesome reputation. Upon arrival, in an effort to break their personalities, prisoners were immediately subjected to brutal ill-treatment and the threat of unspeakable forms of punishment, or even death, which loomed over the inmates throughout each and every day.22
The daily routine in most camps customarily began between 4:00 and 4:30 in the morning (in some camps one hour later in winter), when prisoners were awoken in their barracks. Inmates were allotted thirty to forty-five minutes to use the toilet, get dressed, make their beds, clean the barracks, and have breakfast. In many camps, toilet and washing facilities (where there was usually only dirty water and no soap or toilet paper) were shared by up to two thousand prisoners. Those who did not finish these tasks within the set time faced mistreatment. Prisoners then had to line up for the morning roll call on the Appellplatz, a routine registration of all prisoners in the camp (including those who had died in the night or those that were ill). Inmates were counted twice: any discrepancies resulted in a recount. Sometimes morning roll call could take hours, often in extreme weather conditions. Those that collapsed or who missed roll call faced beatings, torture, or execution.23
Following roll call, prisoners set off for work, usually on foot. The type of work varied from camp to camp but often consisted of factory work, road construction, or labor in stone quarries.
In later years, in many of the camps, with the aim of reducing the amount of time walking and increasing the amount of time working, lunch was brought to the prisoners’ work places. Work typically finished at approximately five or six o’clock in the evening or at sundown in winter. Prisoners were then marched back to the camp to participate in the evening roll call. Those who had died during the day were also brought out to the roll call to be counted. This, again, could take hours in the event of inaccuracies. After the evening roll call was completed and the evening soup consumed, prisoners were sent back to their barracks, where they had “free time.” Some prisoners used this period to barter between each other for additional food or to repair their clothing. Others, exhausted, simply retired to their beds.24
Upon arrival at most camps, prisoners were stripped of their own civilian clothing and made to wear a blue striped uniform, though this was not always the case. Men were issued a cap, trousers, and jacket, whereas women wore a dress or skirt with a jacket and a kerchief for their head. Some uniforms, especially those of higher-ranking prisoners such as Kapos included pockets. These were very useful for hiding extra rations or concealing handy luxuries such as cutlery. Footwear usually consisted of wooden or leather clogs. As socks were not supplied, many prisoners suffered sores from rubbing—a normally benign occurrence that could become very dangerous in the poor and unhygienic conditions of most of the camps.25
Prisoners’ clothing was typically inadequate for the conditions in which they were expected to work and live. In general, uniforms displayed each prisoner’s number, stitched onto the front left-hand side of the uniform, as well as a triangle to show the category of prisoner to which they had been classified. Jews wore two yellow triangles forming the Star of David, political prisoners wore red triangles, Roma and Sinti wore brown triangles (although they were also sometimes classed as “asocials,” a category that was represented by black triangles), homosexuals wore pink triangles, and Jehovah’s Witnesses wore purple triangles.26
Between 1933 and 1939, prisoners in concentration camps were provided with a simple breakfast consisting of bread or porridge, served with tea or ersatz coffee, in tin bowls and mugs. Lunch usually consisted of vegetable soup, occasionally accompanied by bread, and dinner might consist of more soup or, in some of the earlier camps, bread and cheese. However, after the outbreak of war in January 1940, the food rations for camp inmates were significantly reduced. Portion sizes were smaller, less nutritious, and provided only twice a day, resulting in an average daily intake of no more than 1,300 calories.27
Camp Security and Disciplinary Measures
For the training of its younger or new members, starting in 1934, the SS founded Leadership Schools in which experienced military veterans and qualified officers provided a training regimen that became the foundation for the Waffen-SS.28 The schools’ objective was to instruct and mold future generations of SS leaders, with cadets trained to carry out any task assigned to them, be it in the police force, guarding a concentration camp, on the battlefield, or in administration.29 The intense SS training also instilled in the young men a sense of racial superiority, ruthlessness, and toughness in carrying out their duty: they swore utter loyalty and obedience to the Führer in the enforcement of the September 15, 1935, Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
Adjacent to the prototypical Dachau Camp was the garrison area, where SS leaders and guards received ideological indoctrination and were put through military drills. The fundamental precepts of the guards’ training was hatred and intolerance of all political opponents of the Reich, as well as rabid racism and antisemitism. In the early years, the SS members of other camps attended Dachau’s “school of violence.”30
Camp detainees were not monitored and brutalized solely by members of the SS. Additionally, some inmates, called Kapos (also spelled Capo, from the Italian for “head” or “chief”), were assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks. This “prisoner self-administration” minimized costs by allowing camps to function with fewer SS personnel.
The camps were encircled by tall barriers, which consisted of high-voltage electric wires and barbed-wire fencing. A broad section leading up to the fence was designated as off-limits for prisoners. Anyone who breached this no-man’s-land was at risk of being shot by the guards positioned in nearby watchtowers. Additionally, some camps were surrounded by a deep concrete moat. The unbearable living conditions in the camps drove many prisoners to despair and suicide. Some prisoners ran toward the fence, where they met their demise through gunfire or electrocution.
Most camps included a prison within the prison: a block of cells for the purpose of carrying out interrogation, punishment, and torture as well as to place prisoners in solitary confinement. Penal torture included being tied to a trestle and receiving around twenty-five blows with a heavy “bullwhip” or detention in a concrete cubicle in which, due to its narrow and confining space, the prisoner was forced to stand for up to seventy-two hours. The most sadistic form of punishment was the so-called pole hanging or medieval strappado, wherein the victim’s hands were tied behind his back and he was suspended by a rope attached to the wrists, typically resulting in dislocated the victim’s shoulders. Weights were sometimes added to the body to intensify the effect and increase the pain, or dogs were set on the unfortunate inmate to tear and pull at his legs.
Targeting the Jews in Germany
In the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I, the National Socialists, as well as other right-wing nationalist parties and organizations, spread the myth that Germany’s internal enemies—Social Democrats, liberals, pacifists, and Jews—had “stabbed the country in the back” just as Germany was on the verge of military victory. A few years later, the Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers called for an end to anti-Jewish propaganda and, through a poster campaign, reminded the nation that twelve thousand Jews died fighting in World War I. The month Hitler came to power (January 1933), there were an estimated 523,000 Jews living in Germany. With a total population of some sixty-seven million, Jews represented about 0.75 percent of the entire population. Foreseeing problems ahead, some thirty-seen thousand Jews emigrated that same year.31
Having slammed the door behind him on his native Austria seven years earlier at the age twenty-four, Adolf Hitler had arrived in Munich with a very different experience of Jewish presence and population percentages. At that time, the Jewish population in Munich was only eleven thousand, a large proportion of which had recently immigrated into Germany from the east due to numerous Russian pogroms against the Jews there.32 Indeed, Munich’s population approached six hundred thousand, some 1.8 percent of whom were Jews. The Austrian capital Hitler had left behind had a Jewish population of 175,000, or 8.6 percent of the city’s population. The Vienna that Hitler had known for several years had elected an antisemitic mayor, Karl Lueger, whose charismatic leadership Hitler admired. The mayor’s use of violence and fear to intimidate political opponents and Jews provided a model for the future Führer.33
Eighty percent of the Jews in Germany possessed German citizenship, the remainder Polish. For the most part, German Jews were well-integrated and widely accepted members of society. They held positions in government, education, and the medical and legal professions; many were farmers, property owners, jewelers, and shopkeepers.
The National Socialist Party’s twenty-five-point program, published in Munich on February 24, 1920, stated in points four and five, “Only someone of German blood, regardless of faith, can be a citizen. Therefore, no Jew can be a citizen. Whoever is not a citizen shall be able to live only as a guest in Germany and must be subject to legislation for foreigners.” However, in the latter years of Hitler’s campaigning and prior to his appointment as German chancellor, he and his fellow NS agitators temporarily subdued their previously vehement accusation and vilification of the Jews. Once in power, the National Socialists’ principal foes had been the party’s political opponents. With that danger taken care of through banning, intimidation, and violence, the regime now turned its eyes once again toward the Judenfrage, the “Jewish question.”
In September 1935, the passing of the Nuremberg “blood laws” put into effect the racial regulations of the NS Party’s twenty-five-point program published fifteen years earlier. German Jews were now barred from Reich citizenship and prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or related blood.” Additional ordinances disenfranchised Jews and deprived them of most political rights.
These laws did not define a Jew as a person with specific religious beliefs but rather as anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. Many Germans who had not practiced Judaism found themselves trapped in the jaws of the National Socialist monster: even those whose Jewish grandparents had converted to Christianity were still classified as Jews. The same laws were soon applied to other minority groups, such as “gypsies” or “African Germans” and their offspring.34 Breaking these laws was punishable by incarceration in a prison or, more likely, a concentration camp.
In the wake of the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933, as well as the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938, vast numbers of German and Austrian Jews abandoned their respective homelands. Of Germany’s half million Jews, about 346,000 had emigrated by 1941, though many of them were later captured in German-occupied lands.35 In 1938, Austria counted a Jewish population of about 192,000, the overwhelming majority living in Vienna, the capital, an important center of Jewish culture, Zionism, and education. Between 1938 and 1940, 117,000 Jews emigrated from Austria.36
From 1936 on, the main drive for filling Germany’s concentration camps was twofold: first, to provide free labor for the Third Reich’s monumental building projects, and second, to work in the armament industry. Apart from politically prominent Jewish persons, Jews were not interned in Germany’s camps in any significant numbers until 1938. Percentage-wise, the Jewish population of Austria (4 percent) was five times that of the Jewish presence in Germany (less than 0.8 percent). Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, thousands of Austrian Jewish prisoners were transported to Germany’s concentration camps to supply forced labor. The pogroms against Jews in both Germany and Austria in November of the same year resulted in transports of thousands more Jewish victims to the German and Austrian camps. Within the camp hierarchy, the Kapos (most often German criminals) formed the upper crust, and at the very bottom of the ladder, Jewish detainees received the worst treatment and the most abuse.
Disease, Medical Facilities, and Medical Experiments
Due to overcrowding, weather exposure, and malnutrition, disease could easily propagate in the camps. Countless were affected by or died of dysentery, tuberculosis, typhus, and phlegmon (cell tissue infection). The camp doctors barely intervened to help sick prisoners, and prisoners who were medical doctors were not allowed to work in the infirmary.37 Essentially, the medical team was only present to help those who were likely to recover and return to work and to expedite the deaths of those whom they deemed would remain unfit for work.
Many camps conducted brutal experiments on human subjects, often resulting in fatalities, even on those who were healthy. The military officials were particularly interested in malaria treatments, biochemical and sulfanilamide experiments, as well as research for aeronautics and marine distress. Harmful experiments were also carried out to simulate the effects of high altitude, hypothermia, and seawater consumption.38 Subjects were intentionally wounded and reinfected multiple times to test the efficacy of various drugs. Some experiments also focused on mass sterilization techniques, while others studied the treatment of hepatitis and other diseases. Additionally, prisoners classified as homosexual were forcefully sterilized or castrated.39 Jews, Roma, and Sinti were often selected as test subjects for these inhumane and barbaric experiments, although there were exceptions to this pattern.
Camp Expansion during the War
Between 1933 and 1945, the camp system in Germany greatly expanded to include hundreds of annex camps or subcamps where prisoners were sent to work in factories—often connected to the armament industry—to repair bombed railroads and bridges, or to work on farms. As Germany invaded neighboring nations, Polish, Czech, Soviet, and other prisoners of war and civilian “undesirables” began to pour into the camps located in Germany, in many cases outnumbering the German inmates. In the course of Germany’s occupation of extensive parts of Europe, ghettos for Jews and prisoner-of-war camps were established abroad. While mass extermination by shooting took place in the Soviet Union starting in the autumn of 1941, plans for the elimination of Europe’s entire Jewish population were only discussed—not yet implemented—by the leadership of the Third Reich.40
Hitler’s Emigration Plans for the Jewish Population
When referring to his plans for the Jews, Hitler frequently employed the German word Vernichtung, which can be understood as “destruction,” “abolishment,” or “extermination.” Depending on the chronology and context, in some cases Hitler’s schemes aimed to eliminate the Jews’ capacity to control their destiny. Sometimes he referred to the abolishment of the presence of Jews in Germany (and eventually in Europe), and at other times he clearly spoke of the actual genocide of Jewish men, women, and children.
Some historians are of the opinion that up until mid-1941, Hitler’s use of the term Vernichtung suggested the destruction of the European Jewish community through forced emigration, as the word was interchangeably employed with Verbannung (banishment) and Entfernung (removal). Starting from the autumn of 1941, however, Hitler’s use of the word Vernichtung or even Ausrottung (extermination) unambiguously implied physical extermination. Even the term Endlösung (Final Solution) carried varying connotations to the NS leaders, depending on the time period. The historian Christian Gerlach insists that, up until Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the term Endlösung did not imply the immediate liquidation of the Jews.
The original goal of the National Socialist regime was to compel the Jewish community to relocate to Palestine, which was perceived as a distant and economically disadvantaged region under British control. Hitler viewed Palestine as an ideal destination due to his belief that the British would prevent the creation of a Jewish state there. To facilitate Jewish emigration, the National Socialist government signed the Haavara Agreement in August 1933 with the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the German Zionist Union. Around sixty thousand German Jews migrated to Palestine between 1933 and 1938, but at a high price as they were required to forfeit half of their assets to Germany. The program ultimately lost momentum, as most German Jews had no interest in relocating to the Middle East or adopting Zionism, and the program was unsuitable for poor or working-class Jews. In the late 1930s, the British terminated the initiative due to increasing Arab resistance.41
After Germany’s annexation of Austria, seizure of the Sudetenland in 1938, and subsequent control over the “Czech Protectorate,” the Third Reich gained vast territories and resources as well as more than 334,000 new Jewish residents, equivalent to around 60 percent of the Jewish population in Germany when Hitler acceded to power five years earlier. In an effort to stimulate their emigration, Jews were subjected to cruel treatment, and approximately forty thousand Austrian Jews managed to flee. Unfortunately, many Jews were unable to leave due to a lack of available destinations. Palestine was no longer a feasible option, and immigration quotas from the German Reich were stringently enforced in countries such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Great Britain, and Australia. In July 1938, the League of Nations convened an emergency conference in Evian, France, bringing together representatives from twenty-five nations and various relief organizations. Despite these efforts, the conference failed, as no country, regardless of size, expressed a willingness to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees.
The French colony of Madagascar continued to be viewed as a feasible option, and by 1939 Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reichsbank, devised a plan to deport the remaining Jewish population from the Reich, approximately six hundred thousand individuals, to the disease-ridden island. According to the malicious strategy, Germany would incur no expenses for the extradition, as Jewish assets would remain in the country and bolster the national economy. However, the scheme failed to materialize for two primary reasons: first, the transportation of such a large number of individuals would have to pass through hostile sea lanes, and second, there was a lack of support from Zionist organizations and the world Jewish community.
During the summer of 1940, after the inclusion of Polish Jews, among others, into the growing Reich, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann updated a report proposing the relocation of interned Jews, totaling about four million people, to a Jewish “reservation” on Madagascar. This strategy became an integral part of the genocidal “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” with Madagascar once again chosen as European Jews’ final destination, transformed into a German protectorate governed by a German police governor. The island’s swampy terrain and high prevalence of malaria would have made life exceedingly difficult for Europeans, and the combination of tropical diseases, police brutality, and scarce resources would most likely have resulted in the deaths of the Jewish settlers, effectively turning the area into a colossal death camp.42
Notes
1. Kevin Bales and Becky Cornell, Slavery Today (Toronto: Groundwork Books, 2008), 27–28.
2. Andrea Pitzer, “Concentration Camps Existed Long before Auschwitz,” Smithsonian, November 2, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/.
3. Donald H. Dyal, Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); G. J. A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).
4. Sean Braswell, “The Concentration Camps of America’s Forgotten War,” OZY.com, August 22, 2017, http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-concentration-camps-of-americas-forgotten-war/80333/.
5. André Wessels, A Century of Postgraduate Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) Studies (Bloemfontein: Sun Press, 2010), 32.
6. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Folio Society, 2003), 643; Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 338.
7. Martin Winstone, The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 3.
8. Ibid., 6.
9. Ibid., 4–5.
10. Ibid., 5.
11. Ibid., 4.
12. Ibid., 8–9.
13. Dahm, “Der Terror- und Vernichtungsapparat,” 304–305.
14. Ibid., 305.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 306.
17. Ibid., 311.
18. Ibid., 347.
19. Alyn Bessmann and Insa Eschebach, eds., The Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp: History and Memory (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), 24.
20. Ibid., 28.
21. The Dachau Concentration Camp, 1933 to 1945 (Dachau: Comité International de Dachau, 2005), 65–66.
22. Ibid., 17.
23. Wiener Holocaust Library, “Daily Routines,” The Holocaust Explained, https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/ss-concentration-camp-system/daily-routines/.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Gilbert, Waffen-SS, 21–22.
29. Weale, Army of Evil, 206–207.
30. Dachau Concentration Camp, 93.
31. Luckert and Bachrach, State of Deception.
32. Museum of Beit Hatfutsot, “The Jewish Community of Munich,” Open Databases Project, n.d.
33. Aristotle Kallis, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
34. Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Nuremberg Race Laws,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws.
35. Dieter Pohl et al., “Rassenpolitik, Judenverfolgung, Völkermord,” in Dahm, Die Tödliche Utopie, 376.
36. Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Austria,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/austria.
37. Dachau Concentration Camp, 120.
38. Ibid., 182–85.
39. Günter Morsch and Astrid Ley, eds., Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936–1945: Events and Developments (Berlin: Metropol, 2006).
40. Pohl et al., “Rassenpolitik, Judenverfolgung, Völkermord,” 434.
41. Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 64–65.
42. Ibid., 44.