Eckart, Johann Dietrich
Referred to by Hitler as his “North Star,” Johann Dietrich Eckart had a tremendous influence both on Hitler and on the Nazi Party during the early years of the movement. One indication of Hitler’s regard for Eckart can be seen in the last two words of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). There, following the last sentence and standing alone, are the words “Dietrich Eckart.”
Eckart was born to a wealthy family on March 23, 1868, in Neumarkt, Bavaria. His mother died when he was 10 years old; his father when he was in his late twenties. After squandering much of the inheritance his father left him, and after studying law and later medicine, Eckart abandoned both to pursue a career as a poet, playwright, and journalist. He moved to Berlin in 1899, bringing with him his long-term morphine addiction, and for years he struggled while his plays were poorly received. In 1912, however, Eckart’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a play that ran for more than 600 performances in Berlin, restored his coffers and allowed him to make important social contacts that would ultimately work to Hitler’s advantage. Eckart’s version of the play has been called a “racial allegory,” in which Gynt symbolized the German Übermensch (superman) caught up in a heroic battle against the Jews.
Eckart’s concept of a “genius superman” portended what would become the role played by Hitler, first in the Nazi Party and later throughout the Third Reich. Eckart is also responsible for the concept of the Jewish “stab-in-the-back” (Dolchstosslegende) that became the accepted explanation for Germany’s loss in World War I and served as one of the rationales for the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.
Perhaps the most concrete of Eckart’s contributions to what we now know as the Nazi party was his co-founding of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in January 1919 with Anton Drexler, Alfred Rosenberg (who earlier worked with Eckart on an antisemitic periodical), Karl Harrer, and Gottfried Feder. It was through this that Eckart met Hitler. Eckart saw in Hitler the “German Messiah” that a group with which he was involved—the Thule Society—believed would lead Germany to its proper place of glory. Eckart and Hitler became close friends, with Eckart writing poems that extolled Hitler as a “super genius” and standing near Hitler when he spoke at rallies. In February 1920 the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which soon became known as the Nazi Party due to the German pronunciation of the first two syllables of Nationalsozialistische.
Other contributions made by Eckart to the Nazi Party include his role as the first publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter (“People’s Observer”), the party paper that provided Hitler a daily platform to espouse the party’s policies and ideology. He also introduced Hitler to prominent people of Eckart’s acquaintance, whom Hitler in his early years would otherwise not have met.
Perhaps Eckart’s most lasting contribution was the discussions the two men had on issues and theories that helped form the ideological foundation on which the Nazi Party was built. Eckart shared his strong sense of nationalism—which was often seen in his poetry—and antisemitism with Hitler. He no doubt also shared his conviction—revealed in a book published soon after his death—that Hitler, alone among all others, saw the Jews’ exodus from Egypt for what it really was: an escape after having failed to overthrow the pharaoh and his ruling clique. Thus, it was not only Nazi ideology that Eckart helped shape but also Hitler’s self-image as the German savior.
Eckart participated with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, the failed attempt to overthrow the government of the Weimar Republic that resulted in the arrest of Hitler and, among others, Eckart. Soon thereafter, Eckart was released from prison due to failing health. He died on December 26, 1923. His memory was perpetuated, however, as, in addition to Hitler’s honor to him at the end of Mein Kampf, his name was incorporated into the city name of his birthplace, and a monument was erected in his honor.
MICHAEL DICKERMAN
See also: Mein Kampf; National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Rosenberg, Alfred
Further Reading
Engelman, Ralph Max. Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism. PhD dissertation, Ann Arbor (MI): UMI Press, 1971.
Evens, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2003.
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Edelman, Marek
Marek Edelman was a leader of the Jewish fighters during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. It is unclear in which year he was born, though September 19, 1919, is the date quoted most often. Born in Homel (now Gomel, Belarus), he was an only son. Both his parents were socialists: his father, Natan, was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and his mother, Cecylia, was an activist in the Jewish Labor Bund. Orphaned by the time he had turned 14, he had already been thoroughly indoctrinated into socialist ways; as he grew to maturity, he became an active member of the Bund.
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Edelman, barely 20, found himself herded into what became the Warsaw Ghetto. On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from the ghetto at a rate of 6,000 a day. In response, Edelman and other young Jews—among them Mordecai Anielewicz—formed a resistance group determined to confront the Nazis. Comprised largely of youth groups that anticipated the Nazi intention to liquidate the ghetto entirely, they created what became known as the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB).
The ŻOB was a formation that united three usually incompatible groups: Zionists, communists, and Bundists, and given the ideological gulf separating them it proved difficult for ŻOB to mobilize the inhabitants of the ghetto for the struggle to come. Still, this did not hold Edelman back from trying to develop a viable and effective force. As an employee of the ghetto hospital, he was able each day to visit the Umschlagplatz—the square in Warsaw where the Nazis concentrated Jews for deportation to Treblinka—carrying passes authorizing him to take people who were too ill to travel off the trains. He took advantage of this to save fit younger Jews who could be recruited to fight.
By September 1942, after wholesale deportations had taken place, only 60,000 Jews remained. In advance of the anticipated confrontation, the ŻOB began acquiring whatever weapons it could obtain for a possible revolt—not, as Edelman said later, in order to defeat or destroy the Nazis, but to at least give those who were already doomed the opportunity to choose how they were to die.
On January 18, 1943, ŻOB fighters opened fire, forcing the Nazis to withdraw and suspend the remaining deportations. Then, when it seemed certain that the final liquidation of the ghetto was about to take place on the eve of Passover (April 19, 1943), the ŻOB struck. Firing from every vantage point, they forced the Germans onto the defensive and obliged them to retreat in what became the most extensive act of armed urban resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The ŻOB could only muster 220 men and women as their fighting strength. This was ranged against Nazi units numbering a daily average of more than 2,000 troops, backed by tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The ghetto fighters were largely untrained, woefully underequipped, and lacking in food and clean water. Edelman led the medical teams assisting the wounded in a constant struggle to alleviate pain caused through gunfire, falling masonry, and, above all, burns after the Nazis decided to reduce the ghetto by fire.
When Anielewicz lost his life during the fighting at Miła 18 on May 8, Edelman—who had been one of three subcommanders—took over as leader of the ŻOB. Overall, the resistance struggle with the Germans lasted three weeks. While the fighters took some German lives and wounded many others, the Jewish losses were significantly greater—and this was to say nothing of the remaining civilian population, which was deported in the tens of thousands. As the fighting intensified, the Nazi military, led by General Jürgen Stroop, decided to clean out the ghetto block by block. Instead of fighting for the buildings, Stroop ordered that they be burned, leaving the remaining fighters with nowhere to turn for cover.
The scorched-earth tactics worked. The remnants of the ŻOB—only about 50, by most estimates—fled through Warsaw’s sewers with the help of couriers from the Polish underground outside the ghetto. Edelman then joined the left-wing People’s Army (Armia Ludowa), fighting alongside the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in the equally ill-fated Warsaw Uprising that began in August 1944. After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising, Edelman and other ŻOB fighters hid in the ruins of the city before being rescued and evacuated.
After the war Edelman elected to remain in Poland, where he studied at Łódź Medical School. Upon graduation, he specialized in cardiology and became one of Poland’s leading heart specialists. He maintained an active interest in issues relating to social justice and workers’ rights, and in 1976 became an activist with the Workers’ Defense Committee. He was an early member of the Solidarity free labor union movement, and was among those interned when General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981. Following the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Edelman became a member of various centrist and liberal parties.
In recognition of his activities as a fighter against Nazism, Edelman was awarded Poland’s highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, on April 17, 1998. Before his death in 2009 at age 90, Marek Edelman was recognized by all as the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a hero to the memory of those who fought back during the Holocaust.
PAUL R. BARTROP
See also: Anielewicz, Mordecai; Resistance Movements; Stroop, Jürgen; Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Further Reading
Ainsztein, Reuben. Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe: With a Historical Survey of the Jew as Fighter and Soldier in the Diaspora. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Edelman, Marek. The Ghetto Fights. London: Bookmarks, 2013.
Krall, Hanna. Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York: Henry Holt, 1986.
Zuckerman, Yitzhak. A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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Edmonds, Roddie
Roddie Edmonds was an American infantry soldier in World War II who was recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations for his efforts in rescuing Jewish servicemen at the Stalag IXA POW Camp in Germany. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on August 20, 1919, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds of the United States 422nd Infantry Regiment participated in the landing of U.S. forces in Europe and was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge on December 17, 1944. He was interned at Stalag IXA, a POW camp near Ziegenhain, in Germany’s Rhineland. As the senior noncommissioned officer, the 25-year-old Edmonds was responsible for the camp’s 1,275 American prisoners of war.
In an exchange in January 1945, the camp commandant, a Major Siegmann, ordered Edmonds to tell only the Jews among the American soldiers to attend the next morning’s Appell, or roll call. They would then be separated from the other prisoners, in line with a practice that had been adopted by the German army on the Eastern Front, where many Jewish POWs were sent to extermination camps or murdered. Siegmann gave his order in English, so that there could be no doubt what was required of Edmonds.
Instead, the next morning Edmonds ordered all 1,275 American prisoners, Jews and non-Jews alike, to assemble outside their barracks. When Siegmann saw all the inmates reporting, he exclaimed, “They cannot all be Jews!” Edmonds replied, “We are all Jews,” and, citing the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, which ruled that they were only obliged to provide their name, rank, and serial number, he refused to identify any prisoners by religion.
At this, Siegmann became enraged, and in a fury he pulled out his pistol and placed it against Edmonds’s head, demanding that he identify the Jewish soldiers under his command. Defying the threat of imminent death, Edmonds told Siegmann, “If you shoot, you’ll have to shoot us all,” and that, should any of Edmonds’s men be harmed, the commandant would be prosecuted for war crimes once the war ended. Major Siegmann, realizing he was at an impasse, backed down; turning around, he left the scene.
Roddie Edmonds’s act of defiance on that January day in 1945 spared the lives of as many as 200 American Jewish soldiers under his command. He then survived the next 100 days of captivity and returned home after the war. He never told his family of his actions. Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds died on August 8, 1985, in his home town of Knoxville, Tennessee.
On February 10, 2015, he was posthumously acknowledged by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations for his action in January 1945. It was recognized that his choices and behavior set an example for his fellow American soldiers, for, at the risk of his immediate death, he defied the Germans with the unexpected consequences that the Jewish prisoners were saved. He became the first American soldier and one of only five Americans to be recognized by Yad Vashem. He joined Varian Fry, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, and Lois Gunden in the honor. Then, on January 27, 2016, a ceremony was held at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, and Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi Israel Meir Lau presented the medal of the Righteous and a certificate of honor to Roddie Edmonds’s son Chris. The ceremony was attended by the president of the United States, Barack Obama.
PAUL R. BARTROP
See also: Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations
Further Reading
Paldiel, Mordecai. The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. New York: Harper, 2007.
Yad Vashem. http://yad-vashem.blogspot.com/2015/12/my-father-kept-cape-in-his-closet.html.
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Eichmann, Adolf
Adolf Eichmann is one of history’s most notorious figures. As Nazi Germany’s head of the Gestapo’s Department IV B4, he planned and carried out the Nazis’ so-called Final Solution—the murder of 6 million Jews in what would become known as the Holocaust.
Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, in Solingen, Germany, near Cologne. His family moved to Austria, and he grew up in Linz, the city of Adolf Hitler’s youth. Eichmann failed in his attempt to become an engineer, so he went to work for a mining company his father owned and later took a sales position with an American company, Vacuum Oil. In 1932 Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi Party but a year later moved to Germany. In 1934 he joined the SS and was assigned to work at Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Later that year he went to work for Reinhard Heydrich in the Security Service (SD) of the SS.
Eichmann first worked on files concerning members of the Freemasons, also persecuted by the Nazis, but quickly became an expert on Jewish matters. He headed the SD’s Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs and in 1937 traveled to Palestine to explore the possibility of transporting Germany’s Jews to the Middle East. Following the Austrian Anschluss (union with Germany), Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler appointed Eichmann head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. It was there that Eichmann established the process of extortion of Jews who were desperate to escape the Third Reich.
In 1939 he was recalled to Berlin and appointed head of the newly created Gestapo Section IV B4, with responsibility for Jewish policy throughout what would eventually be 16 Nazi-controlled European countries. With the early German successes in Western Europe in the summer of 1940, he first proposed a mass emigration of Jews to the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, but the Madagascar plan was considered impractical. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, however, Eichmann sent special killing squads of SS (known as Einsatzgruppen) to begin murdering the millions of East European Jews who fell under Nazi control.
Even this was not efficient enough, however, and in January 1942 Eichmann helped organize the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the mass extermination of all 11 million Jews calculated to be living at Europe at that time. The result was a string of death camps, including Auschwitz, Treblinka, and others, that would process, rob, gas, and cremate tens of thousands of human beings every day. Eichmann personally oversaw the massive logistical operation of rounding up, transporting, murdering, and disposing of millions of Jews. He was a very efficient bureaucrat who complained about delays caused by the lack of zeal in some of the occupied zones. Eichmann actually continued the terrible work unabated during the final months of the war, when transport and other military resources were desperately needed for the defense of the Third Reich.
At the end of the war in 1945 Eichmann was arrested and interned by occupying U.S. forces, but he soon escaped. He hid for a time in Germany, but in 1950 escaped to Argentina, which had a sizable population of German expatriates where Eichmann could feel comfortable. In 1952 he even sent money home to allow his family to emigrate. By the mid-1950s he was settled in Buenos Aires and working as a foreman in the Argentine Mercedes-Benz factory.
The revelations of the Nuremberg Trials following the war made Eichmann the most infamous Nazi still at large, and war-criminal hunters—particularly, though not exclusively, from Israel—were determined to bring him to justice. In 1959 the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, learned that Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement. Following months of observation and planning, in May 1960 Mossad agents kidnapped him and smuggled him back to Israel. Despite the protests (from prominent American newspapers as well as the Argentine government) of the breach of Argentine sovereignty, Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem as a war criminal.
Eichmann was charged on 15 counts—eight for crimes against the Jewish people, four for crimes against other groups, and one each for membership in the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo, all of which had been declared illegal organizations at Nuremberg. During his four-month televised trial in the summer of 1961, more than 100 witnesses testified against him. Eichmann sat inside a bulletproof glass booth in the courtroom and did not deny the facts. Like the other Nazis who preceded him at Nuremberg, he simply claimed he was following orders. He testified: “It was my misfortune to become entangled in these atrocities. However, these misdeeds did not happen according to my wishes. It was not my wish to slay people. The guilt for the mass murder is solely that of the political leaders.” The court found him guilty on all 15 counts and sentenced him to death on December 15, 1961. Eichmann was hanged at Israel’s Ramleh Prison on May 31, 1962.
CURTIS COLE
See also: Al-Husseini, Haj Amin; Banality of Evil; Central Office for Jewish Emigration; Conspiracy; Dannecker, Theodor; Desk Killers; Eichmann in Jerusalem; Eichmann Trial; Final Solution; Gestapo; Kasztner, Resző; Lubetkin, Zivia; Müller, Heinrich; Nisko Plan; Nuremberg Trials; Rademacher, Franz; Reichssicherheitshauptamt; Szálasi, Ferenc; Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup; Wannsee Conference; Wiesenthal, Simon
Further Reading
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Cesarani, David. Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004.
Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
Stangneth, Bettina. Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Yablonka, Hannah. The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.
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Eichmann in Jerusalem
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a book written by the celebrated political philosopher Hannah Arendt and first published in book form in 1963. The work covers the trial for war crimes of the infamous Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, which took place in Israel in 1961. Arendt, a Jew who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941, was commissioned by The New Yorker magazine to cover the sensational trial and write a detailed article on it; the book emerged from that article. At the time, Arendt’s conclusions about Eichmann and the Holocaust upended the more traditional interpretations of Holocaust perpetrators, which tended to portray them unerringly as evil, depraved, and psychopathic individuals.
Arendt, having viewed all stages of the trial, having listened to hours of Eichmann’s testimony, and having read all pretrial material, including the reports of Eichmann’s mental state by six different psychologists, concludes that Eichmann was neither inherently evil nor psychopathic. In fact, she asserts, he presented himself as a rather ordinary individual who demonstrated no inherent hatred toward Jews or guilt for the deplorable acts that took place on his watch and as a result of his orders. Eichmann had been primarily responsible for carrying out the Holocaust because he oversaw the rounding up and deportation of Jews to concentration camps beginning in the early 1940s.
Eichmann claimed at trial that he was simply doing his job and following orders; Arendt, however, counters that as a human being, Eichmann had a choice—he could have refused to follow orders or left Germany if he believed that doing so would be a threat to his life. Moral decisions, she insists, are always available, even in a totalitarian atmosphere like Nazi Germany. She further argues that Eichmann’s apparent lack of antisemitism and his nonchalance toward Nazi ideology made the evil he unleashed seem “banal” because there appeared to be no psychological or moral explanations for it. And the fact that he felt no responsibility or guilt after the fact compounded that banality.
Arendt also drew her own careful psychological study of Eichmann in her attempt to understand his motivations (or lack thereof). She asserts that he was unable to think for himself and was unable to connect and communicate with others outside a military setting. This rendered him more immune to the moral consequences of Nazi policies and made it easier for him to carry out the Final Solution. Eichmann was also a chronic “joiner,” meaning that he could only define himself within the milieu of the many organizations to which he belonged, including the Nazi Party. She also ably demonstrates that Eichmann was not a bright man intellectually, which may have predisposed him to participate in activities that most people would have found repugnant. In the end, however, Arendt concludes that even though Eichmann appeared “normal” on the exterior, his complete willingness to follow morally repugnant orders indicated his exceptional inclination toward evil, not because it was ingrained in him, but because he chose not to recognize evil acts even as he carried them out. Eichmann was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 1962.
PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.
See also: Arendt, Hannah; Banality of Evil; Eichmann, Adolf; Eichmann Trial
Further Reading
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Roskies, David G., and Naomi Diamant. Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide. Waltham (MA): Brandeis University Press, 2013.
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Eichmann Trial
The trial for war crimes of Nazi German official Adolf Eichmann, held in Israel from April 11 to December 11, 1961. Before and during World War II, Eichmann had been chiefly responsible for the mass deportation of Jews from Germany as well as other parts of Europe to concentration and extermination camps. He carefully planned each step in the process and was also responsible for the deportation of thousands of Roma, many of whom were also exterminated. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Eichmann eluded capture, eventually settling in Austria under a pseudonym. Later, he fled Europe entirely, taking up residence in Argentina, where he took the name Ricardo Klement. On May 11, 1961, Israeli Security Service agents captured Eichmann and took him to Israel, where he was to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people. He arrived in Israel on May 21.
After World War II, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer instrumental in organizing the Nazi “final solution” of the Jewish people, fled from Austria and made his way to Argentina. In May 1960 Israeli Security Service agents seized Eichmann and took him to Jerusalem for trial in an Israeli court, where he testified from a bulletproof glass booth. The trial brought Nazi atrocities to the forefront of world news for an entirely new generation. (Library of Congress)
Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner, drew up a 15-charge indictment against Eichmann, which not only accused him of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people but also membership in criminal organizations, including the Gestapo. The trial, which generated international attention, began in the district court in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. A three-judge panel headed by Moshe Landau, an Israeli Supreme Court justice, presided. Hausner was the principal prosecutor. Eichmann’s defense attorney was Robert Servatius, who had served as a defense counsel during the 1945–1946 war crimes trials held at Nuremberg, Germany.
The trial featured more than 100 witnesses for the prosecution, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. They included the writer Yehiel Dinur, who became so emotional during his testimony that he fainted, and Zivia Lubetkin, a famed Jewish ghetto resister. The prosecution also admitted into evidence some 1,500 documents that substantiated the charges against Eichmann as well as much of the testimony of the witnesses. Practically all of the defense witnesses were former high-ranking Nazi officials who had been granted immunity from prosecution. The trial ended on August 14, at which time the judges secluded themselves to deliberate. On December 11, 1961, the judges found Eichmann guilty on all counts.
The three-judge panel sentenced Eichmann to death on December 15, 1961. Eichmann’s defense team immediately filed appeal petitions. Among other things, they asserted that Israel did not have a right to try Eichmann, who was not an Israeli citizen; that the judges were biased; that the charges were based on ex post facto laws; that Eichmann was merely “following orders”; and that Eichmann had been illegally abducted from Argentina. All of the bases for the appeals were rejected. Eichmann also appealed for clemency with Israel’s president. That motion was also denied. On June 1, 1962, Eichmann was executed by hanging at an Israeli prison in Ramla, Israel.
The Eichmann trial not only brought to the international forefront the horrors of the Holocaust but also encouraged greater openness among Israelis to discuss the Holocaust and what it meant for Jews and humanity as a whole. Indeed, many Holocaust survivors were more willing to open up about their experiences.
PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.
See also: Arendt, Hannah; Banality of Evil; Dinur, Yehiel; Eichmann, Adolf; Eichmann in Jerusalem; Nuremberg Defense
Further Reading
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Brager, Bruce L. The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: The Holocaust on Trial. San Diego (CA): Lucent Books, 1999.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books, 2011.
Yablonka, Hannah. The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.
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Eicke, Theodor
German Waffen-SS general. Born in Hampont in Alsace (then in Germany) on October 17, 1892, Theodor Eicke fought in World War I, rising to sub-paymaster. After the war, he joined the border police and served in the Freikorps before entering the police force in Thuringia in 1920. Active in right-wing politics, Eicke joined the National Socialist Party in December 1928. He initially achieved prominence in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich as a member of the SS, serving as commandant of the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and 1934 and as inspector of concentration camps and leader of SS guard formations between 1934 and 1939. Eicke played a leading role in the Blood Purge of the party (known colloquially as the Night of the Long Knives), when he and a subordinate shot to death storm troop (SA) leader Ernst Röhm on July 1, 1934.
Eicke set ruthless standards in the concentration camps, warning guards that they would be punished for showing any compassion for the inmates. He centralized SS control over all concentration camps in the Reich, established uniform regulations for the treatment of inmates, and organized the elite guard formations known as the Totenkopfverbande (Death’s Head units). He also oversaw their expansion into five battalions, which became the Obeybayern, Brandenburg, and Thuringian regiments. With the beginning of World War II, he formed the SS Death’s Head unit for service in Poland.
In November 1939 Eicke took command of the first SS-Totenkopf division, a motorized unit and one of three original Waffen-SS divisions. He personally led it in combat in both France and the Soviet Union. Brutal, fanatical, and violently antisemitic, Eicke molded the Death’s Head Division in his own image, a development that helps explain both its military effectiveness and its perpetration of numerous atrocities. His unit committed the first SS atrocity in France—the May 27, 1940, murder of 100 British prisoners of war at Le Paradis. In Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, his division served with Army Group North.
Eicke died when an aircraft in which he was flying was shot down behind Soviet lines in Michailovka, Ukraine, on February 26, 1943.
BRUCE J. DEHART
See also: Concentration Camps; Dachau; Glücks, Richard; SS-Totenkopfverbände; Waffen-SS; Wilde-KZ
Further Reading
Bartrop, Paul R. Surviving the Camps: Unity in Adversity during the Holocaust. Lanham (MD): University Press of America, 2000.
Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
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Einsatzgruppen
The Einsatzgruppen were special extermination squads that followed the advance of the German Army into areas to be occupied, most notably Poland, beginning in September 1939, and the Soviet Union, beginning in June 1941. Most of these mobile killing squads were composed of Nazi SS, Gestapo, and special police units.
In Poland, between 1939 and 1941, the squads were primarily responsible for rounding up Jews, communists, and Polish dissidents and placing them into ghettos (segregated areas) or concentration camps. However, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced on June 22, 1941, the Einsatzgruppen’s activities increased dramatically, and their primary mission became one of mass extermination, chiefly of Soviet Jews, communists, political commissars, and Roma. Although many think of the Holocaust only in terms of the systematized extermination of Jews and others at Nazi death camps, the fact is that many were killed in or near their home towns or villages by the Einsatzgruppen. It is estimated that mobile killing squads murdered as many as 1.3 million people between 1939 and 1945.
Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary mobile death squads responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II. They played an integral role in the implementation of the killing phase of the Holocaust in Eastern European territories conquered by Nazi Germany. The Einsatzgruppen also murdered Soviet political commissars and Roma, and engaged in anti-partisan warfare. One of the worst of the many massacres they perpetrated was at Babi Yar in 1941, pictured here. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The killing squads followed close on the heels of advancing German Army troops, moving into towns and villages rapidly and heavily armed to take the civilian population by surprise. Once the victims were identified and rounded up, they were usually stripped of all their possessions, including their clothing, marched into a field, cemetery, or other open area, shot to death, and buried in shallow mass graves. Many of the victims included women and children. In places like Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, the killing squads were aided by non-Jews and others not targeted by the Nazis. Perhaps the worst single atrocity occurred at Babi Yar (Ukraine) during September 29–30, 1941, when some 34,000 Jews were shot to death. By December 1, 1941, one killing squad reported having killed 137,346 Jews in Lithuania alone.
PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.
See also: Babi Yar Massacre; Belarus; Communists in the Holocaust; Final Solution; German Army, Role in the Holocaust; Heydrich, Reinhard; Hitler’s Willing Executioners; Holocaust by Bullets; Kappler, Herbert; Kommissarbefehl; Lange, Herbert; Latvia; Lithuania; Lubny Massacre; Müller, Heinrich; Nazi Criminal Orders, 1941; Nisko Plan; Ohlendorf, Otto; Operation Barbarossa; Ponary Forest; Reichssicherheitshauptamt; Schmid, Anton; Schöngarth, Karl Eberhard; Sicherheitsdienst; Soviet Union; Ukraine; Vilna Ghetto; Waffen-SS
Further Reading
Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Desbois, Patrick. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997.
Rhodes, Richard. Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 2002.
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Enabling Act, 1933
On March 24, 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, a constitutional amendment that gave the German Cabinet—in effect, Chancellor Adolf Hitler—plenary powers to enact laws. It followed one month after the Reichstag Fire Decree, which abolished most civil liberties and transferred state powers to the Reich government. The combined effect of the two laws was to transform Hitler’s government into a de facto legal dictatorship.
The final two years of the Weimar Republic were unstable: political, social, and economic crises were frequent. President Paul von Hindenburg issued many emergency decrees and dissolved the Reichstag twice in 1932, during which period the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) transformed from a radical splinter group to a party of government. In the two elections to the Reichstag in 1932 the NSDAP won the largest share of the vote. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, placing him at the head of a coalition cabinet comprising conservatives, nationalists, members of the NSDAP, and representatives of the German National People’s Party (DNVP).
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag Fire was allegedly started by 24-year-old Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe. Hindenburg accepted Hitler’s request following the fire for a decree suspending all political and civil liberties as a “temporary” measure for the “protection of the people and state.” The subsequent Reichstag Fire Decree, enacted the following day, severely curtailed fundamental rights and subjected the police largely to the control of the national government. This created all manner of opportunities for the persecution and elimination of political opponents, which the police and the so-called auxiliary police forces formed by the SA and SS exploited to the full. Blaming the communists, Hitler had all political opponents rounded up and put into “protective custody” (Schutzhaft). This temporary measure was never revoked.
In March 1933 the last parliamentary elections took place. The SA, using violence and intimidation, silenced all other parties. The Nazis polled 44% of the vote, not enough for a majority but enough to quash any future political resistance.
Hitler then proposed the “Act for the Removal of the Distress of the People and the Reich,” more commonly known as the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz), ostensibly to allow him greater time to deal with political unrest. This act, consisting of only five articles, vested the government of the Reich with almost unlimited powers to enact laws, even in cases where the legislation encroached on core provisions of the constitution.
Just before the vote, Hitler made a speech to the Reichstag in which he pledged to use restraint and to use those powers only insofar as they were essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures. He also promised an end to unemployment and pledged to promote peace with France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. But in order to do all this, Hitler said, he first needed the Enabling Act.
Since the act entailed an amendment to the Weimar Constitution, its adoption required both a two-thirds majority and the presence in the Reichstag of at least two-thirds of all its members. The prospects of achieving the requisite number of votes were good, since the mandates of the 81 deputies from the Communist Party of Germany had been rescinded under the Reichstag Fire Decree. Moreover, many Reichstag members had already fled, been imprisoned, or murdered.
The Reichstag convened in the Kroll Opera House, Berlin. After eliminating the communists, Hitler was still 31 votes short. The support of the German Center Party was particularly important to secure the remaining votes. Hitler and his interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, gave the Center Party far-reaching guarantees on the continuing existence of the supreme organs of the constitution and the states, and promised to respect the rights of the churches, to safeguard fundamental rights, and to establish a parliamentary committee to scrutinize legislative bills. With these promises (most of which were never honored), the government gained the parliamentary support it required.
Only the deputies from the Social Democratic Party voted against the bill as a bloc, in spite of massive intimidation by the SA and SS, whose troops had moved in to surround the Kroll Opera House. The chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, Otto Wels, combined the explanation of his group’s rejection of the Enabling Act with a passionate profession of faith in parliamentary democracy. In spite of the clear depiction of the intended consequences of the act, a mere 94 deputies voted against the bill compared with 444 who voted in favor. The Enabling Act passed on March 24, 1933, and was signed by Hindenburg later that day
The adoption of the act enabled Hitler’s government to enact laws without the consent of the Reichstag, which continued to exist, and without the countersignature of the president. These extensive powers also applied, almost without restriction, to constitutional amendments and to treaties with other states.
The act thus marked the final eclipse of the democratic state based on the rule of law and the abolition of parliamentary democracy. There would be neither further elections nor a constitution to keep Hitler in check. The Reichstag had, in effect, voted away its power.
All subsequent legislation of the Nazi state was based on the Enabling Act. It served to centralize the public administration, the judiciary, the security apparatus, and the armed forces in accordance with the “Führer principle,” to standardize political life in accordance with National Socialist principles (Gleichschaltung) by banning political parties and mass organizations, and to abolish freedom of the press. The concentration of power in the hands of the government, and hence in the person of Adolf Hitler, sealed the transition to dictatorship.
Within three months after the passage of the Enabling Act, all parties except the Nazi Party were banned or pressured into dissolving themselves, followed on July 14, 1933, by a law that made the Nazi Party the only legally permitted party in the country.
Within a matter of weeks it had become illegal to criticize the government. A new secret police force was established, the Gestapo, which immediately began arresting “unreliable” persons. Dachau, the first concentration camp, which opened within weeks of the Nazis coming to power, catered for their custody. Trade unions were banned, freedom of the press curtailed, and all other political parties were declared illegal, leaving only the Nazi Party. Germany had become a one-party state with Hitler its dictator.
The Enabling Act was initially adopted for a four-year period but was extended in 1937, 1939, and 1943. It remained the basis of all legislation throughout the Nazi dictatorship and was finally abolished after the capitulation by Law No 1 of the Allied Control Council on September 20, 1945.
EVE E. GRIMM
See also: Frick, Wilhelm; Führerprinzip; Gleichschaltung; Sondergericht; Sturmabteilung; Volksgerichtshof; Weimar Republic
Further Reading
Broszat, Martin. The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich. London: Longmans, 1981.
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Press. 2003.
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Estonia
Estonia is a small Baltic country with a 1939 population of 1.13 million people, of whom about 4,500 were Jewish. Estonia was an independent state from 1920, although it would be continually overshadowed by its much larger neighbor, the Soviet Union, to its immediate east. In August 1939 the Germans and Soviets sealed Estonia’s fate by agreeing in secret that Estonia would fall under the aegis of the Soviet Union in the forthcoming war. When Germany invaded Poland the next month, sparking World War II, the Soviets began to pressure the Estonians into acquiescing to their demands, including a mutual assistance agreement, which Estonian officials grudgingly signed. By June 17, 1940, the Soviets had occupied Estonia, and in August they annexed it completely. The Soviets wasted no time in imposing a repressive occupation regime, arresting thousands and deporting many to rural gulags within the Soviet Union. Estonian Jews did not escape Soviet clutches.
At the time, nearly half of Estonia’s small Jewish population lived in the capital city of Tallinn. This made it easier for Soviet occupation authorities to single them out. Many Jewish organizations and synagogues were disbanded, which compelled at least half the Jewish population to flee the country. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Estonia was quickly overrun, and a brutal occupation was established. The Nazi authorities compelled Jews to wear identification badges in public, restricted their movements, and confiscated their money and property. By late 1941 virtually all of the remaining Jewish population in Estonia had either been murdered or deported to death camps.
The Germans began establishing forced labor camps in Estonia during 1942; most of these were set aside for thousands of Jews sent from other areas of Europe. There they worked on German military projects, or mined shale oil. The largest of these camps was Vaivara, where untold thousands of Jews died; many more were killed at the Kalevi Liiva camp system. By late 1944, when Soviet forces had begun to push the Germans out of Estonia, the Germans abandoned these camps and transported some of the remaining prisoners to other camps further west. Several thousand Jews died on a ghastly forced march along the Baltic Sea coast. In the meantime, Estonia had become a bloody battleground between Soviet and German forces, which destroyed huge swaths of the small nation.
In the fall of 1944 the Soviets re-annexed Estonia, and the little country would remain under the Soviet yoke until the end of the Cold War. Estonia lost approximately 20% of its prewar population. Sadly, almost no Jews living in Estonia prior to 1941 remained alive in 1945. Some Jews who had managed to flee the country before the German occupation returned after the conflict, but their number was small. Estonia achieved independence for a second time in August 1991.
PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.
See also: Soviet Union; Vaivara
Further Reading
Butta, Prit. Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II. Oxford: Osprey, 2013.
Raun, Toivo. Estonia and the Estonians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Weiss-Wendt, Anton. Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press. 2009.
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Ethnic Cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a broad concept that encompasses actions ranging from nonviolent pressure on a specific ethnic group or groups to the deliberate extermination of a people to effect their removal from a particular place; it is distinguished from genocide in that the ultimate goal is not the destruction of its victims but rather their complete removal from a specific area. Ethnic cleansing can be accomplished through genocide, but not all cleansings are genocides.
Like the term “genocide,” the term “ethnic cleansing” is ambiguous and has a number of different meanings ascribed to it; in fact, the term is often misused as a synonym for genocide. Although the term was popularized in the 1990s during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, antecedents exist in the Nazi use of the phrase “racial cleansing.” Ethnic cleansing lacks a standard legal definition as a war crime. As an activity, elements of it are encompassed within the definition of genocide in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
There is debate over whether or not ethnic cleansing is a strictly modern phenomenon. A number of premodern examples have been suggested: the events of the exodus in the Old Testament, Roman and Greek enslavement of enemy peoples, the devastation of Native Americans, the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain, and the English conquest of Ireland. Because the formulation of the term is ethnic cleansing, however, the phenomenon is usually regarded as a result of the spread of the concept of the nation-state in the 19th century. The ethnic character of a state defined it and was synonymous with “nation.” Ethnic minorities were thus seen as potentially disloyal and in need of assimilation. Some states turned to expulsion, such as the expulsion of Muslims from the newly independent Balkan states in 1831 and 1877–1878. European colonial powers also engaged in cleansing in their colonial possessions.
Technological changes allowed for greater organization and execution of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century, which facilitated greater lethality. Events in Anatolia overshadowed incidents of cleansing during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. The Ottoman Empire, and its successor, the Republic of Turkey, feared that resident Armenians and Greeks were potentially disloyal, and that Greece and Russia would use their presence to advance claims on Turkish territory. The Turks thus expelled approximately 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, half of whom died during the expulsion, and 1.5 million Greeks during and after the Greco-Turkish War of 1921–1922. Quixotically, the response of the League of Nations was less to regard ethnic cleansing itself as a crime than to attempt to regulate it as a necessary evil. While creating a system for minority protection, the League of Nations oversaw compulsory population transfers in the 1920s among countries such as Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria.
Nazi German policies of redrawing both the political and ethnic maps of Europe utilized ethnic cleansing in the 1930s and 1940s. The Nazis, for example, pressured the Jews to leave Germany after 1933; after 1939, there was discussion of deporting all Jews from Europe. Beginning in 1941, Jews were slated for extermination, and some 6 million would be killed in the Holocaust. The Nazis targeted other ethnic groups, slating Roma for extermination as well as Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians for removal from conquered territories; however, the “cleansing” of Jews was unique in its importance to Nazi ideology. Similarly, the German-allied Independent State of Croatia sought to cleanse itself of Serbs, helping to drive the 1941–1945 civil war in Yugoslavia. Other German client states engaged in cleansing on a more limited scale.
The Soviet Union engaged in ethnic cleansing before and during World War II, shifting nearly a dozen groups of non-Russian nationalities perceived to be potentially disloyal away from its borders. Imperial Russia had deported Jews and Germans away from the front during World War I, but Soviet operations were more brutal. The forced resettlement of the Chechens-Ingush in 1944 killed 100,000 out of the 494,000 involved, and half the 189,000 Crimean Tatars resettled in 1944 also died.
The postwar expulsion of the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans living outside of Germany, proved to be the largest cleansing in history. Over 10 million were forced to relocate from Eastern Europe in 1944–1947, with perhaps a million killed in the process. The Soviets’ redrawing of borders led to forced resettlements of Poles from Ukraine and Ukrainians from Poland during 1946–1947. Allied leaders regarded such cleansing as necessary to remove future German territorial claims.
Cleansing also accompanied the end of the European colonial empires. Colonial borders had not been drawn along ethnic divisions, and conflict often emerged along ethnic lines in the new states. The worst case was the transfer of Muslim and Hindu populations between India and Pakistan in 1946–1947, with millions forced to relocate. Numerous lesser incidents occurred in both postcolonial civil wars and international conflicts. Claims of ethnic cleansing accompanied the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli Wars, as well as the Turkish intervention in Cyprus in 1974. Iraq relocated or destroyed Kurdish populations in sensitive border areas during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War.
Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1996 attracted widespread international attention. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia resulted in the deaths of some 250,000 people and a million forced relocations. All sides used cleansing as a deliberate weapon to reinforce claims to specific territories by driving out rival ethnicities. Although attention focused on the Serbian use of cleansing, hundreds of thousands of Serbs also became victims. These actions were repeated in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, during which Serbian security forces cleansed Albanians during the bombing campaign; Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerillas cleansed Serbs afterward.
Events in Rwanda in April 1994, which followed similar events in Burundi in 1972, are more complicated because the Hutu and Tutsi are not “ethnicities” in the strict European sense of the term. In its effects, however, the intentions were the same: the Hutus intended to drive Tutsis out of the country. At least 500,000 Tutsis died in the massacres, and the resulting war led to hundreds of thousands of Hutus fleeing to the Congo.
Ethnic cleansing in both Yugoslavia and Rwanda was frequently portrayed as the result of “ancient hatreds.” In each historical case, while ethnic tension did exist, the cleansing operations themselves were the result of deliberate manipulation and organization by political leaders. Ethnic cleansing possesses a political utility that has made it attractive in the past. It remains to be seen if international regulation will change this.
JAMES FRUSETTA
See also: Genocide; Madagascar Plan; Oberlaender, Theodor; Serbia; Ustashe
Further Reading
Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. Ethnic Cleansing. Sydney: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Lieberman, Benjamin. Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
Naimark, Norman M. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2002.
Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.
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Eugenics
Eugenics is a term coined in the last years of the 19th century, originally referring to the improvement of human beings through selective breeding and the elimination of genetic characteristics deemed to be undesirable. These included—but were not limited to—hereditary diseases, intellectual disabilities, physical handicaps, and the like. At the time, the theories behind eugenics were supported by many scientists and social commentators, although the science that underwrote those theories was suspect and later found to be deeply flawed. In general, eugenics theories were not initially aimed at eliminating entire groups of people; rather, they were designed to minimize the number of persons born with certain “defects.” It was the Nazis who used the pseudoscience of eugenics to categorize “lesser peoples” by race and ethnic background, which was then used to justify the extermination of such people, including Jews and Roma, among others.
Over the years, Nazi adherents developed elaborate hierarchies based on race and ethnicity to fit their flawed theories involving “racial hygiene” and racial supremacy. This they accomplished largely by determinations of one’s ethnic heritage, or by bogus physical and anatomical determinations, including eye and hair color, height, shape of the skull and body, and so on. In Nazi thought, the so-called Aryan race, to which pure Germans belonged, was the “master race.” Beneath the master race were Indo-European–speaking peoples, who were deemed “partly Aryan.” Jews, along with blacks, Roma, Indians, and other peoples from the subcontinent and Asia were not considered Aryans and were thus undesirables. The Aryan ideal was a Nordic type—tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. Ironically, many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, did not fit this set of physical characteristics.
Hitler had read deeply in books and articles that discussed racial hygiene and eugenics, and so he had come to believe that many of Germany’s modern problems stemmed from the fact that the German people had been weakened by intermarriage between Aryans and non-Aryans and corrupted by the likes of the mentally and physically challenged and other individuals deemed undesirable. The answer to reversing this was to eliminate those who were categorized as non-Aryans, or who otherwise did not mesh with Nazi ideology concerning racial purity. Aryans were to be encouraged to mate only with other Aryans; the physically and mentally sound were encouraged to have more children while the racially inferior and weak were to be marginalized or eliminated. The German creation of Jewish ghettos and the ritual extermination of Jews, Roma, and homosexuals during the 1930s and early 1940s were thus logical extensions of the Nazi belief in eugenics.
Nazi Germany’s racial ideology placed the biological improvement of the Aryan race at the center of all its social policies. The pseudo-science of eugenics saw to it that in this way a “master race” could be bred through selective breeding and the destruction of those with so-called “defective genes.” An important part of the process was the application of scientific standards for the measuring of human imperfections. In this picture, for instance, Nazi officials use calipers to measure an ethnic German’s nose. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)
These beliefs became the basis for government policies in Germany beginning with Hitler’s ascent to office in 1933. That same year, the Nazis enacted a law that required all doctors to report all hereditary illnesses of their patients to the government; doctors who failed to comply were fined or prohibited from practicing medicine. Soon “Hereditary Health Courts” were established throughout Germany, and more than 400,000 German citizens were forcibly sterilized to ensure that they would not pass their “defective” genes to others. Some 70,000 others were killed as part of the so-called “euthanasia” program. Strict laws were passed regarding marriage, and all who sought marriage licenses were tested for hereditary and other diseases.
The infamous Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, were based partly on eugenics and were designed to marginalize and ghettoize German Jews. They placed a great many prohibitions on Jews and served as the foundation for the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II.
Many of the eugenics beliefs that suffused Nazi ideology were absurd from both a logical and scientific perspective. Based on pseudoscience, deeply flawed social scientific analyses, and rabid bigotry—particularly antisemitism—eugenics played a major role in German social policies between 1933 and 1945 and most certainly drove policies that gave birth to the Holocaust. In addition to the physically and mentally infirm, Jews, and the Roma, homosexuals were also considered “defective” by the Nazis. As many as 100,000 homosexuals were arrested during 1933–1945, with about 50,000 serving prison sentences. At least 15,000 are thought to have died in Nazi concentration camps. In other parts of Europe, Nazi officials routinely castrated, imprisoned, or killed homosexuals.
PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.
See also: Aryan; Euthanasia Program; Fischer, Eugen; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; Medical Experimentation; Nuremberg Laws; Ploetz, Alfred; “Racial Hygiene”; Ritter, Robert; Roma and Sinti; Social Darwinism; Sterilization
Further Reading
Back, Les, and John Solomos (Eds.). Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2006.
Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1989.
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Euthanasia Program
Hitler’s secret program to euthanize “life unworthy of life”—men, women, and children deemed mentally and physically ill or disabled. Initiated in October 1939 and headed by Reich Chancellery chief Philipp Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt, the program’s original intention was the euthanization of disabled infants and young children, based on the pretext of the Knauer family’s request to have their baby euthanized due to multiple birth defects. Before the program entered into action, however, Hitler authorized its expansion to euthanize disabled adults. The Reich Chancellery established several organizations such as the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments and the Reich Cooperative for State Hospitals and Nursing Homes, which provided an outwardly benign façade.
Aktion T-4—the “T-4” coming from the address of its administrative headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4—was rooted in the larger clinical discussions of eugenics and racial hygiene in Europe and the United States at the turn of the 20th century. The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, passed in 1933, set a precedent for the T-4 program, requiring compulsory sterilization for Germans suffering from a hereditary disease. Over 300,000 people were sterilized under this law. Hitler’s euthanasia program was a natural extension of racial hygiene and the product of increasingly radical Nazi policies.
Aktion T-4 was responsible for the death of approximately 250,000 mentally and physically disabled individuals. Of this, at least 5,000 were children. Questionnaires disseminated by the various front organizations to public and private clinics and institutions gathered information and functioned as the means of finding the program’s victims. For children, killing centers were set up as specialized pediatric clinics catering to physically and mentally disabled adolescents. Once there, children received lethal injections or were simply starved to death. The Nazi assault on mentally and physically disabled adults began with those already institutionalized. Victims were transferred to one of the six killing centers—Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hadamar, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, and Hartheim—where they were herded into fake showers and gassed with carbon monoxide. Their bodies were cremated and their remains sent to their families along with medical documents giving a fictitious cause of death. Although T-4 staff worked meticulously to conceal their actions, the rash of mysterious deaths among the mentally disabled quickly aroused the suspicion of families. Outrage and protest over these extralegal killings—voiced perhaps most famously by Catholic clergyman Clemens August Graf von Galen—gathered tremendous public pressure. In August 1941 Hitler officially halted the euthanasia program. Unofficially, however, the killings continued until the end of the Third Reich, only now executed in a decentralized and even more clandestine fashion with local physicians administering lethal injections.
Just as the sterilization law was a precursor to euthanasia, so too was Aktion T-4 for the “Final Solution,” marking the logical conclusion of Nazi radicalization. The killing centers, gas chambers, and crematoria that became hallmarks of the Holocaust were all developments, first, of Hitler’s euthanasia program.
JASON C. ENGLE
See also: Brack, Viktor; Brandt, Karl; Einsatzgruppen; Eugenics; Franz, Kurt; Galen, Clemens August Graf von; Gas Vans; Gerstein, Kurt; Good; Hadamar; Hadamar Insane Asylum Case; Höppner, Rolf-Heinz; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; Kreyssig, Lothar; Lange, Herbert; Lichtenberg, Bernhard; “Life Unworthy of Life”; Medical Experimentation; Nazism and Germany; Ploetz, Alfred; “Racial Hygiene”; Schlegelberger, Franz; Stangl, Franz; Stuckart, Wilhelm; Thierack, Otto; Wiedergutmachung; Wirth, Christian
Further Reading
Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Freidlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Durham (NC): University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Weindling, Paul. Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
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Evian Conference
The Evian Conference of July 6–15, 1938, was called in response to American president F. D. Roosevelt’s invitation to the nations of the world to meet to discuss what had by now become a global refugee crisis. His motives in calling the conference appear to have emanated from his desire to deflect some sectors of American public opinion, which were beginning to lean toward a liberalization of immigration regulations. This deflection would take the form of a new organization to manage refugee resettlement. Inviting the nations of the world to participate in the formation of this organization would also show that the United States was playing a leading role in trying to find a solution to the refugee issue, and that the problem was not to be dumped onto any specific countries.
Roosevelt’s initiative was not intended to compromise the existing policy of any country; none would have to make a commitment to receive refugee Jews. Yet the initiative was received cautiously, particularly by Switzerland. Roosevelt had hoped to locate his meeting in a Swiss city, the better to establish it as a legitimate gathering of a genuinely international kind. The Swiss refused to host the meeting, however, and so it was decided that a French city near the Swiss border would have to be chosen as the next best option in order to retain the internationalist spirit as far as possible.
The United States sought to convene a committee comprised of all interested countries for the purpose of “facilitating the emigration from Austria, and presumably from Germany, of political refugees.”
The plenary meeting of the conference took place on the morning of July 6, 1938. The French delegate, Henri Bérenger, took the chair as host in order to welcome representatives of the thirty-two nations who were attending. Speeches of welcome then followed from the American and British representatives (the former of whom, Myron C. Taylor, was elected president of the conference). The public formalities over, the conference then proceeded to hear statements from all the nations present. The representatives quickly got to the point, and it was not long before the gist of the Evian Conference was made clear: all countries understood the need for international cooperation, but in almost every instance it was pointed out that the opportunity for absorbing refugees was limited owing to economic conditions. The countries represented at Evian were unable, or unwilling, to agree to anything like mass migration. Some countries—particularly those from Latin America—indicated a willingness to accept agricultural refugees or those who could bring a degree of wealth with them; others agreed to consider plans for refugee settlement in rural colonies only. The inviting nation, the United States, did nothing more than publicly affirm its already existing annual quota of 27,370 Germans and Austrians, a figure that had to include nonrefugee German immigrants and non-Jewish refugees, as well as Jews.
The British government had misgivings about the whole conference, and much preferred to utilize the already existing League of Nations High Commission for Refugees. It was also wary about drawing too much attention to the refugee problem in case the representatives assembled at Evian began to make disquieting noises about Palestine as a Jewish haven. Indeed, British concern about the possibility of Palestine as a target area for mass Jewish migration led to an insistence on the part of the British delegation that the president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, not be permitted to address the delegates, even privately. The issue of Palestine was one on which the British preferred to avoid discussion altogether. Consequently, the matter of British refugee policy took something of a back seat at the Evian Conference—though the British delegation head, Lord Winterton, was elected conference vice president.
The representative from Australia, Sir Thomas White, summed up the general tenor of many at the conference with the statement that “as we have no real racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”
Once all the speeches had been made, the conference broke into two subcommittees, designated the Technical Subcommittee and the “Subcommittee for the Reception of Organizations Concerned with the Relief of Political Refugees coming from Germany (including Austria).” This latter subcommittee was established in order to accommodate the numerous refugee organizations, which were registered as participants at the conference but which could not take part in the general sessions. Myron Taylor, the president of the conference, invited the major organizations to amplify their views, if they so wished, and as a result some 39 organizations stepped forward to take advantage of the offer and to put forth their case.
With extreme haste, the subcommittee proceeded to hear the depositions of 25 of these organizations on the single afternoon of July 8. As time was limited, speed was of the essence. When members of the subcommittee began to grow weary, the period of 10 minutes per hearing was reduced to five. The depositions, moreover, had to be translated into French if not presented in that language, and consequently there was little enough time for a deposition to be heard before it was time to make way for the next organization.
The upshot of the subcommittee’s hearings was a distillation of all the memoranda presented into a single, three-page Synopsis, which was presented to the conference but which made no difference to its ultimate outcome.
The conference broke up on July 15, its main outcome being the establishment of a permanent organization in London, the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees. This convened on July 19.
In the long run, the existence of the Inter-Governmental Committee did not change the outcome for the Jews of Europe in the slightest. Attitudes such as those expressed by Australia’s Thomas White at Evian demonstrated to Hitler that the Jews he did not want were also unwanted throughout the rest of the world, an argument that was clearly apparent to perceptive observers at the time. The tragedy is that while all saw the dangers of inaction—and that, after all, was the ostensible reason for Roosevelt’s calling of the meeting in the first place—none were prepared to put their words of sympathy into practice. The Evian Conference clearly demonstrated that the nations of the world did not yet fully understand the implications of what was happening in Germany in any terms other than their own.
On one level, it is not surprising that Evian saw no grand commitments to refugee acceptance: that had never been part of Roosevelt’s proposal when calling the meeting back in March. It will be recalled, for example, that the original invitation indicated how no country would be expected to receive a greater number of immigrants than was already permitted by its existing legislation, which was an attractive reason for attendance in the eyes of many of the attending countries. It was perhaps an optimistic hope, then, that these countries would have agreed to some great liberalization of their refugee policies. Far from the nations of the world letting down the Jews of Germany, to some extent the opposite was true; the Jews—not only of Germany but also of the Free World—put too much faith in the concept of an international conference the object of which was to only talk about the refugee crisis. Jewish hopes were misplaced, and their expectations too high.
For all that, the gathering at Evian did serve the purpose of concentrating the minds of government leaders, if only for a short time, on the refugee crisis. It could have acted as an occasion for caring administrations to voluntarily make some kind of announcement that they would agree to an increase in their refugee quotas. None, however, with the exception of the tiny Dominican Republic, chose to do so, and in this lay Evian’s real tragedy. Few of the nations of the world can claim to have been helpful in receiving Jews or alleviating their plight.
PAUL R. BARTROP
See also: British Response to the Holocaust; Soos, Géza; United States Response to the Holocaust
Further Reading
Breitman, Richard, and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Marrus, Michael. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Sherman, A. J. Island Refuge. Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–1939. London: Frank Cass, 1994.
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Exodus 1947
The ill-fated voyage of the ship Exodus 1947 (July 11–August 22, 1947) highlighted the plight of Jewish refugees attempting to immigrate to Palestine after World War II. The British government had from 1939 continued to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine; indeed, during the war Britain had maintained warships off Palestine to intercept ships bound for Palestine carrying Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.
British policies of blocking illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine continued after the war. Jewish leaders responded by encouraging and facilitating illegal immigration (Aliya Bet). From 1945 to 1948 Mossad Le-Aliya Bet, a branch of the Haganah headed by Shaul Avigur, organized 65 voyages transporting in all some 70,000 displaced Jews to Palestine. One of the vessels involved in this effort was the former President Warfield.
The President Warfield was a Chesapeake Bay ferry that had been transferred to the British under Lend-Lease and had participated in ferrying operations to Normandy after the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings. It had been returned to the United States after the war. This worn-out ship was then sold as scrap to the Jewish immigration effort for slightly more than $8,000.
Renamed the Exodus 1947 and packed with 4,515 refugees bound for Palestine, the ship departed Sète, France, on July 11, 1947. Eight British warships—the cruiser Ajax, five destroyers, and two minelayers—eventually trailed the Exodus 1947. On July 18, when only 12 miles beyond Palestinian territorial waters, the British surrounded the ship and boarded it.
Hand-to-hand fighting ensued. In the melée that extended over several hours, the British finally resorted to small arms fire. Two passengers and one crewman were killed, and 32 others were injured. The crewmen surrendered only when the British began a ramming operation, threatening to sink the ship and those in it.
The British towed the Exodus 1947, now listing badly, to Haifa. Ordinarily, the refugees would have been sent to camps in Cyprus, but these were now packed with 26,000 people, and the British sought to make an example. They reembarked the passengers on three troopships and sent them to the port of Marseille, France, in effect returning them to their point of origin. There the deportees rejected orders to go ashore, and French officials, who were willing to see them reenter France, refused to remove them by force. Only 130 passengers, most of them sick or pregnant, disembarked.
The remaining passengers, including many Holocaust survivors and orphaned children, began a hunger strike. French authorities offered supplies, which the refugees rejected despite desperate sanitary conditions and extreme heat.
After 24 days, and fearing the outbreak of an epidemic, the French ordered the three ships to depart. The British government, reeling from growing adverse worldwide public outrage over what had transpired, ordered the ships on to Hamburg in their zone of Germany. There, British soldiers forcibly removed the refugees, who were then sent on to two displaced persons’ (DP) camps near Lübeck. Demonstrations and protests occurred in DP camps throughout Europe over the events.
The British then changed their policy, ending the effort to return illegal immigrants to Palestine to their port of origin. Instead, they sent them to Cyprus. Media coverage of the events also led to a swing in public opinion in favor of the Jews and establishment of a Jewish state in 1948.
Many of the passengers on the Exodus 1947 continued to try to reach Palestine. Although some gained illegal entry, more than half of them were detained again and deported to Cyprus. There they remained until they were allowed to immigrate to Israel after its founding in May 1948. The Exodus 1947 itself burned at Haifa in August 1952 and was scrapped in 1963.
Writer Leon Uris loosely based his novel Exodus (1958) on the Exodus 1947 incident and the lives of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin. Paul Newman received an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the fictional Ari Ben Canaan in the film Exodus (1958), directed by Otto Preminger.
RICHARD EDWARDS AND SPENCER C. TUCKER
See also: British Response to the Holocaust; Displaced Persons
Further Reading
Gruber, Ruth. Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation. New York: Crown, 1999.
Halamish, Aviva. The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 1998.
Kaniuk, Yoram. Commander of the Exodus. New York: Grove, 2001.
Uris, Leon. Exodus. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
