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Sachsenhausen

Sachsenhausen was a Nazi concentration camp established in July 1936. It was located north of Berlin, near Oranienburg. Administered by the SS, Sachsenhausen initially housed political prisoners and others deemed “dangerous” to the German government. Beginning in 1937 and continuing into 1945, the camp expanded dramatically and soon became home to a wide array of detainees, including Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, male homosexuals, individuals deemed “asocial,” and Roma. Between 1936 and 1945 some 200,000 detainees were either incarcerated at Sachsenhausen or transited through it. A few Soviet civilians were held there, and the camp became a major staging area for Soviet prisoners of war. By 1945 the number of Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen totaled about 11,000. In the period immediate following Kristallnacht in 1938, at least 6,000 German Jews were rounded up and imprisoned at Sachesenhausen. Most Jews were released, however, and by early 1939 only 1,345 remained.

After World War II began in September 1939, however, Sachsenhausen once again became home to many Jews, mainly resident aliens who had been residing in Germany, or Polish Jews. Many of those people were transferred to death camps in the east, where most perished. In 1944 Hungarian and Polish Jews who had been residing in various ghettos began arriving in large numbers, while Soviet POWs began arriving in the late summer of 1941; as many as 18,000 of these men were shot and killed there between 1941 and 1945. Their bodies were cremated in an on-site crematorium. In the autumn of 1944 German officials arrested thousands of Polish civilians, of whom approximately 6,000 were sent to Sachsenhausen. Most were non-Jews.

As in all concentration camps, conditions at Sachsenhausen were appalling. Food was scant and of poor quality, living quarters were overcrowded, sanitation facilities were crude at best, and medical care was essentially nonexistent. Many prisoners were ordered to perform forced labor in area factories, where some were worked to the point of exhaustion and death. Malnutrition and disease were perhaps the biggest killers. Including the Russian POWs who died at Sachsenhausen, a total of some 30,000 people died at the camp between 1936 and 1945. Others were beaten to death or executed, and some became the victims of Nazi medical experimentation.

In early April 1945, as Allied troops closed in on Berlin, the SS decided to liquidate the facility. Prisoners were force marched toward the north and east, a brutal process that resulted in many more deaths. When the Soviet Army liberated Sachsenhausen on April 22, 1945, there were still some 3,000 prisoners there, including 1,400 women.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Asocials; Concentration Camps; Fackenheim, Emil; Haas, Leo; Hoess, Rudolf; Homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses; Medical Experimentation; Roma and Sinti; Salomon, Charlotte; Zyklon-B Case, 1946

Further Reading

Bartrop, Paul R. Surviving the Camps: Unity in Adversity during the Holocaust. Lanham (MD): University Press of America, 2000.

Sachsenhausen was a Nazi concentration camp near Berlin that housed political prisoners from its establishment in 1936 until its liberation in May 1945. During its existence some 30,000 prisoners lost their lives there from a wide variety of causes. Toward the end of the war, with the advance of the Soviets, Sachsenhausen was evacuated. A death march took place in April 1945, during which thousands did not survive. On April 22, 1945, the camp’s remaining 3,000 inmates, including 1,400 women, were liberated by the Soviet and Polish troops. (AP Photo)

Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

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Salaspils

Salaspils is a small city in Latvia, situated on the Daugava River. It is located about 11 miles (18 kilometers) to the southeast of Latvia’s capital, Riga.

Toward the end of 1941 a concentration camp, a little over one mile out of town, was established at Salaspils. Originally it was intended for former Soviet prisoners of war and political prisoners, but by the time it was at its peak the camp became the largest civilian concentration camp in any of the Baltic republics. Officially, Salaspils (known in German as Kurtenhof) was designated as a Police Prison and Work Education Camp (Polizeigegfängnis und Arbeitserziehungslager), spread over an area measuring about 650 by 450 yards.

In October 1941 a senior Einsatzgruppen officer, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, began planning a detention camp to be built at Salaspils. He then oversaw the planning and implementation of the Rumbula massacre, a program that saw the murder of 24,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto, which occurred between November 30 and December 8, 1941. Later in December he began working as commander of both the security police (Sicherheitspolizei) in Latvia and also of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). His idea for the Salaspils camp was to create a place in which to confine not only those arrested in Latvia for political reasons or as resisters but also as an end point for Jews deported from Germany. Eventually, this would also extend to other occupied countries.

There was a precedent for this dating to before the establishment of Salaspils. On November 29, 1941, a trainload of approximately one thousand Jews from Germany arrived in Riga, where they were murdered. This served as a precedent for others, starting on December 3, 1941. Salaspils now became a convenient location for the Nazis’ grisly task, situated on the main rail line between Riga and the next largest city in Latvia, Daugavpils.

Development of the camp took place during January 1942, when around one thousand Jews from the Riga ghetto were conscripted to work on the site. By the fall of 1942 Salaspils was comprised of 15 barracks. In addition, there were two additional camps for Soviet prisoners of war nearby, which also fell under the overall jurisdiction of the camp administration. The death rate here, as in other compounds holding Soviet POWs, was high; while the exact number is unclear and subject to varying estimates, perhaps up to a thousand Soviet prisoners died, the victims of inferior accommodation and sanitary conditions and poor nutrition.

There was a juvenile barrack block at Salaspils, where children aged from 7 to 10 years old, upon being separated from their parents, were held. It has been recorded that these children were often victims of medical experimentation, which, together with typhoid fever, measles, and other diseases, saw a death rate that numbered at least half of the children incarcerated. Indeed, in one of the burial places discovered after the war, 632 corpses of children of ages 5 to 9 were found. While imprisoned, moreover, children were given special badges with their names and family information on them, but should the badges be lost—which happened particularly with younger children, who would often play with their badges or swap them around—their identities would also be lost.

On January 20, 1942, in recognition of his anti-Jewish measures in Riga, Rudolf Lange was invited to attend the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. This only served to encourage him (as well as those around him) to push for higher results in the mass killing of Jews. Plans for the camp at Salaspils were then revised, with a projected population of 15,000 Jews deported from Germany anticipated. While this did not eventuate, nonetheless between 12,000 and 15,000 people did transit through the camp in one way or another during its existence.

Figures concerning the overall mortality rate at Salaspils have fluctuated considerably over time. A reasonable estimate for the total number of deaths has landed at anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000. Not all were Jews, though it is certain that hundreds of German Jews were deliberately murdered or died as a result of sickness, overwork as slave labor, or callous treatment on the part of the guards. During the Cold War, Soviet estimates placed the number of deaths at anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000, but these figures are clearly way too high on account of the camp never taking in that many prisoners to begin with.

On October 13, 1944, the Soviet army liberated Riga—now completely emptied of all of its Jewish population—and on the same day the camp at Salaspils was also overrun. On October 31, 1967, a memorial complex was opened at the site of the Salaspils concentration camp, embracing a small museum and various forms of commemorative artwork.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Concentration Camps; Lange, Rudolf; Latvia; Riga; Rumbula Massacre

Further Reading

Buttar, Prit. Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II. Oxford: Osprey, 2013.

Ezergailis, Andrew. The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center. Riga: Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996.

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Salkaházi, Sára

Sára Salkaházi was a Hungarian Catholic nun who saved the lives of approximately one hundred Jews during the Holocaust. She was born Sára Schalkház in Kassa (Košice) in the Slovak-speaking area of the Habsburg Empire on May 11, 1899. The second of three children, her father died when she was still an infant. A thoughtful and religiously devout child, as a teenager she began to write plays and short stories. As a young adult she earned an elementary school teacher’s degree, which was the highest available qualification for women in education at the time. She taught school only for one year, leaving to move to another profession, that of book-binding. Later still, she learned millinery. After this, she turned to journalism.

Politically, she joined the Christian Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia and worked as editor of the party newspaper with a specific focus on social problems as they pertained especially to women. Over time, however, she realized that something was missing, until she found solace in religion.

Only after a long personal journey did she decide that her life should be spent in the service of others. In 1929 she entered the Society of the Sisters of Social Service in Budapest, a religious order founded in 1923 by Margit Slachta devoted to charitable, social, and women’s causes. At Pentecost 1930 she took her first vows, choosing as her personal motto the words “Here am I! Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8). She took her final vows in 1940.

In 1941 Sister Sára, as she was now known, was sent to Budapest to serve as the national director of the Hungarian Catholic Working Women’s Movement. She became editor of the movement’s publications and through these cautioned members against the growing influence of Nazism. She also established a network of Working Girls’ Homes in order to create a safe environment for working single women.

With the onset of war, political conditions in Budapest became less clear-cut than they were in earlier times. The Arrow Cross Party, the Nazi-inspired antisemitic movement in Hungary, began persecuting Jews, and the Sisters of Social Service, in response, commenced a program of providing safe havens for Jews fleeing from harassment. Sister Sára opened up the order’s Working Girls’ Homes as places of refuge under increasingly dangerous circumstances with other efforts extended to the provision of food and other vital goods.

As conditions worsened, by 1943 she saw there was only one possible option for her to consider; in order to truly live up to the example set by Jesus, she offered her life for the Society of the Sisters of Social Service and its mission. She pledged herself to God as a willing sacrifice to ensure that the other sisters and the order were not harmed.

With the intensification of anti-Jewish persecution during 1944, Sister Sára redoubled her efforts to save as many people as she could. Ultimately, the Society sheltered up to a thousand Jews, with Sister Sára personally responsible for approximately one hundred.

On the morning of December 27, 1944, armed Arrow Cross troops came to one of the Girls’ Homes under Sister Sára’s care, looking for Jews. They took four Jewish women and children and a religion teacher, Vilma Bernovits, into custody. Sister Sára was not present at that time, but when she arrived she was immediately detained. Later that night the little group was driven to the Danube Embankment, stripped naked, and shot into the river. It was said that as they were lined up Sister Sára knelt and made the sign of the cross. Her body was never recovered.

In 1969, after having been nominated by the daughter of one of the Jewish women who was killed alongside her, Sister Sára was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. Further recognizing her martyrdom, on September 17, 2006, Sister Sára was beatified in a proclamation by Pope Benedict XVI, in what was the first beatification to take place in Hungary since that of King Stephen in 1083.

In an ongoing tribute to her martyrdom, the Sisters of Social Service now hold an annual candlelight memorial service on the Danube Embankment every December 27, the anniversary of Sister Sára’s death. It is generally acknowledged that offering herself as a martyr for the society saved not only many Jews suffering persecution but also the order itself.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Arrow Cross; Catholic Church; Hungary; Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations; Slachta, Margit

Further Reading

Reeves, T. Zane. Shoes along the Danube: Based on a True Story. Durham (CT): Strategic Book Group, 2011.

Sisters of Social Service. Blessed Sára Salkaházi, Sister of Social Service, at http://www.salkahazisara.com/sss_en.html.

Yad Vashem. Sara Salkahazi, at http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4017359.

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Salomon, Charlotte

Charlotte Salomon was a German Jewish artist whose autobiographical work, Life? or Theatre?, combines paintings, text, and musical cues in a unique chronicle of her life. Salomon’s autobiography deals with her childhood in Weimar-era Germany, her coming of age during the Nazi years, and her exile in France as a refugee from the Nazi regime. It reveals her battle to define her existence and identity in the face of constant personal and political conflict.

Born into a prosperous family in Berlin in 1917, the young Charlotte Salomon struggled to find her own place and voice amid the turbulence of interwar Germany and the antisemitic policies of the Nazi regime. She quit school in 1933 but later applied and was admitted to the esteemed Berlin Art Academy. (Her openly avowed Jewish heritage would eventually lead to her dismissal from that institution.) There she learned classical, Nazi-sanctioned methods and techniques of realism, from which she broke almost completely in her own artistic work.

Increasing persecution at the hands of Adolf Hitler’s government ultimately convinced the Salomon family to leave their homeland. In the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) on November 9, 1938, Salomon’s father, Albert, along with thousands of other Jews, was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. His family managed to secure his release, and from that point forward the family prepared to leave Germany. Charlotte Salomon left in January 1939 to join her grandparents, who had fled Nazi rule in 1933, on the French Riviera. A plan to reunite with her father and stepmother in exile never materialized; her parents ended up in Amsterdam, where they survived World War II and the Holocaust.

After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Salomon’s grandmother, distressed by the expansion of Hitler’s empire, tried to commit suicide (she made another, successful attempt the following year). It was only then that Salomon learned a family secret hidden from her since childhood: six people in her family, including Salomon’s mother, had taken their own lives. (Salomon had been told that her mother, who died when Salomon was eight years old, had succumbed to influenza.) Her grandmother’s death, the dislocations of war, and her increasing clashes with her grandfather—including an exchange in which he angrily suggested that Salomon kill herself—provided her with the determination to paint the story of her life to avoid falling victim to this fate and as a means of grappling with her family’s history. Salomon spent more than a year crafting her autobiography in 1941 and 1942, composing over 1,300 notebook-sized gouache paintings on which text was written directly or on attached overlays. From these, she selected more than 700 for inclusion in Life? or Theatre?

In June 1943 Salomon married Alexander Nagler, an Austrian Jewish refugee also living in southern France. Just three months after their marriage, they were arrested during intensified Nazi roundups of Jews along the Riviera. Before her apprehension, Salomon had given Life? or Theatre? to a friend, with whom it safely remained until the end of the war. After her arrest, Salomon was transported to Auschwitz, where she apparently was gassed soon after her arrival on October 10, 1943.

ADAM C. STANLEY

See also: Art and the Holocaust; Kristallnacht; Sachsenhausen

Further Reading

Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Salomon, Charlotte. Life? or Theatre? Edited by Judith C. E. Belinfante, Christine Fischer-Defoy, and Ad Petersen. Zwolle (Netherlands): Waanders, 1998.

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Salonika

Due to the vibrancy of its Jewish culture the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki) was known for more than five hundred years as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” St. Paul makes an important, though negative, reference to the community in 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 (ca. 50–52 CE) as thwarting his agenda of promoting his new religious understanding. There are even scholars who have contended that the origins of settlement may go as far back as the Babylonian Exile of the Jews from Judea (ca. 586 BCE). Equally significant, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many fled to this city in such large numbers that the Jews already living there (Romaniote—Jewish communities with distinctive features who have lived in Greece and neighboring areas for more than 2,000 years) were absorbed, albeit, at times, somewhat reluctantly, into a new cultural ethos and set of specifically Sephardic (Spanish) religious practices.

Be that as it may, in April 1941 the Germans both conquered and occupied Greece and divided the spoils into three zones of occupation: German, Bulgarian, and Italian. (Jews in the latter two zones would fare quite differently from each other: the Bulgarians were quick to implement the Nazi policies of death and destruction, while the Italians tended to ignore or evade the more heinous Nazi antisemitic decrees and activities.) At war’s end, however, more than 95% of the 50,000 Jews initially found in Salonika under German control had been murdered, either directly in the city itself or transported to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed immediately upon arrival. Others—males—would be become part of the internal camp labor force, especially Sonderkommando—“special handlers”—tasked with emptying out the gas chambers of bodies, examining them for hidden valuables, transporting them to the crematoria, and, finally, removing the increasingly large quantities of ashes. Many of these same Jewish Greeks (the preferred more accurate term) would also play a part in the unsuccessful Auschwitz uprising, which would destroy one of the crematoria. Several members of the Salonikan leadership, including Rabbi Koretz and his family, were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

From the initial Nazi takeover until February 1943, the Jewish community of Salonika would experience increasing pressure on its leadership with the arrests and removal of those in charge, especially Chief Rabbi Tzvi Koretz, a divisive figure who would be transported to and imprisoned in Vienna, Austria, only to later return and resume his position and that of president of the Jewish community. (Even today, Koretz remains something of a controversial figure among both survivors and historians, questioning not only his possible collaborationist activities but also his imperial high-handed leadership, his accomodationist subservience, and the like.)

With the arrival of Adolf Eichmann’s henchmen SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny and SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner—the latter would go on to become the commandant of Drancy, France’s primary deportation camp, later dying in Damascus, Syria, where he fled after the war—and the active complicity of German SS Captain Max Merten; the German plenipotentiary Günther Altenburg; and the governor-general of Macedonia, Vasilis Simonides, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage) would begin to take an ominous turn.

On July 11, 1942, 9,000 Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 were told to assemble in the Plateia Eleftheria (Liberty Square) for forced labor registration. Without shade, water, or food, the Germans instituted a vigorous calisthenics regimen replete with beatings and verbal harassments from which many died in the sweltering heat of that month. Two thousand of the survivors would be transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere to work for the German army. The remaining men were ransomed after a negotiation between the Nazis and the organized Jewish community of Greece to the tune of $3.5 billion drachmas (more than $1,000,000 USD). Four thousand would be put to work building a road linking Salonika with Katerini and Larissa through lice-infested territory. In addition, with the further collaboration of the Greek authorities, the huge Jewish cemetery of Salonika, housing more than 500,000 graves, was plundered of its tombstones to be used for construction projects. (Today, Aristotle University is built upon this site.)

By the end of February 1943 the remaining Jews of Salonika were rounded up and forced into three ghettos, the ultimate goal of which was to make their deportation to death that much easier. The ghettos were Kalamaria, Singrou, and Vardar/Agia Paraskevi. Ironically, the deportation camp location was in the Baron (Maurice/Moritz) de Hirsch section of the city, funded by the German philanthropist to care for the less fortunate, often refugees, and make their transition into city life that much easier, because of its proximity to the train station.

The deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau began on February 8, 1943, with the first of what would be 19 transports of more than 45,000 Jews from Salonika. The last transport left on August 8, 1943. By the end of the war, only two thousand Jews were left alive in Salonika.

Ironically, the tragic fate of the Jewish Greeks of Salonika was not unknown to the Allies, due to reports appearing in The Times, London (May, 1943) and the New York Times (February 1944, May 1944, and November 1944). Nothing, however, was done to increase their chances of survival.

STEVEN LEONARD JACOBS

See also: Auschwitz; Birkenau; Brunner, Alois; Collaboration; Greece; Sonderkommando; Venezia, Shlomo

Further Reading

Apostolou, Andrew. “‘The Exception of Salonika:’ Bystanders and Collaborators in Northern Greece.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, 2 (2000), 165–196.

Bowman, Steven B. Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006.

Holst-Warhaft, Gail. “The Tragedy of Greek Jews: Three Survivors’ Accounts.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13, 1 (1999), 98–108.

Matsas, Michael. The Illusion of Safety: The Story of the Greek Jews during the Second World War. New York: Pella, 1997.

Mazower, Mark. Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica: City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

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Sauckel, Fritz

Ernst Friedrich Christoph “Fritz” Sauckel was a member of the German Nazi Party and the general plenipotentiary for labor deployment from 1942 to the end of World War II. He was one of 24 Nazis to be accused, tried, and convicted of war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946. As general plenipotentiary for labor deployment, Sauckel was responsible for providing the forced labor to accommodate wartime productivity in Nazi Germany. Due to his efforts, approximately 5 million people were deported from their homes throughout the Third Reich and forced to work for the German war machine.

Sauckel was born on October 27, 1894, in Bavaria. The only son of a postman and a seamstress, he spent his pre–World War I years working with the merchant marine in Norway and Sweden. As a sailor, he rose to the rank of Vollmatrose, or able-bodied seaman. At the start of World War I he was working on a German vessel headed for Australia when it was captured by the British and its crew interned. He spent four years as a captive in France, from August 1914 to November 1919.

Sauckel returned to Germany after the war, joining the German Nazi Party in 1921. Six years later, in 1927, he was appointed Gauleiter (a Nazi district political governer) of Thuringia, a central-eastern region of Germany. Sauckel served as a member of Thuringian government into the 1930s, and following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933 he was promoted to Reich regent of Thuringia and Reichstag member and an Obergruppenführer in the SS and SA.

In 1942 Sauckel was again promoted, to general plenipotentiary for labor deployment, after a recommendation from Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary. In this capacity, Sauckel was directly subordinate to Hermann Göring, president of the Reichstag. The war effort resulted in increasing demands for labor in Germany. Unfortunately, voluntary labor within the Reich was severely lacking, and Sauckel turned to Germany’s newly occupied territories, particularly Poland and the Soviet Union. According to Sauckel’s testimony at Nuremberg, of the 5 million people who were placed in forced labor, approximately 200,000 came voluntarily. Saukel’s view was that all workers were to be exploited in the most efficient way possible: “All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.” Such management led to the death of thousands of Jews in the work camps in Poland and other eastern territories.

In 1945, following the end of World War II, Sauckel and 23 other Nazi officials were tried for various counts of war crimes. The Nuremberg Trials, which took place from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946, were a series of Allied military tribunals to bring the biggest Nazi criminals to justice. Sauckel swore in his testimony that he was innocent of all war crimes and that he had been unaware of the concentration camps. He defended his position as Reich plenipotentiary for labor, stating his job had “nothing to do with exploitation. It is an economic process for supplying labor.” He was found not guilty on Nuremberg Trials’ indictments one and two, namely “The Common Plan or Conspiracy” and “Crimes against Peace.” However, he was found guilty on indictments three and four, “War Crimes” and “Crimes against Humanity” for his work as general plenipotentiary for labor deployment. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on October 16, 1946. His last words on the scaffold were recorded as, “Ich sterbe unschuldig, mein Urteil ist ungerecht. Gott beschütze Deutschland!” or, “I die an innocent man, my sentence is unjust. God protect Germany!”

DANIELLE JEAN DREW

See also: Bormann, Martin; Crimes against Humanity; Göring, Hermann; National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Nuremberg Trials; Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup; War Crimes

Further Reading

Buggeln, Marc. Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Plato, Alexander Von, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld. Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

Roland, Paul. The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes against Humanity. New York: Chartwell Books, 2010.

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Schacter, Herschel

Herschel Schacter was an influential Orthodox rabbi who was the first Jewish chaplain in the U.S. Army to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp upon its liberation in April 1945.

Schacter was born on October 10, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrants from Poland. After receiving a BA degree from New York’s Yeshiva University in 1938, he was ordained a rabbi in 1941, having studied under the highly esteemed Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. During 1941 and part of 1942, Schacter served as a rabbi in Stamford, Connecticut, before enlisting in the U.S. Army as a chaplain in 1942. He held the rank of lieutenant. Throughout World War II, he served in a variety of locations and settings in the European theater.

On April 11, 1945, advance units of the U.S. Third Army (VIII Corps) made their way to Buchenwald. Having learned that the concentration camp was about to be liberated, Schacter commandeered a jeep and raced to the camp. What he saw when he arrived was horrifying and heartbreaking. Emaciated, ill prisoners lay in squalid barracks, while piles of corpses were strewn about like firewood. He then proceeded to go from barracks to barracks, shouting in Yiddish, “Peace be upon you Jews, you are Free!”

Schacter later described a deeply moving scene. As he moved around the camp, he spotted a seven-year-old boy cowering in a dark corner. He picked the boy up and, asking him his name, the child meekly replied, “Lulek.” Schacter then asked him how old he was. The boy replied, “What difference does it make? I’m older than you anyway.” Puzzled, the chaplain asked him what he meant. The boy proceeded to tell him “because you cry and laugh like a child…. I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t cry anymore. So who’s older?” The young boy would later migrate to Palestine and become a rabbi. Now known as Yisrael Meir Lau, he serves as Tel Aviv’s chief rabbi.

After Buchenwald’s liberation, Schacter remained there for many months. He ministered to the survivors, held religious ceremonies, and later helped to resettle them. There had been almost 1,000 orphans at Buchenwald, nearly all of whom Schacter helped resettle. Many went to France, including a young Elie Wiesel, who later became a renowned writer, while others went to Switzerland. Schacter himself accompanied a group of orphans to Palestine. He was discharged from the army in early 1946.

In 1947 Rabbi Schacter became the chief rabbi for the Mosholu Jewish Center in the Bronx, New York, where he remained until 1999, when the facility was closed. Schacter died in the Bronx on March 21, 2013. In 2011 Rabbi Lau published a memoir, Out of the Depths, which details his encounter with Schacter in 1945 and how it affected the remainder of his life.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Buchenwald; Liberation, Concentration Camps; Wiesel, Elie

Further Reading

Lau, Rabbi Israel Meir. Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last. New York: Sterling, 2011.

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Schindler, Oskar

Oskar Schindler is perhaps the best known rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust by virtue of a multi-award-winning movie, Schindler’s List, made by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1993. At his enamelware and munitions factories in Poland and later Bohemia-Moravia, Schindler saved more than 1,200 Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

Born to Johann and Franziska Schindler, née Luser, on April 28, 1908, in Zwittau (Svitavy), Austria-Hungary, Oskar Schindler had an unsettled education that carried over to his early adult years. On March 6, 1928, he married Emilie Pelzl. An opportunist and womanizer always interested in get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably failed, with little else going for him he joined the Abwehr, the German military intelligence network, in 1936. He applied for membership in the Nazi Party on November 1, 1938, and in February 1939, five months after the German annexation of the Sudetenland, this was accepted.

Following the German invasion and occupation of Poland, Schindler moved to Kraków in October 1939. Taking advantage of the German occupation program to “Aryanize” businesses in the so-called Generalgouvernement (General Government), in November 1939 he purchased an enamelware factory from its Jewish owner, Nathan Wurzel, and reopened it as Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik (German Enamelware Factory), or, by its shortened version, Emalia. He employed Jewish slave labor, at extremely exploitative rates payable to the SS, which he brought in from the Kraków ghetto. After the ghetto’s liquidation in March 1943 the Jewish workforce was relocated to the concentration camp at Plaszów under the command of Amon Goeth.

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and rescuer of Jews credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. His first enamelware factory was located in Krakow, Poland, where he manufactured goods for the German military. This enabled his workers to be protected from deportation to the Nazi concentration camps. In 1963 he was recognized as one of the Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. The photo shows Schindler with the original list of the 1,200 Jewish concentration camp prisoners whom he employed in his factory. (AP Photo/Michael Latz)

Schindler went to great lengths to ensure the survival of “his” Jews, or Schindlerjuden, as they came to be called. Though they were still subject to the draconian and deadly rules and regulations of the concentration camp (and the whims of Goeth’s erratic regime), Schindler made constant intercessions on the Jews’ behalf, seeing to it that they were neither deported nor killed. He repeatedly demanded that they not be harmed on the ground that they were essential to the war effort, and, with the assistance of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, he managed to keep the prisoners in one place while making it appear as though the factory was performing valuable war work.

It was no surprise at first that Schindler was only interested in making money from his enterprise, but as he witnessed the brutal treatment Jews were experiencing, he became more and more disillusioned with Nazi ideology and what he saw it as representing. Over time he became transformed from the money-grubbing opportunist he had always been to a humanitarian with a desperate desire to save Jewish lives. The underlying reason for this change of heart has eluded historians, but it can be said with certainty that Schindler was never part of any organized resistance movement or rescue organization, and acted from motives that were his alone.

Protecting his workers came at a huge financial cost, but the money Schindler had made as a war profiteer he spent in bribes and expensive presents to Nazi officials. Eventually, he lost count of how much he had spent in protecting “his” Jews. Certainly, it was many millions of Reichsmarks. In trying to ensure that his workers would survive the war, he was prepared to spend all his money. Servicing huge costs in order to protect his workers, Schindler had to engage in illegal business dealings on the black market, which saw him arrested on three separate occasions. He was also twice arrested for Rassenschande, or “race shame,” after kissing Jewish girls—one of them on the cheek as a gesture of affection and gratitude.

With the advance of the Eastern Front during 1944, many of the concentration camps located in eastern Poland began to be closed down. Seeing the prospect of this happening to Plaszów, a Jew working as Goeth’s personal secretary, Mietek Pemper, informed Schindler that all factories not directly involved in the war effort, including his factory camp, were at risk. He then proposed that Schindler would be more secure if he were seen to be producing armaments instead of pots and pans. Accordingly, in October 1944, Schindler sought permission to relocate his factory to Brünnlitz (Brneˇnec) in Moravia, taking as many of his “highly skilled workers” as possible with him, and to resurrect it as an arms factory. Permission was granted, and the factory became reestablished as a subcamp of Gross-Rosen.

Pemper then compiled a list of people who, it was argued, had to go to Brünnlitz. The names were provided by a corrupt member of the Kraków Jewish police, Marcel Goldberg, who identified a thousand of Schindler’s workers and two hundred from the textile factory of a Viennese businessman in Kraków, Julius Madritsch. The lists were typed up by Goldberg; unlike popular wisdom, Schindler was not present when this took place. Nonetheless, all were sent to Brünnlitz: 800 men deported by the SS from Plaszów via Gross-Rosen and just over 300 women who went from Plaszów via Auschwitz, rescued at the last moment from gassing by the timely arrival of Schindler’s secretary, Hilde Albrecht, who came armed with bribes of black market goods, food, and diamonds.

Because they were relatively safe at Brünnlitz when compared to the possible fate that would have greeted the Jews if they had remained at Plaszów, Schindler worked at ensuring his charges would remain secure by continuing to bribe the SS and other Nazis, some of whom had an eye for profit, others with an ideological commitment that said the Jews had to keep working unto death.

By the time Brünnlitz was liberated by the Russians on May 9, 1945, Schindler was bankrupt and, as a member of the Nazi Party and a perceived war profiteer and exploiter of slave labor, he was on the run. He smuggled himself and his wife, Emilie, back into Germany, where they settled in Regensburg and kept a low profile.

They stayed there until 1949, when they migrated to Argentina. Just as before the war, he again failed in his business ventures. His marriage to Emilie broke down, and in 1957 they separated. In 1958 he returned to Germany alone.

On July 18, 1967, for his efforts in rescuing over 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, Schindler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. Emilie was similarly recognized on June 24, 1993. Oskar Schindler died, penniless, on October 9, 1974, in Hildesheim, Germany. Later, he was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion. He was the only member of the Nazi Party ever to be so honored.

In 1980 Australian novelist Thomas Keneally learned about Schindler from Leopold (Poldek) Pfefferberg, a “Schindler Jew.” The result was a fictionalized account of the story, Schindler’s Ark, which appeared in 1982. In the United States the book was published as Schindler’s List. The book was later adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg, using the American title, to immense critical and popular acclaim. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Liam Neeson was nominated as Best Actor for his portrayal of Schindler. Because of the high profile accorded Schindler as a result of the movie, and a vast array of books and documentaries that followed, his name has become a byword for rescue during the Holocaust—such that one of the highest accolades many can today give a rescuer is that he or she is “the Oskar Schindler of …” a given situation.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Aryanization; Generalgouvernement; Kraków-Plaszów; Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations; Schindler’s Jews; Schindler’s List

Further Reading

Crowe, David. Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activites, and the True Story Behind the List. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s Ark. New York: Folio Society, 2009.

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Schindler’s Jews

“Schindler’s Jews,” or Schindlerjuden in German, is a term that refers to a group of some 1,100 mostly Polish Jews who were saved from almost certain death during the Holocaust by German businessman Oskar Schindler. After the German invasion of Poland began on September 1, 1939, Schindler purchased an enamelware factory near Kraków, Poland. His accountant, a German-speaking Jew by the name of Itzhak Stern, helped Schindler secure the services of some 1,100 Polish Jews, who would work in his factory.

Schindler witnessed more and more brutality toward Jews in Kraków, which troubled him greatly. After Nazi soldiers rounded up scores of Jews in 1943 for deportation to concentration camps, Schindler stepped up his efforts to shield his Jewish workers from Nazi atrocities. Increasingly, Schindler defended his workforce and claimed exemptions for them because his business was considered essential to the war effort. Schindler treated his workers fairly and civilly, even permitting them to pray.

Late in the war, as Soviet troops advanced to the west, Schindler learned that Nazi officials planned to close all factories in Poland, including his own. He then convinced SS officials to allow him to operate a factory in Brünnlitz (now in the Czech Republic), where he would manufacture military items. He also received approval to relocate his mostly Jewish labor force to the new facility, under the premise that the workers were already trained and hence indispensable to his operations. Before the move, which took place in October 1944, a list of 1,200 workers—mostly Jews—was drawn up and presented to the authorities.

In reality, few military items were made in the new factory, and those that were had been purposely sabotaged. By mid-1945 Schindler and his family had closed the facility and fled to Austria, but almost all of his workers survived the war.

There are now more than 7,000 descendants of Schindler’s Jews living throughout the world, chiefly in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Nearly all of the original survivors have now died, and in January 2013, Leon Leyson, the youngest of the Schindler survivors, died at the age of 83 in Los Angeles, his adopted city. Leyson was reunited with Schindler almost 30 years after the war when Schindler visited the United States. Although there has been no formal mass reunion of Schindler’s Jews, a number of them did meet with other survivors after the war, often in conjunction with meetings with Schindler, who died in 1974.

Schindler’s deeds were later brought to light in a book written by Australian writer Thomas Keneally; titled Schindler’s Ark (1982), it was published as Schindler’s List in the United States. In 1993 Steven Spielberg produced a masterful and popular film rendition of the book, again titled Schindler’s List.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Kraków-Plaszów; Schindler, Oskar; Schindler’s List

Further Reading

Crowe, David. Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activites, and the True Story Behind the List. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

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Schindler’s List

Considered perhaps the most famous Holocaust film ever to be made, Schindler’s List is a motion picture directed by multi-award-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1993. The film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won seven: best picture, best director (Spielberg), best adapted screenplay (Steven Zaillian), best cinematography (Janusz Kaminski), best original score (John Williams), best editing (Michael Kahn), and best art direction (Ewa Tarnowska and Allan Starski).

The film was produced almost entirely in black and white, at times taking on the manner of a quasi-documentary, though color was introduced briefly on three occasions: in its opening and closing sequences, and showing a little girl in a red coat (the coat makes a brief appearance on one other occasion).

The movie starred Liam Neeson in the title role as Oskar Schindler, Ben Kingsley (Itzhak Stern), and Ralph Fiennes (Amon Goeth), and was based on Schindler’s Ark, a book from 1982 written by Australian writer Thomas Keneally. It tells the dramatic story of real-life Sudeten-German businessman and Nazi Oskar Schindler, a morally corrupt adulterer, opportunist, and profiteer, who operated a slave labor factory producing enamelware intended for military use in Kraków, Poland, during World War II.

The movie is a dramatized account of the life of Schindler during the Holocaust, as he makes a dramatic turnaround from exploiting Jewish slave labor to seeing the need to save the lives of his workers. Once he realizes a way to do so, he composes a list of those he wishes to save; a list that he strove to make as long as possible (eventually comprising nearly 1,200 names), right under the gaze of the SS.

Spielberg was said to have been interested in the story of Oskar Schindler from the time of the book’s first appearance but needed time to carefully consider how it could be made. He was, however, seemingly always determined to make the film, not only from an artistic perspective but also from the perspective of his own personal commitment; upon finishing, he later spoke of how the process of making of the movie had a deep emotional impact on him.

The three-hour-long epic has been hailed as among the most accurate portrayals of the reality of the Holocaust for the events it describes. In certain circles it stimulated controversy, however, particularly for its ending. After the audience has accompanied Schindler and those around him through their various ordeals and journeys, the film moves to a cemetery in Jerusalem, where surviving “Schindler Jews” (Schindlerjuden), accompanied by the actors who portrayed them in the movie, line up in order to place stones on Oskar Schindler’s grave—a traditional Jewish custom to signify that a visit has been made by one who remembers the departed. The last person at the grave is Liam Neeson (Oskar Schindler). He places a rose on the tombstone. A postscript informs viewers that the Jews saved by Schindler have now embraced life, with more than 6,000 descendants.

The reason for the controversy, among some critics, was because this was seen as both a maudlin and an inferior ending to what had otherwise been a brilliant evocation of the Holocaust experience—for some, it was even unnecessary. Despite this, the film generated additional historical research (particularly among younger viewers and schoolteachers), inspired new Jewish-Christian dialogue, and served to relocate the Holocaust at the forefront of American consciousness.

The movie’s tagline, coming from the Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Yerushalmi Talmud 4:9, Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a), is celebrated as an inscription inside a ring presented by the survivors to Schindler at the end of the movie: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” As a coda for the whole movie, it was clear that Spielberg was attempting to send a moral message to his viewing audience through this device; indeed, through the whole movie. Building on this, in 1994 Spielberg founded and financed the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, whose aim was to record testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. In January 2006 it partnered with the University of California to establish the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The fundamental goal of the Shoah Foundation is to provide an oral history archive for the filmed testimony of as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible, so that future generations will be able to hear the actual voices of those who experienced the Holocaust in their very flesh.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Schindler, Oskar; Schindler’s Jews

Further Reading

Fensch, Thomas. Oskar Schindler and His List: The Man, the Book, the Film, the Holocaust and Its Survivors. Forest Dale (VT): Paul S. Eriksson, 1995.

Loshitzky, Yosefa (Ed.). Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Palowski, Franciszek. The Making of Schindler’s List: Behind the Scenes of an Epic Film. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1998.

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Schlegelberger, Franz

Louis Rudolph Franz Schlegelberger was state secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice and served as German justice minister during the Third Reich. He was the highest-ranking defendant at the Judges’ Trial in Nuremberg.

Schlegelberger was born on October 23, 1876, into a pious Protestant family from Königsberg, where he attended gymnasium and sat for his school-leaving examination in 1894. He began studying law in Königsberg in 1894, continuing his legal studies in Berlin from 1895 to 1896. In 1897 he passed the state legal examination. At the University of Königsberg (by some accounts, the University of Leipzig) he graduated as a doctor of law on December 1, 1899.

On December 9, 1901, Schlegelberger passed his state law examination. Two weeks later he became an assessor at the Königsberg local court, and on March 17, 1902, assistant judge at the Königsberg State Court. On September 16, 1904, he became a judge at the State Court in Lyck (now Ełk, Poland). In early May 1908 he went to the Berlin State Court and in the same year was appointed assistant judge at the Berlin Court of Appeals (Kammergericht). In 1914 he was appointed to the Kammergericht Council (Kammergerichtsrat) in Berlin, where he stayed until 1918.

On April 1, 1918, Schlegelberger became an associate at the Reich Justice Office, receiving appointment later in the year to the Secret Government Court and Executive Council. In 1927 he took on the post of ministerial director in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. Schlegelberger had been teaching in the Faculty of Law at the University of Berlin as an honorary professor since 1922 and was a well-known jurist who, in September 1929, even traveled to Latin America. On October 10, 1931, Schlegelberger was appointed state secretary at the Ministry of Justice under Franz Gürtner and kept this job until Gürtner’s death in 1941.

After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, in an attempt to restrain executive power, Schlegelberger objected to a decree retroactively imposing the death penalty on those blamed for the Reichstag Fire on the basis that the decree was a violation of the ancient legal maxim nulla poena sine lege (“no punishment without law”). By January 30, 1938, following Adolf Hitler’s orders regarding judges in the Third Reich, Schlegelberger joined the Nazi Party.

In March 1940 Schlegelberger proposed that lawyers be expelled from their profession if they did not fully and without reservation support the National Socialist state. As minister of justice, he reiterated that call in a conference of German jurists and lawyers in April 1941. The first item on the conference agenda was the Nazi regime’s T-4 euthanasia initiative, in which Schlegelberger announced the Führer’s policies so that judges and public prosecutors understood that they might not use legal means to oppose the Aktion T-4 measures against the will of the Führer.

After Franz Gürtner’s death in 1941, Schlegelberger became provisional Reich minister of justice for the years 1941 and 1942 while still holding his post as state secretary. Otto Thierack was appointed after Schlegelberger’s acting position expired. During Schlegelberger’s period in office the number of judicial death sentences rose sharply. He drafted the Poland Penal Law Provision (Polenstrafrechtsverordnung), under which Poles were executed for tearing down German wall posters and proclamations.

Schlegelberger’s work assisted the institutionalization of torture in the Third Reich. After defendants accused of “political” crimes started to show signs of torture, Schlegelberger’s Justice Ministry “legalized” such acts, to such an extent that the Reich Ministry of Justice even established a “standard club” to be used in beatings, so that torture would at least be regularized.

In 1941 a police captain named Klinzmann was convicted of torture for beating an arson confession out of a Jewish farm laborer. When the German Supreme Court refused to hear Klinzmann’s appeal, Schlegelberger created a new procedure called “cancellation” that gave the Reich a means to end every trial independently of judicial decisions. Klinzmann was set free and so had no criminal record against his name.

On October 24, 1941, Schlegelberger wrote to the chief of the Reich Chancellery, Minister Hans Lammers, informing him that acting under the Führer Order of October 24, 1941, Schlegelberger had handed over to the Gestapo for execution a Jew named Markus Luftglass, sentenced by the Special Court (Sondergericht) in Katowice to two-and-a-half years in prison (for the crime of hoarding eggs). That was clearly a violation of the legal maxim “no punishment without law.”

In November 1941 Schlegelberger was among those whom Reinhard Heydrich invited to attend the Wannsee Conference. As things turned out, his subordinate, Roland Freisler, attended as Schlegelberger’s deputy. After the conference, Schlegelberger supported efforts to apply a more restrictive definition of the persons subjected to the “Final Solution.” In a letter on April 5, 1942, to Lammers, he suggested that “mixed people” should be given a choice between “evacuation to the East” or sterilization, writing that “The measures for the final solution of the Jewish question should extend only to full Jews and descendants of mixed marriages of the first degree, but should not apply to descendants of mixed marriages of the second degree…. There is no national interest in dissolving the marriage between such half-Jews and a full-blooded German.”

Schlegelberger wrote several books on the law and at the time of his retirement was called “the last of the German jurists.” Some of those law texts commenting upon German law were still in use and available for purchase in 2017. Upon Schegelberger’s retirement as justice minister on August 24, 1942, Hitler thanked him with a huge financial endowment and permitted him to purchase an estate with the money, something outside the rules then in force; clearly Hitler held Schlegelberger in high esteem.

After the war Schlegelberger was one of the main accused indicted in the Nuremberg Judges’ Trial in 1947. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judgment stated, in part, “that Schlegelberger supported the pretension of Hitler in his assumption of power to deal with life and death in disregard of even the pretense of judicial process. By his exhortations and directives, Schlegelberger contributed to the destruction of judicial independence. It was his signature on the decree of 7 February 1942 which imposed upon the Ministry of Justice and the courts the burden of the prosecution, trial, and disposal of the victims of Hitler’s Night and Fog. For this he must be charged with primary responsibility.”

In 1950 the 74-year-old Schlegelberger was released from prison on “health grounds” by the American High Commissioner for Germany. He then lived in Flensburg until his death at the old age of 93 on December 14, 1970.

Schlegelberger was perceived as a reluctant supporter of Hitler’s rule and given a lenient sentence. From the available records it appears that Schlegelberger’s most acute regrets dealt with what he experienced, rather than what he helped inflict on others. Given his record, he was the model for the character of Ernst Janning, the penitent German jurist portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the multi-award-winning motion picture Judgment at Nuremberg, a depiction of the Judges’ Trial at Nuremberg.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Crimes against Humanity; Euthanasia Program; Final Solution; Freisler, Roland; Judges’ Trial; Nacht und Nebel

Further Reading

Koch, H. W. In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler’s Germany. London: I. B. Tauris, 1989.

Miller, Richard Lawrence. Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust. Westport (CT): Praeger, 1995.

Muller, Ingo. Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1991.

Nathans, Eli. “Legal Order as Motive and Mask: Franz Schlegelberger and the Nazi Administration of Justice.” Law and History Review 18, 2 (Summer 2000), 281–304.

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Schmeling, Max

Max Schmeling was a German heavyweight boxer who risked his life to save two young Jewish brothers by hiding them in his hotel room and then helping them escape Germany during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.

Of modest background, Maximilian Schmeling was born in Klein-Luckow, Germany, near Hamburg, on September 28, 1905. The son of a sailor, from a young age his life was to be that of a boxer. He turned professional in 1924 at age of 19 and won the German light heavyweight title two years later. On June 19, 1927, he won the European light heavyweight title, and then the German heavyweight crown. He soon went to the United States, where he had his first American fight at Madison Square Garden against Joe Monte on November 23, 1928. He won by knockout. The following year, also in New York, Schmeling signaled his intentions by defeating a pair of top heavyweights, Johnny Risko and Paulino Uzcudun.

With these victories, he moved to the number-two ranking and a shot at the heavyweight title. At that time the crown was vacant, and Schmeling met Jack Sharkey to settle the title. They met on June 12, 1930, and Schmeling won when Sharkey was disqualified in the fourth round after delivering a low blow. This became the only occasion in boxing history when the heavyweight championship was won by disqualification.

In April 1933, not long after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he summoned Schmeling—by now his favorite athlete—for a private dinner meeting with himself, Hermann Göring, Josef Goebbels, and other Nazi officials. In discussion, he told Schmeling that when he was in the United States he should inform the American public that reports about Jewish persecution in Germany were untrue. When Schmeling arrived in New York he complied, saying that there was no antisemitism in Germany and emphasizing the point that his manager, Joe Jacobs, was Jewish. Few were convinced, particularly as Hitler had banned Jews from boxing soon after he and Schmeling had met.

In July 1933 Schmeling married a blond, beautiful Czech movie star, Anny Ondra, and the two became Germany’s most glamorous couple. The same year, Schmeling lost the title in a rematch with Sharkey after a controversial 15-round split decision, followed by defeat at the hands of Max Baer before a crowd of 60,000 at Yankee Stadium in June 1933. With this, the loss was deemed a “racial and cultural disgrace” by the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer, which considered it outrageous that Schmeling would even have deigned to fight a “non-Aryan.” Baer’s father was Jewish, and Baer himself fought wearing shorts emblazoned with a Star of David.

By this stage Schmeling was viewed as a something of a Nazi puppet, when not being accused of sympathizing with Nazism. On March 10, 1935, he fought and knocked out American boxer Steve Hamas in Hamburg. At this, the 25,000 spectators spontaneously stood and sang the Horst Wessel (the Nazi anthem), with arms raised in the Hitler salute. This caused outrage in the United States, with Schmeling now being publicized in Germany as the very model of Aryan supremacy and Nazi racial superiority, something he would detest all his life.

During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Schmeling requested from Hitler a promise that all American athletes would be protected, which Hitler respected. Around this time, the German dictator also began pressuring Schmeling to join the Nazi Party, which would have made a wonderful propaganda coup for the regime. Not only did Schmeling refuse, he also turned down every inducement to stop associating with German Jews or fire Joe Jacobs as his manager.

Nonetheless, the German propaganda machine still found enough traction in Schmeling to retain him as a propaganda model of Aryan supremacy. The U.S. public also wanted Schmeling, but for the opposite reason. Rather than celebrating him, many in the United States hoped he would come back for another fight and lose—this time against the young American hero, the “Brown Bomber,” Joe Louis. As Schmeling’s record of late had not been strong, he went into the fight a 10–1 underdog, and many people thought that at 30 years of age he was past his prime.

On June 19, 1936, the fight took place at Yankee Stadium. Schmeling had studied his opponent’s technique closely and found a weakness in his defense. In the 12th round, he scored what some consider the upset of the century, when he sensationally knocked Louis out. In Germany, the Nazi press—to Schmeling’s dismay—boasted of the victory as representing white Aryan supremacy. When he returned to Berlin, he was invited by Hitler to join him for lunch.

A rematch at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, was arguably the most famous boxing bout in history. The fight had huge implications, plain for all to see. It became a cultural and political event, billed as a battle of the Aryan versus the Negro, a struggle of evil against good. Held before a crowd of more than 70,000, the match saw a determined and highly motivated Joe Louis knock Schmeling out within two minutes and four seconds of the first round.

Schmeling later said that although he was knocked out in the first round and shipped home on a stretcher with a severely damaged spine, he was relieved that the defeat took Nazi expectations off him. It made it easier for him to refuse to act as a Nazi, and he was shunned by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy for having “shamed” the Aryan Superman ideal.

On the night of November 9, 1938, as antisemitic mobs were sacking Jewish property throughout the Reich, Schmeling’s opposition to Nazism was tested as never before. One of his friends, a Jew named David Lewin, was a tailor at Prince of Wales, the shop where Schmeling bought his suits. As the Kristallnacht intensified throughout the night, Lewin asked Schmeling to shelter his two sons, Heinz and Werner, aged 14 and 15 respectively. Without hesitation, Schmeling took them to his room in the downtown Excelsior Hotel and kept them there for three days. He told the desk clerk that he was ill and must not be disturbed. After things settled down, he drove them to his house for further hiding; waiting another two days, he then delivered them to their father.

In 1939 Schmeling helped the family to flee the country altogether. They went to the United States where one of them, Henri Lewin, became a prominent hotel owner in Las Vegas.

For his part, Hitler never forgave Schmeling for losing to Louis, especially given the circumstances, or for refusing to join the Nazi Party. During World War II he saw to it that at the age of 35 Schmeling would be drafted into the Luftwaffe as an elite paratrooper, where he served during the Battle of Crete in May 1941. It was said that the Führer took a personal interest in seeing to it that the former champion would be sent on suicide missions.

After the war, Schmeling tried to reinvigorate his boxing career. He fought five times, but in May 1948 was beaten by Walter Neusel, whom he had defeated in a classic match several years earlier. This was his last fight. Across his career, Schmeling’s record read as 70 fights for 56 wins (40 by KO) and four draws.

In retirement, Schmeling became one of Germany’s most revered and respected sports figures. He remained popular not only in Germany but also in America. He was awarded the Golden Ribbon of the German Sports Press Society and became an honorary citizen of the City of Los Angeles. In 1967 he published his autobiography, Ich Boxte mich durchs Leben, later published in English as Max Schmeling: An Autobiography.

He bought a Coca-Cola dealership in 1957, from which he derived much financial success. This enabled him to become one of Germany’s most beloved philanthropists, a popular and much respected figure not only in Germany but also in America. He became friends with many of his former boxing opponents, in particular Joe Louis. He would often help out Louis financially, and their friendship lasted until the American’s death in 1981, when Schmeling, in a final tribute, paid for the funeral.

On February 28, 1987, Schmeling’s wife of 54 years, Anny Ondra, died. In 1992 he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, though sadly he was never honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile for his actions during the Kristallnacht of November 1938. No one, it seems, ever nominated him.

Max Schmeling was a man in conflict with both the Hitler regime and the racial policies of Nazism. The degree of resistance he showed was built around a sense of what it was to be a decent human being. On February 2, 2005, he died aged 99, at his home in Hollenstedt, near Hamburg.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Der Stürmer; Kristallnacht; Propaganda; Rescuers of Jews

Further Reading

Hughes, Jon. “From Hitler’s Champion to German of the Century: On the Representation and Reinvention of Max Schmeling.” In Pól Ó Dochartaigh and Christiane Schönfeld (Eds.), Representing the “Good German” in Literature and Culture after 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity. Rochester (NY): Camden House, 2013, 66–84.

Margolick, David. Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Myler, Patrick. Ring of Hate: The Brown Bomber and Hitler’s Hero: Joe Louis v Max Schmeling and the Bitter Propaganda War. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2005.

Schmeling, Max. Max Schmeling: An Autobiography. Lanham (MD): Taylor Trade, 1994.

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Schmid, Anton

Anton Schmid, an Austrian soldier serving in the Wehrmacht during World War II, resisted the Holocaust through the saving of Jews—and was executed as a result. He was born in Vienna in 1900, married his wife Stefi, and had a daughter. An electrician by trade, by the time he reached early middle age he owned a radio shop and lived a comfortable life in Vienna.

Having been drafted into the German army after the Anschluss with Austria, he was mobilized upon the outbreak of war in September 1939. He was sent first to Poland, and then, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, transferred to Nazi-occupied Lithuania. By the autumn of 1941 the now Sergeant Schmid was stationed near Vilna (Vilnius).

Witnessing the creation of the Vilna ghetto in September 1941, Schmid soon learned what the fate of the Jews was to be. Mass killings had already been taking place since July 1941, and they continued throughout the summer and fall. By the end of the year, some 21,700 Jews had been murdered by Einstatzgruppen units and their Lithuanian allies in the Ponary Forest near Vilna. Schmid was appalled, particularly as he saw children being beaten in front of him. From his perspective, it was unthinkable not to try to find a way to go to the Jews’ aid.

Schmid’s assignment in Vilna saw him commanding a unit responsible for reassigning soldiers who had been separated from their detachments. He was based at the Vilna train station; from here, he saw a great deal of the treatment meted out to Jews, and he lost no opportunity in using his position to ease their situation. He would take them off the trains and employ them as workers, arranged for some to be released from prison, organized new papers for others, and even—at immense personal risk—sheltered Jews in his office and personal quarters.

Among those he hid were Herman Adler and his wife Anita, both members of Vilna’s prewar Zionist movement. Through them, Schmid met with one of the leaders of the nascent Jewish resistance movement in the ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum. The result saw him smuggling Jews out of Vilna to other Jewish cities such as Białystok—places where it was thought the Jews could have a better chance of survival. Schmid also acted as a conduit enabling various resistance groups to establish contact with one another.

Ultimately, Schmid’s actions in hiding Jews, supplying them with false papers, and arranging their escape managed to save the lives of up to 250 men, women, and children. Within resistance circles, news of his activities on behalf of Jews spread; inevitably, he began to be watched more closely by Nazi authorities. The knowledge that he could be found out only emboldened him to work on behalf of Jews with greater determination and audacity.

Inevitably Schmid was found out. In the second half of January 1942 he was arrested, and on February 25 he was summarily court-martialed for high treason. The death penalty was the only possible outcome of such a trial, and on April 13, 1942, he was duly executed by firing squad.

Anton Schmid was an extremely brave human being. He clearly knew that he was placing himself in danger through his actions, and that, if caught, his fate would be sealed. For all that, however, he did not see anything particularly special in what he did. In his last letter to his wife Stefi, written from his prison cell prior to execution, he wrote, “I only acted as a human being and did not want to hurt anyone.” His actions had an unfortunate outcome for Stefi, besides the obvious one of depriving her of her husband, his income, pension, and a war hero’s death. When word got back to Vienna, her neighbors shunned her, referring to her husband as a traitor and socially ostracizing her. At one point, her windows were smashed.

The life-saving deeds of Anton Schmid had another outcome, however, when, on May 16, 1967, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognized him as one of the Righteous among the Nations. Stefi Schmid received the award personally, having been flown to Jerusalem for the occasion.

Then, on May 8, 2000, the German government named a military barracks in Schmid’s honor in Rendsburg, northern Germany, as the Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne. At the naming ceremony Germany’s defense minister, Rudolf Scharping, said: “We are not free to choose our history, but we can choose the examples we take from that history. Too many bowed to the threats and temptations of the dictator, and too few found the strength to resist. But Sergeant Anton Schmid did resist.”

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Einsatzgruppen; Ponary Forest; Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations; Vilna Ghetto

Further Reading

Silver, Eric. The Book of the Just: The Unsung Heroes Who Rescued Jews from Hitler. New York: Grove Press, 1992.

Wette, Wolfram. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2007.

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Scholl, Hans and Sophie

Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie were a brother and sister who were at the forefront of organizing a resistance movement within Germany against the Nazi regime during World War II. The movement, known as the Weisse Rose (“The White Rose”), was largely centered on the University of Munich, where the Scholls were students.

Hans was born on September 22, 1918, in Ingersheim, the second of six children. Sophie was born on May 9, 1921, in Forchtenberg. Hans joined the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), and Sophie the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel) soon after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and at first they were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime. Their parents, however, were far less enamored with the Nazis and expressed their dissatisfaction to others.

Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister who, with others, organized the White Rose, an anti-Nazi movement centered among students at the University of Munich. They produced and distributed a series of leaflets condemning Nazism and calling on the German people to rise up against it. Hans and Sophie, together with Christoph Probst, were executed on February 22, 1943; others were later caught and also executed. (Authenticated News/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The younger Scholls became increasingly disenchanted with the Nazi Party during their years at the University of Munich. Hans became a medical student, and Sophie studied biology and philosophy. By the early 1940s they had developed a belief that Hitler and the Nazis were ruining the German nation and engaged in atrocities against Jews and others. They had also come to realize that all Germans had a duty to object to their government’s policies and activities, and their attitudes were reinforced at home; in 1942 their father, Robert Scholl, was arrested for publicly doubting Germany’s ability to win World War II.

In 1942, with a group of fellow students including Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and Alexander Schmorell, and their professor, Dr. Kurt Huber, the Scholls helped to spearhead the White Rose. The group began posting and mailing various antigovernment posters and literature publicizing the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler’s government, and urging Germans to resist the government and its policies. One of those who met with them and assisted briefly in these early days was a Swedish Red Cross delegate, Sture Linnér.

The focus of these statements was a series of numbered pamphlets campaigning for the overthrow of Nazism and the revival of a new Germany dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and founded on the purest of Christian values. The group’s opposition to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was essentially based on religious morality and humanitarianism, with little, if any, overt political motivation.

The name of their movement came from a novel that had inspired the Scholls when they were young. Their initial pamphlet, of what would eventually be six, was secretly published in June 1942. The pamphlets attracted public attention, and copies were made and distributed widely. Problems arose regarding state-regulated supplies of paper and ink, which could only be overcome illegally, but eventually White Rose pamphlets were dispersed throughout Germany and Austria, denouncing the activities of the Nazi Party and decrying the murder of innocent German citizens, including Jews.

The activities of the group quickly drew the attention and ire of the Gestapo. Hans, Christoph Probst, and others were sent to fight on the Russian front from the summer of 1942 onward, exposing them to the horrors of the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities. This only encouraged their efforts to resist Nazi authority when they returned to Germany.

The range of the White Rose group expanded beyond the University of Munich. Students at the University of Hamburg also joined, and at its peak membership it had about 80 adherents.

In mid-February 1943 the White Rose arranged a small anti-Nazi demonstration in Munich. Their ideals inspired them to an ever-increasing number of daring acts, such as a run through the buildings of the university during which leaflets condemning the Nazis were scattered liberally in the hallways. On February 18, 1943, a janitor who was a Nazi Party member, Jakob Schmid, spotted Hans and Sophie scattering copies of the sixth pamphlet from a balustrade in the atrium of the university. He raised the alarm, called the Gestapo, and had the Scholls and Probst arrested.

They were sent for a summary trial in the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) on February 22, 1943, and stood before Judge Roland Freisler, who berated them for their activities. They were quickly indicted for treason, and, defiantly, they admitted their crimes. Inevitably found guilty, Hans and Sophie Scholl, together with Christoph Probst, were executed by beheading the same day. It was noted by witnesses that all three faced their deaths bravely, with Hans claiming as his last words, “Long live freedom!” Hans was 24, Sophie was 21, and Christoph was 22. From arrest to execution took only four days.

Shortly afterward, numerous others associated with the White Rose were denounced, identified, and arrested by the Gestapo. Later that same year, other executions took place. Alexander Schmorell (age 25) and Dr. Kurt Huber (age 49) were both executed on July 13, 1943, and Willi Graf (age 25) on October 12, 1943. Another member, Hans Conrad Leipelt, who helped distribute the sixth leaflet in Hamburg, was executed on January 29, 1945, aged 23. Most of the other students convicted for their part in the group’s activities received prison sentences; many were consigned to concentration camps.

The text of the sixth White Rose leaflet saw their efforts crowned in part, however. It was picked up by Helmuth James von Moltke and smuggled out of Germany, through Scandinavia, to the United Kingdom. In July 1943 tens of thousands of copies of the leaflet were air-dropped over Germany as “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich.”

The White Rose movement and the story of the Scholls have become the subject of numerous depictions in literature and film, most notably two movies: Die Weiße Rose (dir. Michael Verhoeven, 1982) and Sophie Scholl, Die letzten Tage (dir. Marc Rothemund, 2005).

In death, the members of the White Rose became a spur to other anti-Nazi groups as well as the political left throughout Germany. After World War II the movement began to be seen by Germans as an admirable example of resistance to evil. The Scholls have become revered as among Germany’s greatest heroes (particularly among younger Germans), with the White Rose Foundation and White Rose International serving as contemporary organizations that seek to preserve the memory of the White Rose and continue its tradition of “principled resistance.” The bravery of the Scholls and their friends has come to represent individual sacrifice in the midst of unspeakable oppression and evil.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Freisler, Roland; Hitler Youth; League of German Girls; Resistance Movements; Upstander; White Rose

Further Reading

Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students against Hitler. San Francisco (CA): Ignatius Press, 2012.

Dumbach, Annette, and Jud Newborn. Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007.

Vinke, Hermann. The Short Life of Sophie Scholl. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

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Scholtz-Klink, Gertrud

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, born Gertrud Treusch and also known as Maria Stuckebrock, was born on February 9, 1902, in Adelsheim, Baden, Germany and died on March 24, 1999, in Tübingen-Bebenhausen. A Nazi Party member, Scholtz-Klink was leader of the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft) during the period of the Nazi regime. In 1920 Scholtz-Klink married Eugen Klink and had six children with him before he died in 1930. Scholtz-Klink joined the Nazi Party during its rise in the early 1920s, and she became leader of the women’s section in Berlin in 1929. In 1932 she married Guenther Scholtz, but they divorced in 1938.

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Scholtz-Klink as the Reich Women’s Führerin, or “Women’s Leader,” and head of the Nazi Women’s League. The National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, or NS-Frauenschaft) was the women’s wing of the Nazi Party. The Frauenschaft was subject to Nazi Party leadership, the Reichsleitung. From February 1934 to 1945 Scholtz-Klink led the NS-Frauenschaft. A talented speaker, she was tasked with promoting male preeminence, the delights of housework, and the importance of child-bearing. In one of her speeches, “To Be German Is to Be Strong,” she expressed to her followers that “the mission of woman is to minister in the home and in her profession to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man’s existence.”

In spite of her own elevated position in politics, Scholtz-Klink spoke against the participation of women in government. She stated, “Anyone who has seen the Communist and Social Democratic women scream on the street and in the parliament, will realize that such an activity is not something which is done by a true woman.”

In July of 1936 Scholtz-Klink was promoted to head of the Women’s Bureau in the German Labor Front, responsible for persuading women to work to the advantage of the Nazi government. In 1938 she argued that “the German woman must work and work, physically and mentally she must renounce luxury and pleasure.” Scholtz-Klink had the same impact over German women in the Nazi Party that Hitler had over Germany as a whole. In 1940 she married her third husband, SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, and made recurrent trips to visit women in concentration camps.

Following World War II, Scholtz-Klink fled from the Battle of Berlin with Heissmeyer. In the summer of 1945 she was imprisoned in a Soviet prisoner of war camp near Magdeburg but escaped soon after. With the aid of Princess Pauline of Württemberg, she went into hiding in Bebenhausen, Germany. She spent the next three years under the alias of Maria Stuckebrock.

On February 28, 1948, Scholtz-Klink was identified and arrested. A French military court sentenced her to 18 months in prison on the charge of forging documents. In May 1950 an evaluation of her sentence categorized her as a “main culprit” and penalized her with an additional 30 months. After her release from prison in 1953, Sholtz-Klink settled back in Bebenhausen. In her 1978 book Die Frau im Dritten Reich (The Woman in the Third Reich), Scholtz-Klink confirmed her ongoing support for the National Socialist ideology, beliefs she held to her death on March 24, 1999.

DANIELLE JEAN DREW

See also: Lebensborn; National Socialist German Workers’ Party

Further Reading

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Livi, Massimiliano. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink: Die Reichsfrauenführerin. Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2005.

Stephenson, Jill. The Nazi Organisation of Women. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Germany. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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Schönerer, Georg Ritter von

Georg Ritter von Schönerer was an early advocate of Pan-Germanism, Germanic religion, and antisemitism, and an important influence on the young Adolf Hitler. He was born on July 17, 1842, in Vienna. In 1869 and again from 1873 to 1888 and from 1897 to 1907, he was a member of the Austrian House of Delegates; in 1888, as a result of his involvement in an act of violence against political opponents, he was condemned to four months’ imprisonment and loss of his parliamentary mandate. After 1907 he became politically very isolated in Catholic Austria on account of his Los-von-Rom movement, in which he called for people to leave the Catholic Church (on the grounds of its alleged “friendliness to Slavs”) and to become Protestants. In 1879 Schönerer was involved in the foundation of the Pan-German Nationalist Party. In the Linzer Programme of 1882, he demanded the annexation of Austria to Germany under the leadership of the Hohenzollerns as a “fulfillment” of the German Reich and the abandonment of the “Slavic territories.” As leader of the Alldeutsche Bewegung, he established a hero cult of Richard Wagner—whom he saw as liberator of German art from “Judaization”—and Otto von Bismarck, who remained reserved toward him. Schönerer pursued an aggressively antisemitic campaign in his newspapers (Unverfalschte Worte and Alldeutsches Tagblatt). He claimed that a “Greater German Reich” was the desire of all Germans and pointed to the Jews as “an unproductive and alien element,” undermining the “moral and material foundations” of the German people (Volk).

Schönerer regarded antisemitism as “the central pillar of the national idea,” called for a battle to be waged for the “purity of German blood,” and attacked “the Jewish press.” Many of his demands anticipated later Nazi measures, such as his demand for special laws even for baptized Jews to establish a limitation of freedom of domicile, exclusion of Jews from the civil service, from the teaching profession and the press, and the creation of special “Jewish registers.” From February 1884 his gatherings took place under a banner that read: “Entry forbidden to Jews!” In his newspapers, Schönerer introduced the greeting “Heil to the Führer!” (addressed to himself). His German nationalism took on more and more strongly religious overtones; in 1883 he had described “German Volkstum” (national character) as “the perfect replacement for religion.” With his cult for old Germanic symbols like runes and Midsummer, Midwinter, and Yuletide festivals, and his introduction of old Germanic names of the months and ways of living among his followers, he influenced the later Germanic cult of Heinrich Himmler and the SS. Schönerer also argued that his followers should marry only “Aryan partners” and must be investigated for the “healthiness of their line.” Hitler referred to Schönerer admiringly many times in Mein Kampf but criticized him for his failure to win mass support and his faith in the parliamentary system.

Schönerer died on August 14, 1921.

MARKUS HATTSTEIN (TRANSLATED BY CYPRIAN BLAMIRES)

See also: Antisemitism; Catholic Church; National Socialist Program; “Racial Hygiene”; Volksgemeinschaft; Wagner, Richard

Further Reading

Whiteside, Andrew G. The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975.

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Schöngarth, Karl Eberhard

Karl Georg Eberhard Schöngarth was born on April 22, 1903 in Leipzig, Saxony. His father was a builder. After graduating from high school in 1920, he served in the Freikorps. In 1922 he joined the Nazi Party, and earned his living as a bank employee. He served in the army during 1924, and then began studying law and statecraft. His doctor of laws was awarded in June 1929, and he worked as a university professor at Leibnitz University in Hannover. From June 1932 Schöngarth was a legal assessor in Magdeburg, Erfurt, and Torgau.

On March 1, 1933 he joined the SS, and in May of that year rejoined the NSDAP, before joining the Prussian Gestapo in 1935. From November 1935 to 1936 he was assigned to the press section in the Berlin Gestapo, and during the first half of that year also acted as a political lawyer. From May 1936 to 1937 Schöngarth was in charge of the Gestapo office in Arnsberg, and during 1937–1938 was in charge of the Gestapo office in Bielefeld, Westphalia, then Dortmund, and then Munster.

In 1939 he became the chief government counsel to the SS, then, from October 1939 to March 1941, an inspector for SiPo and the SD in Dresden. From January 30, 1941 (the day he was also promoted to the rank of SS-Oberführer, or senior colonel) to January 14, 1943 he commanded the SiPo and SD in the Generalgouvernement in Poland. A fanatical enemy of the Jews, Schöngarth believed their “extermination” was necessary and wanted to harden his SiPo-SD commanders with the necessary “steel hardness” to be able to carry out their murderous actions. During the execution of Jews in Lvov, for example, he informed officers under his command that any SS officer failing to carry out an order of execution would himself be shot, and that he would support any officer who shot his comrade for this failure.

Schöngarth was characterized by an outstandingly fast intellectual grasp, strong willpower, and an impressive appearance, which commanded respect and obedience. His experience and high position within the security services of the Generalgouvernement, together with his ideologically safe political approach, led to his chief of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, inviting Schöngarth to attend the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where he participated in the discussion of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Endlösing der Judenfrage).

Schöngarth was promoted to SS-Brigadefuhrer (brigadier general) and police major general on January 30, 1943, and in July of the same year was transferred to the 4th SS Police Division in Greece, where he served until early July 1944.

From early July 1944 until the end of the war, Schöngarth was the senior commander of the SiPo and SD in The Hague, Holland. After his immediate chief HSSPF Hanns-Albin Rauter was wounded in 1945 in an ambush by Dutch resistance fighters, Schöngarth ordered the execution of 260 Dutch hostages in retribution. With the unsuccessful attempt on Rauter’s life, Schöngarth served in his place as higher SS and police leader in The Hague during March and April 1945.

After the war, Schöngarth was captured by the British, who investigated his background. After these inquiries, he was charged with the crime of murdering a downed Allied pilot (on November 21, 1944), and tried by a British Military Court in Burgsteinfurt. The murder of this airman came to light immediately after the war through two Dutch political prisoners who were employed at the SS/SD headquarters. On November 21, 1944 the crew of an Allied bomber bailed out near Enschede in Holland. One of the crew, a 26-year-old U.S. airman, fell into the grounds of a villa that was the headquarters of the German SS/SD. The American airman was unhurt, put into civilian clothes, and, with his hands cuffed behind him, taken by two SS men to a spot within the compound where a grave had already been prepared. He was shot in the back of the neck, buried, and the grave was then carefully camouflaged. In following a directive of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler concerning the treatment of captured Allied airmen, Schöngarth executed the downed pilot.

The two Dutch prisoners witnessed the airman falling to the ground, saw the airman in the cellar of the headquarters, and witnessed the airman’s transfer from the cellar to the grave where he was shot. The Dutch witnesses also confirmed the presence of Schöngarth and several other SD/SS who were present at the time. On his arrest Schöngarth denied complicity in the murder throughout. It was clear from the evidence of the co-accused that Schöngarth was implicated and had in fact given the order to execute the airman. He was found guilty of this war crime on February 11, 1946; he was sentenced to death by hanging. Schöngarth was executed by Albert Pierrepoint on May 15 or 16, 1946 at Hameln Prison.

It should be noted that Schöngarth was charged and executed for the one single act of murdering the airman in November 1944. He was not charged for the many crimes he committed against thousands of murdered Jews in Galicia or in Lvov, or against the Dutch hostages in The Hague, or the many other crimes carried out by Einzatsgruppen units under his control.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Einsatzgruppen; Gestapo; Lange, Rudolf; Netherlands; Schutzstaffel; Wannsee Conference

Further Reading

Browder, George. Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of the SIPO and the SD. Lexington (KS): University of Kentucky Press, 1990.

Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 2011.

MacLean, French. The Field Men: The SS Officers Who Led the Einsatzkommandos, the Nazi Mobile Killing Units. Atglen (PA): Schiffer, 1999.

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Schutzhaft

After the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933, the newly installed government of Adolf Hitler persuaded President Paul von Hindenberg to sign a Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. One of the measures introduced under this was a form of arbitrary arrest known as “protective custody,” or Schutzhaft.

As a policing concept, this had greater implications than would be found in the mere removal of a wrongdoer from society. Very few ordinary citizens were aware of what happened to a person taken into protective custody. Men who had been imprisoned and then released were cowed into such submission that they refused to discuss their experiences, and the Nazi authorities (the SS, SA, Gestapo, and SD) revealed nothing. Often a man simply disappeared from his home, his place of work, or even from the street, and his whereabouts were not disclosed.

Ignorance of the fate of Schutzhaft detainees served to provoke fear among the general population. As it appeared the authorities were indiscriminately arresting all manner of people on the flimsiest of charges (or often for no reason at all), it did not take long for the notion of protective custody to become synonymous with the word fear. Uncertainties abounded: the motives behind the arrest; what would happen in the future; treatment at the hands of the Nazis; and the means of avoiding such an arbitrary system of seizure and captivity. Schutzhaft was a necessary precursor to the concentration camps in its effect on the psychology of the masses; together, the two would combine to suppress all opposition to the Nazi regime.

The wave of early arrests understandably put enormous strains on the existing prison system, and it was soon clear that such a situation could not continue indefinitely. Moreover, the concept of protective custody, some believed, might become less terrifying if it became known that the detainee had “merely” gone to prison. An institution was thus needed that would concentrate all the Schutzhaft prisoners of a given region within a single, nonpenal, nonpublic detention center. There were decided practical and political advantages to the creation of such an institution: it would relieve the overcrowding in local prisons; it would assemble all the prisoners in one compound far removed from the prying eyes of civilian prison authorities; and it would serve to give concrete form to the sense of dread accompanying Schutzhaft arrests.

The earliest origins of a “concentrated” form of Schutzhaft imprisonment can be traced to a letter from Adolf Wagner, the leading Nazi official at the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, to Dr. Hans Frank, his counterpart at the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, dated March 13, 1933. Wagner suggested that if the existing prison system should prove unable to carry the strain of the great influx of new prisoners, “special protective custody quarters separate from the police prisons and those of the Ministry of Justice” be established. This was the genesis of what became the concentration camp system.

Once the singular function of gagging political opposition had been achieved, however, the Nazis saw the desirability of retaining the camps as a bolster to the regime. A regulation issued on April 12, 1934, by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick acknowledged this, adding that the time was “not yet ripe for the complete abolition of protective custody.” The regulation produced a series of guidelines clarifying the whole issue, including such matters as how and to whom protective custody was to be applied, together with its intentions and its duration. One of its most important points stated that the use of protective custody would be permissible only (a) for the protection of the prisoner and (b) “if the prisoner by his behavior directly endangers law and order particularly by subversive activities.”

This made the likelihood of arbitrary arrests far greater than before, as it was now unnecessary to justify an “enemy” by seeking out an opponent belonging to a distinct group. By its vagueness the regulation left the choice of who was subject to Schutzhaft arrest open to the discretion of the senior Nazi officer on the scene, also noting that protective custody was not to be used as a punishment for criminal offenses.

In addition to standardizing the principles surrounding Schutzhaft, however, Frick’s regulation also expressed the desire of the administration to restore “normal” conditions, and it followed that for the rest of 1934 and most of 1935 thousands of prisoners were actually released from protective custody. As a judicial concept, however, Schutzhaft was to stay in operation across the duration of the Third Reich, right down to the end of the regime in 1945.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Concentration Camps; Frank, Hans; Frick, Wilhelm; Sondergericht

Further Reading

Bartrop, Paul R. Surviving the Camps: Unity in Adversity during the Holocaust. Lanham (MD): University Press of America, 2000.

Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Krausnick, Helmut, Martin Broszat, Hans Buchheim, and Hans-Adolf Jacobson. Anatomy of the SS State. London: Collins, 1968.

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Schutzstaffel

The Schutzstaffel (SS), or Protective Squad, was created in 1923 as a specialized unit of fifty men as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard, composed of men personally loyal to him. Heinrich Himmler took over its leadership in January 1929, when it had about 280 men. Himmler’s visions for his organization could have been inspired by his own Roman Catholic upbringing, and his admiration for the military strength and obedience of the Jesuit order. In its creation, Himmler conceived of this paramilitary group composed of persons of high moral caliber, honesty, decency, committed to the Nazi vision and agenda, and thoroughly antisemitic in orientation. The SS was technically part of the Sturmabteilung (SA) until July 1934. Wearing distinctive black uniforms to distinguish them from the SA—uniforms created by fashion designer Hugo Boss—applicants for membership had to submit genealogies proving pure Aryan ancestry for at least four generations in order to qualify. The black uniforms and Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” insignias were introduced in 1932; its motto was “Loyalty is my honor.”

In 1930 Hitler made the SS the internal police of the Nazi Party and gave it responsibility for dealing with rebels within the party. The SS began to accumulate enormous power after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. In April 1933 Himmler was appointed the chief of police for Bavaria, and by 1936 he had control of every police organization in Germany, including the Gestapo. The SS completed its ascendancy within the Nazi Party in June 1934, when, on orders from Hitler, it murdered the leadership of the SA (and others) in the “Night of the Long Knives” and was made an independent party organization.

The Schutzstaffel, abbreviated as SS, was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Jews during the Holocaust, as well as millions of other victims in war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II. The SS was responsible for enforcing Nazi Germany’s racial policy, as well as general policing, detective work, and security functions. The Waffen (armed) SS consisted of combat units of troops within Nazi Germany’s military. (AP Photo)

The SS consisted of two main groups: the Allgemeine-SS and the Waffen-SS. The Allgemeine-SS was composed of police units and organizations whose job was to monitor racial matters. Included within this division were the Gestapo, regular police, and the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, which was the Nazi espionage bureau. The Waffen-SS was created in September 1933, when Hitler’s personal bodyguard was organized as a semi-independent battle formation. At its peak, the Waffen-SS fielded almost 40 full-strength divisions on both the Eastern and Western fronts. The Waffen-SS also administered the concentration camps through its Death’s Head units.

The SS was branded a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, which made membership an offense punishable by prison, regardless of any other charges that might have been brought for individual actions. Himmler escaped capture for a few weeks after Germany’s surrender, but he was caught at a British checkpoint and committed suicide in late May 1945.

The SS was an elite organization whose members felt a strong espirit de corps due to their rigorous physical training and supposed racial purity. By 1945, through Himmler’s careful accumulation of various powers, it had become second in power to no other entity within Germany. It is certain that had Hitler died before the war ended, Himmler would have succeeded him or at least played a major role in selecting his successor.

LEE BAKER

See also: Himmler, Heinrich; Nazi Book Burning; Nuremberg Trials; Pohl, Oswald; Röhm, Ernst; Schöngarth, Karl Eberhard; Sicherheitsdienst; Stroop, Jürgen; Stuckart, Wilhelm; Sturmabteilung; Topography of Terror; Waffen-SS; Wirth, Christian; Wolff, Karl

Further Reading

Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Graber, G. S. The History of the SS. London: Robert Hale, 1978.

Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s Head. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969.

Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation. London: Heinemann, 1956.

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Second Generation

A term that refers to the children of Holocaust survivors and victims. As the Holocaust generation rapidly diminishes, the second generation is becoming more and more central to understanding the Holocaust and the memories and myriad issues it has produced. The second generation has had to deal with a host of issues that spring directly from their parents’ experiences. Many feel obligated to preserve their parents’ memories, which becomes a burden for some because they find themselves having to carry “transmitted trauma,” particularly after their parents have died. This is not an easy task. Most members of the second generation have been affected by their parents’ experiences in one way or another, and to varying degrees.

The children of non-Jewish survivors and victims have had a particularly difficult time coming to terms with the Holocaust because the larger culture has tended to view the Holocaust as purely a Jewish experience. And while Jews certainly suffered more than any other group, hundreds of thousands of victims and survivors were not Jews. Yet, there is little popular recognition of that, which has made it more difficult for non-Jews to process their emotions and memories. Some children of first-generation non-Jewish survivors have had to deal with guilt in the mistaken assumption that their parents did not suffer as much as Jews.

In addition, non-Jewish children have not had the same sense of cohesiveness as that of Jewish children, and they have not had access to the large number of support organizations that Jews established soon after the Holocaust ended. There is a feeling among some non-Jewish children that their memories and voices have not been heard with the same intensity and variation as the many Jewish stories about the Holocaust.

The perspective by which most second-generation victims and survivors view the Holocaust is fundamentally different from that of their parents or society at large. The second generation has the ability to judge the Holocaust knowing the after-effects of it and how they have impacted those involved in it. This retrospective viewpoint can be very useful, but it also means that the second generation must rely increasingly on their memories or perceptions of their parents’ memories, in effect second-generation memories, which can be problematic.

Those among the second generation have also experienced a far more complex and nuanced understanding of the Holocaust, particularly when compared to other individuals who have had no familial connections to it. They have learned that some survivors are not necessarily saints, or even “good” people. Others in the second generation came to learn from their parents that the Holocaust was not always black and white or good versus bad. Some survivors, for example, have told their children that some Jews during the Holocaust behaved abhorrently. Other have told stories of heroic Germans, Austrians, Poles, and others who are often grouped together with perpetrators in a monolithic way.

There can be no doubt that many in the second generation have borne—and continue to bear—the emotional and psychic scars of the Holocaust, which were (knowingly or not) passed on to them. Many Holocaust survivors suffered from lifelong emotional and mental afflictions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Until the 1970s, however, these problems went largely unrecognized and untreated, meaning that the children of those suffering from such illnesses were subjected to less-than-ideal family relationships and childhoods. As children, some in the second generation were ashamed of their parents, not because they were Holocaust survivors, but because they exhibited strange behaviors that did not mesh with the norms of the larger society in which they lived. These issues significantly affected some in the second generation, but they also affected their relationships to their parents.

Several recent studies have shown that some in the second generation are also prone to emotional disturbances and even PTSD, despite the fact that they did not experience the Holocaust themselves. One study conducted in 2010 has even suggested that there are subtle differences in the genetic makeup of Holocaust survivors, which might be passed on to their children. It is not yet known how this might affect the children, however. Another recent study conducted at an Israeli university, however, has asserted that children of the Holocaust are no more likely to suffer emotional trauma than those who have no connection to it, unless their parents had suffered “extreme trauma” during the Holocaust.

The second generation has also begun producing a varied and rich body of work on the Holocaust, although many of its authors have experienced—to varying degrees—the same problems and limitations that the second generation in general has experienced. Some are like Art Spiegelman (author of Maus and Maus II), who has poignantly described how the Holocaust affected his parents, changing their lives as well as his in dramatic ways. Spiegelman had a contentious relationship with his father, which is one of the major themes in his graphic novels. Several other works also feature this theme.

More recently, studies have begun to be made of the grandchildren of the Holocaust, known in some circles as the Third Generation, or 3G. As the last generation of Jews who will have had firsthand relationships with survivors of the Holocaust, some see that they have a very special responsibility to ensure that the legacy of their grandparents lives on in the work they do, the lives they lead, and the memory they seek to transmit. In some Jewish communities, Third Generation activity is becoming a new vehicle for Jewish identity formation, and broad networks are being created.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Maus and Maus II; Survivor Testimony

Further Reading

Grimwood, Marita. Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Hass, Aaron. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Jilovsky, Esther, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki (Eds.). In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015.

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Segerstedt, Torgny

Torgny Segerstedt was a Swedish journalist who served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Handelstidningen, one of Sweden’s leading liberal newspapers, between 1917 and 1945. The son of a teacher, he was born in Karlstad in 1876 and educated at Lund University, where he taught the history of religion from 1904 to 1912. In 1913 he moved to Stockholm University, where he taught until joining the newspaper in 1917.

Segerstedt’s resistance to Nazism began as soon as Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Through the pages of his paper he launched an unceasing campaign against Hitler, starting with the comment that “To force the politics and press of the entire world to deal with that character, that is unforgivable. Mr. Hitler is an insult.” He continued with other articles, prompting a response within days from senior Nazi Hermann Göring, who protested that the tenor of Segerstedt’s articles, if continued, could threaten relations between Germany and Sweden.

Segerstedt’s criticism saw him become one of the earliest European journalists to recognize where Nazism could lead, identifying that it could eventually lead to a new global conflict. In years to come, members of the Swedish government expressed concern at Segerstedt’s condemnations, but he persisted nonetheless. As Nazi anti-Jewish measures intensified, he wrote in response to Sweden’s silence on the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, “We are responsible for what we say and for what we do not say.”

Segerstedt opposed Sweden’s participation at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 and was critical of the high point of British and French appeasement of Hitler, the Munich Agreement of September 1938. The excesses of Nazism, culminating with the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, saw his campaign continue with relentless vigor.

On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union—at that time allied to Germany—attacked Sweden’s immediate neighbor, Finland. Then, on April 9, 1940, Norway and Denmark were invaded by Germany. With war encroaching on Scandinavia, the Swedish government began to fight hard to maintain its neutrality, desperate not to antagonize the Nazis, and press censorship was introduced resulting in Segerstedt’s editorials being cut. His response was to leave blank columns as an indication to his readers that press freedom had been assaulted.

Across Nazi-occupied Scandinavia, Segerstedt’s articles and the Handelstidningen newspaper were banned, a measure that only served to give inspiration to resistance movements in Norway and Denmark. Indeed, in Norway the paper was smuggled into both countries, the intention being to give hope to the fighters that they were not alone.

Throughout the war years Segerstedt continued to defy his government, which, in turn, held that he was too uncompromising in his sustained criticism of Nazi Germany. In 1940, at the request of the government, King Gustaf V called Segerstedt to Stockholm’s Royal Palace for an audience in which he reproached Segerstedt for his irresponsibility. The king informed him that “If Sweden gets into the war, it will be your fault.” When Segerstedt objected and tried to point out the morality of his stance, the king is reputed to have said: “We know why you are defending the Jews.”

In this regard, Segerstedt’s relationship with his Jewish mistress, Maja Forssman, was being thrown in his face. Soon after this Handelstidningen began to lose its advertising sponsors, while certain editions of the newspaper were actually seized by the government amid threats from Berlin. Despite such pressure, Segerstedt never gave in and maintained his condemnation of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Segerstedt’s story relates one man’s moral courage in the face of intense pressure to back down for the sake of state interests. At the same time that Prime Minister Per-Albin Hansson, a longtime friend, pleaded with him not to drag Sweden into the war, he continued his writing—indeed, it has been estimated that Segerstedt wrote up to ten thousand articles across the span of his career. Of course, along the way he made many enemies. Several even played the antisemitic card in view of his relationship with Maja Forssman, sending him hate mail and calling him a “lackey” of the Jews.

On March 31, 1945, after a walk with his dogs (one of whom he had named “Winston” in honor of the British prime minister), Segerstedt fell ill and died in Gothenburg.

He was recalled in an award-winning movie made in 2012, The Last Sentence (dir. Jan Troell; Swedish title, Dom över död man, or Judgement on the Dead), which painted a particularly sensitive picture of Segerstedt as a man of intense convictions who struggled with what he saw as his moral duty in a world of increasing immorality. Starring Jesper Christensen, the film shows a Segerstedt who is zealous in his opposition to Hitler, conflicted in his interpersonal relations with those around him, and a major hero of the opposition to Nazism—against the advice of his friends, the preferences of his government, and the demands of his king.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Göring, Hermann; Kristallnacht; Munich Agreement; Olympic Games, 1936; Sweden; Upstander

Further Reading

Ekman, Stig, and Klas Amark (Eds.). Sweden’s Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2003.

Holmila, Antero. Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Koblik, Steven. The Stones Cry Out: Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1945. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989.

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Serbia

Serbia was occupied by German forces in April 1941. By August 1942 it became the second country in Europe—second only to Estonia—to declare itself Judenfrei (free of Jews); such was the scope and lethality of the Holocaust in Serbia.

During the years that are relevant to the Holocaust, Serbia was an independent republic within the broader Federation of Yugoslavia. Its capital, Belgrade, was also the capital of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia attempted to remain neutral during the initial years of World War II. When this was no longer possible, it joined Germany and the Axis powers on March 25, 1941. A coup was immediately staged by military officers who opposed the decision to ally with Germany. This, in turn, resulted in Hitler’s decision to invade Yugoslavia, which Germany—along with Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary—did on April 6, 1941. One week later, Germany occupied Belgrade, and 11 days after the invasion, on April 17, 1941, Yugoslavia officially surrendered. The four invading powers divided Yugoslavia among themselves. Serbia was occupied by Germany.

Before the month was out, the German occupiers were instituting anti-Jewish measures, similar to those that had been in place in Germany for years. These included registration with the police; restrictions against practicing certain professions; the need to wear an identifying Star of David on all outer clothing; restrictions on food; and a prohibition against the use of public transportation.

What occurred over the next 13 months—from April 1941 to May 1942—was the near-annihilation of the Jewish community in Serbia, which had numbered about 16,000 at the start of the war. Initially the Nazis intended to deport all the Jews from Serbia to the “East” (a euphemism for the extermination camps in Poland), but when that proved unworkable, and upon the advice of Adolf Eichmann, the decision was made for extermination.

The first wave of killing was focused on Jewish men. They were imprisoned in detention camps, including Topovske Šupe. During this time there was significant partisan resistance, leading to the issuance of an order by the Germans that proved disastrous for the Jews. It was an order for reprisal killing: for each German killed, a hundred Jews, communists, suspected communists, and others were to be killed; for each German wounded, fifty were to be killed. Since Jews and communists were conflated in the Nazi worldview, it was not surprising that nearly all Jewish men (approximately 8,000) were killed by November 1941. Once there were no more Jews to be killed, non-Jews became victims, including 1,000 male Roma. The death toll—both Jews and non-Jewish Serbs—is estimated to have reached 30,000.

In December 1941 the Nazis shifted their focus to Jewish women and children. By that time, the Semlin (Sajmište) concentration camp was built and began receiving this cohort of victims.

The Semlin camp was built in Belgrade on what were the Belgrade Exhibition Grounds. The now-empty pavilions on that site had been used in 1937 by Yugoslavia and other countries participating in the international exhibition. In October 1941 the decision was made by the Germans to convert these grounds and the pavilions into a concentration camp. It was named the Judenlager Semlin (the Semlin Jewish camp). Jews were forced to work on this conversion through November 1941, with Jewish women and children from Belgrade entering the camp in early December. More than 5,000 Jews were there by the end of the year, with that number set to expand to 7,000 in the early months of 1942. The combination of a particularly cold winter in 1941–1942, terrible conditions of overcrowding in the pavilions (now barracks), and a wholly inadequate diet, led to the death of more than 500 Jews by March 1942.

As was the case with Serbia’s Jewish men, the Nazis had at one time entertained the possibility of deporting the women and children to the “East,” and made the same decision to kill them instead. However, unlike the men who had been shot, the women and children were killed in the spring of 1942 by the use of a gas van. This was a van that had a sealed divider that separated the victims from the driver. It was configured so the van’s exhaust was redirected into the sealed section, thereby asphyxiating the women and children. More than 6,300 Jewish women and children were killed in this manner, meaning that virtually no Jews—men or women—were still alive in Serbia.

Romani victims were also brought to Semlin. They, however, fared better than the Jews. Although all were subject to terrible conditions and an unknown number were killed throughout Serbia, most of them were released from Semlin during the first four months of 1942.

In May 1942, with the Serbian Jewish population almost completely eliminated, Semlin was converted to a detention camp and a distribution center for all of Yugoslavia. By August 1942 Serbia declared itself Judenfrei. While this was not completely true, the magnitude of the loss was staggering.

The impact of Nazi occupation was just as devastating in Vojvodina, an autonomous province in the north of Serbia. It was composed of four districts or regions: Baranja, in the northwest, and Bacˇka, in central Vojvodina, were controlled by Hungary; Syrmia, in the southwest, was controlled by the Nazi-puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia; and Banat (sometimes referred to as “the Banat”), the eastern third of Vojvodina, was, like Serbia, controlled by Germany, although in Banat the Volksdeutche (people considered to be part of the German people or race, regardless of country of citizenship, living outside of Germany), a large minority, played a role in administering and enforcing the occupation.

Most of the Jews of Banat—about 2,500 in number—were deported to Serbia and killed, but not before they were tortured by the Volksdeutsche. Although Baranja had a very small Jewish community of perhaps 500, the Bacˇka Jewish community had some 20,000 Jews. These Jews were subject to beatings, torture, and killing by the occupying Hungarian forces. For example, over a two-day period in January 1942 the Hungarian army killed approximately 1,100 Jews in Bacˇka and an additional 900 Serbs. The vast number of Bacˇka Jews were ultimately deported to and killed in Auschwitz.

The statistics of all of this killing in Serbia and its autonomous province of Vojvodina show how severely the Jewish community was decimated during the Holocaust. Although, as noted, the Nazi occupiers of Serbia declared it to be Judenfrei, the fact is that there were Jewish survivors, albeit in very small numbers. Of the approximately 16,000 Jews living in Serbia when World War II broke out, only 1,500 survived. Of the approximately 20,000 Jews in Vojvodina (most in the Bacˇka region), only 3,000 survived. This represented a total loss of almost 90% of all the Jews in this area.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Croatia; Ethnic Cleansing; Gas Vans; Jasenovac; Krajugevac Massacre; Rademacher, Franz; Ustashe; Yugoslavia

Further Reading

Mojzes, Paul. Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century. Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.

Ramet, Sabrina P., and Ola Listhaug (Eds.) Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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Seyss-Inquart, Arthur

Arthur Seyss-Inquart was a prominent Austrian Nazi and Reich commissioner in the Netherlands, largely responsible for the persecution of Dutch Jews.

Born in Stannern, Moravia, on July 22, 1892, Seyss-Inquart studied law at the University of Vienna before joining the Austro-Hungarian army. During World War I, he saw action and was badly wounded. After the war he became a lawyer in Vienna, where he developed right-wing views. A strong advocate of Anschluss (union with Germany) in the 1930s, Seyss-Inquart was regarded as the leader of the small Austrian Nazi organization. Publicly he sought to achieve reconciliation with the government headed by Kurt von Schuschnigg, but behind the scenes he eagerly undermined the Austrian state.

Seyss-Inquart became state councillor in May 1937, and in February 1938, following pressure by Adolf Hitler, Schuschnigg appointed Seyss-Inquart to the position of minister of the interior. When Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite on the Anschluss issue, the German government pressured him to resign on March 13, 1938, in favor of Seyss-Inquart as chancellor. The same day, German forces moved across the border, and Hitler announced the union of Austria with Germany.

Seyss-Inquart then became the Reich representative in the former Austria and minister without portfolio in Hitler’s cabinet. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and then conquered the country within two weeks, Seyss-Inquart served as deputy governor there under Hans Frank. Displeased with the atrocities committed by SS forces and unable to exert any influence over policies, he asked for a new appointment.

In May 1940 Seyss-Inquart became Reich commissioner of the newly occupied Netherlands. He tried to come to terms with the Dutch and have them carry out a Nazification program, but instead of achieving collaboration, he found himself dealing with the Dutch Nazi movement. In Seyss-Inquart’s view, Dutch Nazi leader Anton Mussert’s followers were unsuited for German occupation policy. They were only a small minority with no real support from the Dutch population and no administrative experience.

Therefore, Seyss-Inquart preferred to work with, and through, the traditional elites. He sought to resign his post, but Hitler refused his request, believing that Seyss-Inquart’s moderate approach would achieve the desired results. On the other hand, Seyss-Inquart instituted a reign of terror toward certain elements of the Dutch population. He was partly responsible for recruitment of Dutch workers to be relocated in the Reich, was wholly responsible for the deportation of scores of thousands of Dutch Jews to the extermination camps, and worked to ensure German exploitation of the Dutch economy.

After the war Seyss-Inquart was charged with war crimes and tried at Nuremberg. Specifically, the charges against him cited his heavy-handed repression of the Dutch resistance effort, the placement of thousands of Jews in the Amsterdam ghetto, and the deportation of some 110,000 Jews to death camps in the East, where all but 5,000 perished—leading to an overall loss of 75% of Dutch Jews (including foreign nationals) between 1940 and 1945. Seyss-Inquart was found guilty and hanged on October 16, 1946.

MARTIN MOLL

See also: Austria; Mussert, Anton Adriaan; Netherlands; Nisko Plan; Nuremberg Trials

Further Reading

Hirschfeld, Gerhard. Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Pauley, Bruce F. Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis: A History of Austrian National Socialism. London: Macmillan, 1981.

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Shanghai Ghetto

The Shanghai Ghetto was an area in the Hongkew (Hongkou) section of Shanghai, China, in which thousands of refugee Jews from Germany, Austria, Russia, and Poland lived before and during World War II. The area, which covered about one square mile, saw a large influx of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe beginning in the 1930s; by 1939 the number of Jews residing there was about 17,000. There were small concentrations of Jews in other parts of the city, some of whom had been there since the early part of the 20th century. After the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, Japanese forces occupied much of Shanghai, but they did not immediately impose restrictions on Jews residing there. Not until the December 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, which brought war between Japan and the United States, did the Japanese require virtually all Jews in Shanghai to live in the ghetto.

The Shanghai ghetto was part of the International Settlement, which dated to 1842, when the port at Shanghai was opened to international trade and commerce. It was administered by a council of Western nations including France, the United States, Britain, Italy, and Portugal. The first Jews to arrive in the settlement were Sephardic Jews from Iraq, who quickly established commercial enterprises there. They numbered between 700 and 1,000 people. During and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the settlement became home to several thousand Ashkenazi Jews who were fleeing persecution. Many became shopkeepers and small business owners who catered to the city’s small Jewish population.

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, German Jews began migrating to Shanghai in increasing numbers; many were professionals and businessmen and their families. In 1938, after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March and the November Kristallnacht Pogrom, which saw widespread destruction of Jewish-owned businesses and property, the pace of Jewish immigration to Shanghai increased dramatically, with as many as 15,000 arriving there between 1938 and 1941. Between late 1940 and early 1941, some 2,100 Jews from Lithuania also found refuge in Shanghai. This brought the total number of Jews in Shanghai to about 24,000; virtually all lived in the International Settlement. After the Pearl Harbor attack, however, hardly any Jews were able to make their way to Shanghai.

Even though the Japanese were allied with Nazi Germany, they did not share the same hatred or antipathy toward Jews. Most Japanese occupation officials in Shanghai viewed them simply as stateless refugees. Indeed, as the war progressed and the Germans called for the Japanese to institute draconian measures against Shanghai’s Jewish refugees, Japanese officials did not comply. In late 1942, however, the Japanese did hatch a plan that would require virtually all Jews in Shanghai to live in the “Designated Area for Stateless Refugees,” which would informally be known as the Shanghai ghetto. The plan was implemented in February and called for all Jews who had arrived in Shanghai after 1937 to reside in the ghetto. This pushed the area’s Jewish population to some 20,000. The Japanese did this to protect the refugees and to ensure that they did not become collaborators with Chinese forces.

Although conditions in the ghetto were not nearly as bad as those in Europe, Jewish refugees nevertheless found themselves chronically short of food and clothing and forced to reside in crowded and primitive living quarters. The Japanese did not erect a wall or fence around the area, but they did enforce a curfew and required that anyone leaving or entering the ghetto have a written pass. Native Chinese continued to live among the Jews in the ghetto, which lessened their isolation. The Shanghai Ghetto witnessed the thriving of Jewish education, culture, and religious observances, unlike Nazi-run ghettos in Europe, where such things were strictly forbidden. The ghetto had its own newspapers, theaters, schools, sports teams, synagogues, and even cabarets. Indeed, each group (German, Austrian, Russian, and Polish) had their own such institutions, based on language and culture.

In 1944 U.S. bombers began operations against Shanghai in the final push to defeat Japan and drive its troops out of China. In July 1944, an air raid on Shanghai resulted in the deaths of 40 Jewish refugees in the ghetto; it is believed that as many as several hundred Chinese residents were also killed. This was the only time during the war that Jewish refugees in Shanghai were killed. American troops entered Shanghai and liberated it in September 1945. Thereafter, many Jews left, choosing to settle in the new State of Israel after 1948. After Mao Zedong’s communist forces took control on mainland China in late 1949, most of the remaining Jews left. Today, it is believed that no Jews are left in Shanghai.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Fugu Plan; Ghettos

Further Reading

Bacon, Ursula. Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China. Milwaukie (OR): Milestone Books, 2004.

Heppner, Ernest G. Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto. Lincoln (NE): University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Kranzler, David. Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community in Shanghai, 1938–1945. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976.

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Sharp, Waitstill and Martha

Waitstill Sharp was a Unitarian minister and humanitarian who helped hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees in Europe during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He was aided in these efforts by his wife, Martha, who was a prominent American social worker. In 2006 Israel’s Yad Vashem posthumously honored the Sharps as Righteous among the Nations.

Waitstill Sharp was born in Boston in 1902 to an old and distinguished family. He attended Boston University, Harvard Law School (class of 1926), and earned a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1931. He then became involved in the Unitarian Church, was ordained a minister, and first presided over a congregation in Pennsylvania in 1933. Martha Sharp was born Martha Ingham Dickie in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1905. She studied at Pembroke College (Brown University) and then undertook advanced studies in social work at Northwestern University. She also earned a master’s degree from Radcliffe College (Harvard University). Martha went on to become a noted social worker, having wed Waitstill in 1927. In 1936 the couple moved back to the Boston area when Waitstill became pastor of a Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

In 1939 the American Unitarian Association asked the Sharps to join the Unitarian Service Committee, which was tasked with aiding displaced persons and refugees in Europe as World War II approached. The couple immediately accepted the challenge and were sent to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where they administered aid and relief to hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. They were also instrumental in securing visas for several hundred refugees and arranged transport to other nations, principally Great Britain, with Martha personally escorting 35 refugees there. In the late summer of 1939 the Sharps were warned that the Gestapo was aware of their activities and would likely arrest them.

In August 1940 the Sharps fled Prague and passed through Vichy-controlled France. They were bound for Lisbon, Portugal, where they hoped to continue their aid and rescue efforts. While in France, they were alerted that Lion Feuchtwanger, a prominent German-Jewish writer, had been imprisoned there. The Sharps set in motion an elaborate rescue scheme to free Feuchtwanger, which was facilitated by the U.S. consulate in Marseille, as well as by Varian Fry, an American journalist and emissary for the U.S. Emergency Rescue Mission. The plan was akin to a plot from a spy thriller, with Feuchtwanger spirited out of prison disguised as a woman. In September 1940, Martha, disguised as a local peasant woman, accompanied Feuchtwanger and his wife to a train at the French-Spanish border. Once they reached Spain, Waitstill and Martha secured passage for the couple on a ship to the United States later that same month.

After this heroic rescue, Martha returned to France to arrange for travel permits for a number of refugee children, including nine Jews. After having secured the permits and the required U.S. visas, in late November 1940, Martha sent the children to the United States; they arrived in New York the following month. The Sharps also worked with the World YMCA to help secure the release of Czech prisoners of war being held by Vichy. The Sharps aided a number of other Jewish and non-Jewish refugees in neutral Lisbon.

After the war ended, Waitstill and Martha separated and were later divorced; both believed that the stress of their rescue efforts had led to the split. Waitstill continued on with the Unitarian Church and was involved in a variety of philanthropic and relief efforts. Martha became heavily involved in Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization, and also helped resettle Jews—many of them children—in Israel after its formal founding in 1948. Between 1950 and 1953 she also sat on the National Security Resources Board, an advisory panel designed to keep the U.S. president and secretary of defense informed on issues relating to defense and national security. Waitstill died in 1984; Martha died in 1999.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Fry, Varian; Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations

Further Reading

Marino, Andy. A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Subak, Susan Elisabeth. Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis. Lincoln (NE): University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

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Sheptytsky, Andrey

Andrey Sheptytsky was the Metropolitan archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Lvov (Lviv) between 1901 and 1944, harboring hundreds of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries during the Holocaust.

Born on July 29, 1865, in the village of Prylbychi, Galicia, he came from a family that had strong Polish, aristocratic, and Catholic roots, though with an Orthodox Ukrainian line stretching back many centuries. Sheptytsky received his education first at home and then in Kraków. He studied law in Kraków and Breslau (Wrocław), earning a doctorate in 1888, and then entered a Basilian monastery of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and took the name Andrey, after Ukraine’s patron saint. He was ordained on August 22, 1892, following which he studied at the Jesuit Seminary in Kraków. Here, in 1894, he received a second doctorate, in theology. On September 17, 1899, he was consecrated a bishop by Metropolitan Julian Sas-Kuilovsky, and the following year, on December 12, 1900, appointed Metropolitan Archbishop of Lvov.

During World War I, Sheptytsky was arrested by the Russians due to his national origin in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In March 1918, as a result of the Russian Revolution, he was released and returned to Ukraine, at that time a quasi-independent republic under German suzerainty.

Before World War II Metropolitan Sheptytsky became the de facto head of all Ukrainian aspirations, and where Jewish-Christian relations were concerned he had a long and sympathetic past from which he could draw. While a student he had learned Hebrew; in his pastoral visits to mixed Ukrainian-Jewish villages he would be met by local delegations led by the town or village priest, who would be followed by the local rabbi carrying the village Torah. Given the time and place, Sheptytsky’s relationship with the Jews was strong.

That said, Sheptytsky’s responses to the war were to be diverse. Following the Nazi invasion of Ukraine at the end of June 1941, the Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists, led by Yaroslav Stetsko, declared an independent Ukrainian state. This was immediately crushed by the Germans, but Sheptytsky had already issued a pastoral letter welcoming the Nazis as liberators from the Soviet yoke and recognizing Stetsko as de facto head of the new Ukrainian government. This would throw a huge cloud over his subsequent actions, the more so as anti-Jewish pogroms broke out immediately after the declaration of independence was announced.

Sheptytsky knew of the pogroms; he had been informed of developments on either July 1 or 2 by Lvov’s chief rabbi, Ezekiel Lewin. The extent to which he tried to check them, however, is highly disputed. It is likely, in fact, that he might have had little control over what was happening in any case, given the mob nature of the riots.

How Sheptytsky responded to Chief Rabbi Lewin is unknown to this day. It is clear, however, that he offered sanctuary to Lewin and his family, and that Lewin accepted the offer on behalf of his children but refused it for himself, saying that his duty was to stay with his community. Later, he was arrested by Ukrainian militia and murdered. Sheptytsky took charge of two of Lewin’s three sons (the other died in a Nazi camp), providing forged certificates of baptism, new identities, and instructions to his priests to train the boys to pray in Ukrainian. Both were to survive.

From early 1942 onward Sheptytsky had been providing a refuge to Jews through his church, instructing monasteries and convents to follow his lead. From then until the liberation, no Jewish child was forcibly converted to Christianity, and all were to survive the Nazis. It has been calculated that Sheptytsky personally arranged for the hiding of 150 Jews—mostly children and about a dozen rabbis—in his official residence and throughout his monasteries.

He also protested the killing of Jews to high-ranking Nazis who made official visits to his residence, and sent a letter to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler objecting to Nazi treatment of the Jews and the use of Ukrainians in anti-Jewish repressions. His letter included a request that Ukrainian police and militias be removed from duty in the camps. On November 21, 1942, he issued a strong pastoral letter to all Ukrainians denouncing the killing. As a final indicator of his attitude toward Nazi antisemitic measures, he wrote a number of letters to Pope Pius XII advising him of the Nazis’ “diabolical” nature.

While it seems clear that Sheptytsky sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, there is a great deal of ambiguity regarding his support for the Nazis. He did not sympathize with Nazi ideology but initially thought that German rule would be better than that of the Soviets, and he appeared to hold hopes of exploiting the German presence in order to buttress a possible Ukrainian state. The invasion of Ukraine in the summer of 1941 did not at first shake this belief; indeed, it took nearly a year before he realized that Nazi occupation policies were even more brutal than those of the Soviets. It was only after this that he really began to assist the Jews, leading some to ask whether his early support for the Nazis actually served to assist them in the first year of the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Adding to the complexity of Sheptytsky’s response to the Nazis and, through that, to the Holocaust is the support he gave to the creation, in April 1943, of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division (“Galician”), a German military formation initially made up of volunteers from Galicia with a Ukrainian ethnic background. Sheptytsky blessed the division and those who joined it—perhaps thinking that they could serve as the nucleus of a future Ukrainian army, perhaps in the hope that they could protect the country in the event of a German collapse and Soviet reconquest.

The gray area involving Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky during the Holocaust is thus highly complex. Many of those he saved have sought to have him recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations, including former Polish foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Roald Hoffmann, and Chief Rabbi David Kahane of the Israeli Air Force. In Israel, the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous has debated in considerable detail whether Sheptytsky’s initial support for the Nazi occupation contributed to the murder of Jews in Ukraine and has, as a result, continued to deny him as one of the Righteous among the Nations. Ironically, Sheptytsky’s brother, Klementiy, was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations in 1995, and on June 27, 2001, was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

On November 1, 1944, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky died at the age of 79 in Lvov. In 1958 an initial investigation into the cause for his possible beatification and canonization commenced, and on July 16, 2015, Pope Francis signed a decree declaring him “venerable,” an initial step in the sainthood process.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Children during the Holocaust; Pius XII; Rescuers of Jews; Ukraine; Waffen-SS

Further Reading

Bank, Jan, with Lieve Gevers. Churches and Religion in the Second World War. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Paldiel, Mordecai. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution.” Rockville (MD): Schreiber, 2000.

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Shirer, William L.

William Lawrence (Bill) Shirer was an American journalist, war correspondent, and historian. Born in Chicago in 1904, he attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in 1925 moved to France to take up a position as European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. In 1931 he married Theresa (“Tess”) Stiberitz, an Austrian photographer. Between 1934 and 1940 Shirer lived and worked in Nazi Germany, working for the Berlin bureau of the Universal News Service until 1937 and then as European bureau chief of CBS radio based in Vienna, reporting to Edward R. Murrow.

William L. Shirer was a leading American journalist in prewar Europe. He and his wife Tess would often shelter Jews in their own home and provide them with foreign currency and the means to escape the country for other lands of refuge. Upon leaving Germany in December 1940, he smuggled out voluminous notes and diaries that were subsequently published and did much to alert American public opinion as to why the Nazis had to be resisted in the future. (Corbis via Getty Images)

Fluent in German, French, and Italian, Shirer thrived in his new environment. When the German annexation of Austria took place on March 12, 1938, Shirer, as the only American broadcaster in Vienna, was obliged to fly to London to report on what he had seen; he could not do so in Vienna itself, as CBS did not possess radio facilities there. With this as a precedent, he then reported on all the major developments in Europe that followed, including the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938), the German annexation of what remained of Czechoslovakia (March 15, 1939), and the German invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939).

Throughout this time, Shirer was an acute observer of Nazi policies regarding the harassment of Jews, and almost as soon as he arrived in Germany he was conscious of the Nazi attempt to terminate the Jewish presence. In 1935 he reported on the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their German citizenship and introduced other restrictions reducing them to second-class noncitizens. He continued his reports the following year when additional restrictions on Jews were made, and with each successive antisemitic measure he became more and more disgusted by what he witnessed.

Wherever possible, Shirer took a stand against the Nazis through his reportage, but he found himself in a difficult position. There was only so much on which he could report, as his outgoing dispatches were watched carefully by the Nazi state as a condition of his credentials being respected. While reporting the 1936 Olympics from Berlin, for example, he was publicly condemned by the Ministry of Propaganda for exposing the antisemitism he detested. He was threatened with expulsion and accused of being a “German hater,” in what would not be an isolated reference.

The threat of expulsion dogged Shirer. He was concerned that if he went too far he could suffer the same fate as Dorothy Thompson, who, in August 1934, became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany for having written articles considered offensive to the regime. Shirer’s reporting, therefore, was fenced in by a form of self-censorship; this was to become much more formalized once war broke out, when state-imposed censorship was introduced.

As foreigners, Bill and Tess Shirer did what they could to help such Jews as they encountered, though the position of Tess, as an Austrian-born U.S. citizen, placed her in a precarious position. They put themselves at risk by sheltering Jews whom they knew personally, using their home as a refuge for those who had gone into hiding. Shirer exploited his contacts located in the United States, as well as in the British, French, and Swiss embassies and consulates, to try to get visas for Jews trying desperately to leave Germany. Despite the ban on trading in foreign currency, he also worked to procure moneys to help tide Jews over once they managed to move to new countries.

Occasionally the Shirers would find themselves harboring a Jew who had just been released from a jail or concentration camp. In such circumstances, he related later, their guest would often have been badly beaten or mistreated, and they would care for him until he had recovered sufficiently to be able to return to his family in something resembling a passable condition. For all his efforts at saving people, however, Shirer knew that his contribution was only a minor one, as most Jews could not avail themselves of the help he and Tess were able to provide.

As a journalist from a neutral country, Shirer was permitted to remain in Germany and report back to the United States. He covered the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, followed by Germany’s further invasions of the Low Countries and France on and after May 10. He moved with the German armies as they progressed through France and was the only foreign correspondent to report in person to the American people on the French surrender at Compiègne on June 22, 1940.

Despite this, he found himself increasingly frustrated by the Nazi state from which he was reporting. With Germany victorious on all fronts, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels placed pressure on Shirer to broadcast official accounts of Germany’s war efforts, rather than independent reports. Shirer began pestering CBS management in New York to relieve him of this assignment, and the situation was not helped when he learned that the Gestapo was waiting for him to slip up in one of his reports so they could arrest him for espionage. Finally, he managed to leave Germany in December 1940. As he left, he smuggled with him his diaries and notes from his time in Germany. These were to be published in 1941 as Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941.

Much of what Shirer wrote did not refer specifically to Jews; he was too savvy to commit his thoughts to paper, and certainly not to broadcast them. Shirer’s resistance to Nazism, where Jews were concerned, must be measured by his actions—and in this regard, his behavior spoke loudly. Underscoring his commitment to covering the crimes of Nazi Germany, he returned to Europe to report on the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.

Shirer’s masterwork, although it appeared well after the end of the war, was to be his study of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which appeared in 1960. One of the first major studies of its subject, it won the 1961 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. The author of many other important works, Shirer died in Boston in 1993, aged 89.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Anschluss; Czechoslovakia; Munich Agreement; Nuremberg Laws; Olympic Games, 1936; Rescuers of Jews

Further Reading

Cuthbertson, Ken. A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

Wick, Steve. The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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Shoah

The word Shoah is a Hebrew term used to describe the mass murder of several million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during the 1930s and 1940s. Within a number of European languages, it has come to serve as a synonym for the English word Holocaust. Shoah may be translated as “Devastation,” “Destruction,” or “Catastrophe.” In recent years, an increasing number of scholars, Holocaust researchers, and Jews have begun to eschew the use of the term Holocaust, and have been substituting it with the word Shoah.

One of the problems with the term Holocaust is that it was a label given to the genocide of the Jews largely by non-Jews. The other problem with the term is that it is derived from the Hebrew Bible concept of offering a complete and consumable burnt offering to God for the expiation of sins. The Holocaust was certainly not an offering to God, so scholars and others sought a more appropriate descriptor for the genocide of the Jews.

The word Shoah can be found in the Book of Isaiah (10:3) and in that context refers to the day of reckoning that will precede the final judgment of the Israelites. Although Shoah is perhaps closer than the word Holocaust in describing the Nazi-inspired genocide of European Jews, it too does not fully describe the events of the 1930s and 1940s, which were not set into motion by God but rather by evil-minded human beings. The term Shoah was first used in print in 1940, and it was popularized in 1985, when French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann released a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary film by the same name that examined the events of the Holocaust and its aftereffects through a series of interviews with witnesses and survivors.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Churban; Final Solution; Holocaust

Further Reading

Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001.

Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt, 1986.

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Shoah

A nine-and-a-half-hour film documentary on the Holocaust, directed by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, Shoah was released in 1985 and is available in several languages, with subtitles in French, English, Polish, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The documentary took nearly 11 years to make, as it features dozens of interviews with victims, perpetrators, and witnesses that were conducted in 14 different countries. It is unusual among documentaries in that it does not employ the use of any archival footage; rather, it lets the interviewees relay the arc of the story. There are also no narrative interpretations or conclusions. Some of the interviews go into minute detail of seemingly mundane and everyday occurrences, which taken as a whole divulge the “banality” of evil, to use Hannah Arendt’s terminology.

Because of Lanzmann’s approach to the subject, the film has a somewhat loose and fluid narrative. The documentary is, however, broken down by subject matter—it covers the Chełmno, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps and then the Warsaw Ghetto. These four general topics are treated using current-day footage and scores of interviews. Jan Karski was interviewed extensively concerning the Warsaw Ghetto. One interview with a former camp guard was filmed clandestinely; the interviewee had granted only an audio interview. Finally, historian Raul Hilberg answers questions relating to German propaganda and the Holocaust. During many of the interviews, survivors and witnesses are actually taken to the sites of massacres, where their reactions—most of them emotion-charged—add to the film’s effectiveness.

After its release, Shoah was lauded by moviegoers and critics alike as a film that literally had no equal. The celebrated reviewer Roger Ebert called it “an extraordinary film” but refused to name it best film of the year because he believed it was in a class by itself and should not be ranked against any other movies. Shoah won numerous awards and prizes in the United States and around the world.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Auschwitz; Banality of Evil; Birkenau; Chełmno; Churban; Hilberg, Raul; Holocaust; Treblinka; Warsaw Ghetto

Further Reading

Innsdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: The Complete Text of the Holocaust Film. New York: Da Capo, 1995.

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Sicherheitsdienst

The Sicherheitsdienst—the Nazi state security and intelligence agency—was created in 1931 by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the highest-ranking Nazi Party leaders. The Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers, usually abbreviated simply as SD, was founded almost two years before Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. Its primary purpose was to act as internal spy agency, but it soon became one of the prime movers of Germany’s mass deportation and extermination of European Jews. The SD detected and helped root out all actual or potential enemies of the Nazi state and worked closely with the Gestapo (secret police), which arrested, deported, or killed state enemies.

Reinhard Heydrich headed the SD until his assassination in June 1942, after which Himmler appointed Ernst Kaltenbrunner to succeed him in January 1943; he remained in the post until the end of World War II in 1945. From 1933 until 1939 the SD, which reported directly to Himmler, was run as an independent SS office. After 1939 it became part of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).

The SD employed several hundred full-time intelligence agents but made use of thousands of informants, who worked inside Germany until 1939, and then both inside Germany and in occupied territories between 1939 and 1945. As German armies pushed into areas and occupied them, the SD sometimes lent its staff to the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads, which rounded up and killed Jews and other “undesirables” in places like Poland and the western part of the Soviet Union. SD personnel were also posted to concentration and death camps, and the SD was the principal security and police force tasked with keeping order in the various Jewish ghettos throughout Europe.

Within Germany, the SD enforced Nazi racial laws by intimidating, terrorizing, killing, or deporting Jews and other groups deemed “undesirable.” It also confiscated millions of dollars’ worth of private property that had belonged to German Jews and other oppressed groups. The SD played a major role in the Kristallnacht pogrom (November 9–10, 1938), during which at least 500 Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were destroyed. According to Nazi statistics, some 90 Jews died during the pogrom (though the figure is almost certainly much higher than this), and another 30,000 were arrested and detained. Many of those men were never seen again.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which conducted the Nuremberg Trials, ruled the SD to be a criminal organization. As part of the wider effort to bring about denazification in postwar Germany, the occupying Allies banned the SD and ordered its immediate dissolution. Unfortunately, many of the SD’s leaders were never brought to justice.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Barbie, Klaus; Einsatzgruppen; Heydrich, Reinhard; Himmler, Heinrich; Höppner, Rolf-Heinz; Kaltenbrunner, Ernst; Lange, Rudolf; Nuremberg Trials; Reichssicherheitshauptamt; Rothaug, Oswald; Schutzstaffel; Topography of Terror; Wirth, Christian

Further Reading

Browder, George. Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of the SIPO and the SD. Lexington (KS): University of Kentucky Press, 1990.

Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 2011.

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Sippenhaft

Sippenhaft, or Sippenhaftung (“kin liability”) was a legal practice in Nazi Germany whereby relatives of those accused of crimes against the state were held to be equally responsible, and arrested and sometimes executed. The concept was based on ideas of blood and purity. A relative of the perpetrator could be punished in place of or in addition to the perpetrator, depending on the circumstances. These threats, fears, and infliction of Sippenhaft formed part of the Nazi system of terror.

As a legal principle, Sippenhaft is derived from traditional Germanic law (the law of Germanic peoples before the widespread adoption of Roman canon law), which accepted that the clan of a criminal was liable for offenses committed by one of its members. This law, which also prevailed among Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples, distinguished between two forms of justice for severe crimes such as murder: blood revenge, the right to extrajudicially kill a Germanic freeman in the context of clan feuds; and blood money, the obligatory pecuniary restitution given to the kin of the victim in accordance with the nature of the crime and the social status of those affected. The kin of the offender was liable to pay in addition to or in substitution for the family member who committed the crime.

Another form of Sippenhaft distinct from traditional kin liability is the practice of kin punishment, often used in Nazi Germany toward the end of World War II. Examples of Sippenhaft being used as a threat exist within the Wehrmacht from around 1943. Soldiers accused of having “blood impurities,” or soldiers conscripted from areas outside of Germany, also began to have their families threatened and punished with Sippenhaft. In Nazi Germany, the term was given a new meaning: the punishment of relatives for the offense of a family member. In this form of Sippenhaft the relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state were held to share the responsibility for those crimes and were subject to arrest and sometimes execution.

An example is the case of a soldier, Panzergrenadier Leiss, who was accused of desertion on the Eastern Front in December 1942. After the Düsseldorf Gestapo discovered supposed “Polish” links in the Leiss family, in February 1943 his wife, child, two brothers, sister, and brother-in-law were arrested and executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

By 1944 several general and individual directives were ordered within divisions and corps, threatening troops with consequences against their families.

After the failure of the July 20, 1944, Bomb Plot, SS chief Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of Nazi Party district chiefs in Posen that he would introduce absolute responsibility of kin. According to Himmler, the bomb plotters had committed treason. Their “blood” was “bad,” and that blood must therefore be “wiped out.” Accordingly, the members of the family of Claus von Stauffenberg, who had planted the bomb that failed to kill Hitler, were all under suspicion. His wife, Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp (she survived and lived until 2006). His brother Alexander, who knew nothing of the plot and was serving with the Wehrmacht in Greece, was also sent to a concentration camp. Similar punishments were meted out to the relatives of Carl Goerdeler, Henning von Tresckow, Adam von Trott zu Solz, and many other conspirators. Younger children of arrested plotters were sent to orphanages under new names: Stauffenberg’s children, for example, were renamed “Meister.” The fact that most of these families belonged to well-established Prussian aristocracy added to the zeal with which they were persecuted.

The threats of kin liability were extended to include all German troops and, in particular, German commanders. A decree of February 1945 threatened death to the relatives of military commanders who showed what Hitler regarded as cowardice or defeatism in the face of the enemy.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Gestapo; Himmler, Heinrich

Further Reading

Loeffel, Robert. Family Punishment in Nazi Germany: Sippenhaft, Terror and Myth. Houndmills, Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Loeffel, Robert. “Sippenhaft, Terror and Fear in Nazi Germany: Examining One Facet of Terror in the Aftermath of the Plot of 20 July 1944.” Contemporary European History 16, 1 (February 2007), 51–69.

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Slachta, Margit

Margit Slachta was a Hungarian pioneer in social service and a leading political figure in interwar Hungary. During the Holocaust, members of the religious order she founded, the Sisters of Social Service, worked to protect their Jewish neighbors while at the same time continuing their commitment to social justice.

Born in Kassa, Hungary, on September 18, 1884, she lived with her parents in the United States when she was a child but returned to Hungary before the turn of the century. Upon her return, she taught French and German at a Catholic school in Budapest. In 1908 she joined a religious community, the Society of the Social Mission. She became an activist for social causes, establishing the Union of Catholic Women, an organization to promote the female franchise in Hungary. As early as 1919 she organized the Catholic Women’s Party, and in 1920 became the first woman to be elected to the Hungarian Parliament (for a term lasting two years), where she campaigned on behalf of women, children, families, and the safeguarding of workers’ rights.

On May 12, 1923, Margit Slachta founded a new order, the Sisters of Social Service, whose members were dedicated to carrying out their commitment to care for those in need and combat the suffering around them. Over time, the sisters became well known throughout Hungary for nursing, midwifery, and taking care of orphans.

As an outspoken woman, committed Christian, and promoter of socially advanced causes, she defied the spirit of the age. When Hungary began to introduce measures discriminating against Jews, it was inevitable that Mother Margit (as she now was) would rebel against such developments. With the first anti-Jewish laws appearing in Hungary in 1938, she began publishing articles opposing official antisemitism in her newspaper, Voice of the Spirit. In 1943 the paper was suppressed, but Mother Margit continued to publish it underground. Sisters were instructed to familiarize themselves on Jewish matters and prepare accordingly.

Mother Margit’s political activities increased as World War II was unleashed, with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 leading to waves of Jewish refugees seeking refuge. In 1940 Hungary joined the Axis Powers, and that fall, before the Nazis insisted on it, deportations of Jews began in certain regions of the country. Mother Margit responded immediately by agitating for these actions to be stopped at once, and in one region, at least, the deportations ceased as a result of her actions.

Beyond this, she also provided shelter and protested against forced labor and antisemitic laws. In 1943 she even went to Rome to try to persuade the Vatican to step in and intervene to stop the persecution of Jews in Slovakia.

Mother Margit instructed her sisters that they had a bound duty to protect the Jews, even at the risk of their own lives. She considered it a theological matter, in view of the fact that the Jews were God’s people and the people among whom Jesus was born and raised.

Between July 15 and August 12, 1941, any Jews living in Hungary who could not prove legal residency since 1850 were deported to southern Poland, there to await their fate at the hands of the Germans. It is estimated that this numbered about 20,000 people. Upon learning this, Mother Margit demanded that the process be stopped, protesting directly to Magdolna Purgly, the wife of Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy.

When the Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944, bringing the full weight of the Holocaust with them, the Sisters of Social Service began to arrange baptisms of convenience in the hope that by doing so they would be able to spare Jews from deportation. As things got worse, the sisters focused completely on helping the Jews. Giving of themselves selflessly, they hid at least 1,000 Jews and provided food and safe houses whenever they could for fugitives.

Following Mother Margit’s lead, one of the sisters, Sára Salkaházi, took the admonition to offer her life for the Jews literally. She personally saved the lives of about 100 Jews, and as the persecution intensified during 1944 she redoubled her efforts to save as many as she could. Eventually, she was caught by Hungarian Arrow Cross soldiers and murdered on the banks of the Danube on December 27, 1944. Her body was never recovered.

In a singular act of defiance once the Nazis had invaded, Mother Margit began to live in the order’s Mother House, located on Budapest’s Thököly Street. This itself acted as a place of refuge for Jews, but its location was both ironic and a challenge, as it was situated right opposite the 14th District Arrow Cross Party headquarters. At one point, gangs invaded the house and carried out a brutal hunt for Jews, attacking Mother Margit as well as several of the sisters. On this occasion she only narrowly avoided execution.

With the end of the war, Mother Margit Slachta once more became a member of the Hungarian Parliament during the democratic period prior to the communist takeover. At the end of 1948 she fled Hungary for the West, arriving in the United States on June 22, 1949. On January 6, 1974, she died, at age 89, in Buffalo, New York. In recognition for her work in hiding Jews, supplying basic goods, and providing false evidence when in the process of saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust, she was recognized by Yad Vashem on February 18, 1969, as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Arrow Cross; Catholic Church; Hungary; Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations; Salkaházi, Sára

Further Reading

Paldiel, Mordecai. The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Hoboken (NJ): KTAV, 1993.

Reeves, T. Zane. Shoes along the Danube: Based on a True Story. Durham (CT): Strategic Book Group, 2011.

Sisters of Social Service. Blessed Sára Salkaházi, Sister of Social Service, at http://www.salkahazisara.com/sss_en.html.

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Slave Labor

During World War II, prisoners in most of the Nazi concentration camps were exploited mercilessly as slave labor. Political prisoners included communists, political dissidents and other opponents of Germany (broadly defined), as well as captured partisans and even citizens of countries occupied by the Germans randomly picked up for conscripted work details. In addition, people who had volunteered for well-paid positions in German war factories ended up as slave prisoners of the Germans once Germany began losing the war. Most abundantly taken advantage of, however, were Jews in every country occupied by the Nazis.

The foreign workers came from Germany’s satellite states or occupied territories to work for the German Reich. As early as March 1938, when Germany invaded Austria, some 100,000 Austrian civilians were taken to work in Germany, and by August 31, 1939, 70,000 workers from Bohemia and Moravia had been conscripted for work in the Reich. After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, harsh methods were used to press workers into laboring on behalf of the German war effort, as replacements for the millions of Germans who were fighting in the army.

In opposition to international law, Germany also used prisoners of war to help support the German economy. As early as fall 1939, 340,000 Polish POWs were being compelled to work the land, and in August 1942 Germany enacted a decree that made forced labor possible in all occupied countries and POW camps. In Western Europe, local authorities cooperated with the Germans in recruitment in an effort to have their own POWs released or to have the status of their POWs changed to that of foreign workers in Germany.

Although Germany recruited millions of workers between 1942 and 1944, there were never enough for the country’s needs, partly because word had spread about the terrible working conditions and the treatment of foreign workers, and partly because of Germany’s impending military defeat. Nevertheless, by late 1944 there were 9 million foreign workers (including POWs) in Germany. One out of every five workers was a foreigner, and one out of every four tanks and every four aircraft manufactured in Germany was made by foreign workers.

In most instances, foreign workers were supervised by the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police, or SiPO) and the Auslandische Arbeiter (Foreign Worker) section of the Gestapo, and members of those groups were guided by racism, xenophobia, and arbitrary decisions. They regarded Poles and Russians as inferior and subhuman beings. Thus, the East European workers were subjected to hard physical labor, humiliated, and severely penalized for misdeeds. They received very low pay, they had to wear special signs on their clothes—“P” for Poles and “Ost” (East) for Russians—and they could not socialize or mix with German society in any way. Germans who had sexual intercourse with foreign workers could be sentenced to death. Even though Western European workers were treated better, they also complained that they were treated like slaves. Jews who became foreign workers or were taken as POWs tried to avoid being identified as Jewish.

The majority of the millions of Jews caught in the Nazi net and earmarked for death were gassed upon arriving by train at one of the six Nazi death camps in Poland. In these camps only a relatively small minority were selected for labor (with the exception of Auschwitz and Majdanek), but hundreds of thousands were sent to work as slave labor in other camps, as well as in the Nazi-imposed ghettos throughout Eastern Europe. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, army units recruited Jews at random for forced labor, including removing roadblocks and paving roads. Not only were the Jews mistreated, but their work was specifically chosen to degrade them. At the same time, Jews were subject to constant beatings and harassment.

From October to December 1939 in Poland, the Nazis issued decrees drafting into compulsory labor Jewish men and women aged 14 to 60 and children aged 12 to 14. Jews had to register with the local Judenrat, the Nazi-enforced Jewish council, and they had to carry out temporary work assignments like removing snow, loading goods the Nazis had confiscated from other Jews, and building ghetto walls. Eventually, special labor camps were set up for the Jews; in the Lublin district in Poland alone, there were 29 such camps by July 1940. In August 1940, 20,000 Jews from the ages of 19 to 35 were ordered to report to the labor camps. Many defied the recruitment despite the danger involved in doing so.

Conditions in the labor camps were horrific. Often, the men had no sleeping quarters and had to sleep outside. Sometimes they were not fed even their meager rations and were humiliated and persecuted with dogs, Nazi threats, and beatings. Those working on land amelioration projects sometimes had to stand in water to work. Out of 6,000 men sent from the Warsaw Ghetto to labor camps, 1,000 were no longer fit for labor after only two weeks. In Poland’s Łódź ghetto, the entire Jewish population had to partake in forced labor as the ghettos themselves became labor camps.

Large numbers of Jews worked in German factories in Poland and in workshops during the last years of the ghettos. At the end of 1940 more than 700,000 Jews were engaged in forced labor in Poland. The figure dropped to 500,000 in 1942 and to little more than 100,000 in mid-1943 owing to the high ghetto death rate and to deportations of the Jews from the ghettos to the death camps. Factories using Jewish labor had to pay sizable sums to the German secret police, and Jews had to pay bribes in order to obtain such employment, which they naïvely believed would exempt them from being deported to the concentration camps.

In mid-1942 and April–May 1943 some of the Jews in the ghettos were taken to the Trawniki and Poniatowa labor camps in Poland, and in November 1943 the Germans murdered 40,000 Jews in those camps. In most work camps, the Jews had to work at least 10 to 12 hours a day. In those rare circumstances where they were paid, they were paid less than the meager wage that people of other nationalities received. Jewish wages did not enable them to purchase food on the black market, so most of the workers starved.

Jews arriving in Auschwitz who were selected for work and not death faced the horrors of forced labor. Eating only a small piece of bread and watery soup either before or after a long, tough workday, most Jewish prisoners succumbed to diseases like typhus. Health conditions in the camps were primitive and the water undrinkable, and epidemics spread quickly. The Germans kept the Jews in a constant state of terror. People could be shot any time and for any reason.

Jews had to do the dirty work in the Nazi-instigated death camps against their fellow Jews, often relatives or fellow Jewish community members. Unlucky men and women were selected for the most hideous medical experiments. Jewish prisoners had to clear rocks, fill trains full of dirt, dig trenches and tunnels, sort the possessions of new arrivals (which were confiscated by the Germans), and work in ammunition factories. Mostly, Jews were slave laborers in factories for the German military effort. Whether Jews were making or putting together airplane parts or ammunition, working in coal mines, or working in machine shops, they were thoroughly and completely abused and exploited. Jews were compelled to steal in order to survive, and some Jewish women were forced into prostitution.

Toward the end of World War II, Jewish prisoners were often shot in forests or on long marches by foot, or journeys by train, after camps were evacuated because of Allied bombings. Many Jewish prisoners ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where they were neglected and left to die of typhus. In the last days before liberation, the Germans poisoned potato storehouses so that many Jews died when eating that food, the only food to be found. After liberation by the Allies, many prisoners died from overeating. Most Jews selected for labor in the death camps did not survive until liberation.

JUNIUS RODRIGUEZ

See also: Auschwitz; Austria; Concentration Camps; Gestapo; Łódź Ghetto; “Racial Hygiene”; Speer, Albert; Stutthof; Thierack, Otto; Treblinka

Further Reading

Browning, Christopher R. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York: Norton, 2010.

Buggeln, Mark. Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Von Plato, Alexander, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld (Eds.). Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

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Slavs

The term Slavs denotes a variety of ethnicities and nations in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, whose tongues belong to the Slavic language group. The Slavs were seen by the Nazis as inferior peoples. In comparison to the Jews, however, they occupied an indeterminate position in the Nazi racial hierarchy. They were collectively or separately characterized as fremdvölkische (“nationally alien”), Untermenschen, or “Asiatic,” and constituted the majority of victims of Nazi annihilation, deportation, and exploitation policies from 1938 to 1945. Nevertheless, representatives of all three Slavic subgroups—Western, Southern, and Eastern—were, at one point or another, accepted as German allies. A number of Nazi publications considered parts (and in some cases all) of the Slavs as belonging to the original “Nordic” or “Indo-Germanic” peoples. The Third Reich’s attack on Eastern Europe may have been primarily determined by motives other than anti-Slavism, such as anti-Bolshevism and the quest for new “living space” (Lebensraum), yet implementation of these aims accounts only partly for the deaths of the millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavs who perished not only in combat against, but primarily under the occupation of, the Wehrmacht and the SS during World War II.

Nineteenth-century German public opinion and research on Eastern Europe and Russia showed, along with certain Russophile tendencies, strong currents of anti-Slavism that continued earlier negative stereotypes about Poles and Russians. Views of Slavs as “unhistorical,” “cultureless,” or “barbaric” were voiced by representatives of both Right and Left—including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In the völkisch discourse of late imperial Germany, Slavs were described as “racially mixed” or “mongolized.” A significant minority of nationalist and racist publicists with influence on the Nazi movement, including Houston Stuart Chamberlain, did, however, write positively about the Slavs. The Slavs played a relatively minor role in interwar German racist discourse in general and Nazi racial thinking in particular. Both official statements and unofficial procedures of the Third Reich regarding Slavic people continued to be marked by contradictions and shifts right down to 1945. Although the Czechs were viewed by Hitler in the 1920s more negatively than the Poles, German occupation policies in the Reichsprotektorat of Czechoslovakia were more permissive and less violent than those in the Generalgouvernement and other annexed Polish territories. Whereas “only” 40,000 or so Czechs perished during the Nazi occupation, the overwhelming majority of the 1.8 to 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilian victims of World War II were killed by Germans. In spite of manifest SS anti-Polonism, Himmler’s Generalplan Ost of 1942 made a distinction between eindeutschungsfahige Poles (“those who can be Germanized”) and Poles who were to be deported to Siberia within the next decades. Earlier, the greater part of the Czech population had become regarded as assimilable by the Nazis, while the Slovaks had been allowed to form their own satellite state.

Whereas in the Balkans Orthodox Serbs were among the nations least respected by Hitler, Orthodox Bulgarians (seen as being of Turkic origin) occupied a relatively higher position in the Nazi racial hierarchy and were referred to by Joseph Goebbels as “friends.” Bulgaria was permitted to abstain from participation in the attack on the Soviet Union and to pursue an independent policy with regard to its Jews. The Soviet people were labeled “beasts,” “animals,” “half-monkeys,” “hordes,” and the like. Among the approximately 10 million Soviet civilians who perished under the Nazis, there were 3.3 million prisoners of war, most of them Eastern Slavs. Yet, as the German advance into the Soviet Union halted, the Waffen-SS recruited, among other soldiers from the Soviet Union, a specifically Ukrainian division (“Galicia”) and a Belorussian unit. Impressed by the phenotype of the Ukrainians, Hitler, in August 1942, proposed the assimilation of Ukrainian women. Toward the end of the war, German troops were assisted by General Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Popular Army of Liberation, consisting of tens of thousands of Russian POWs and emigrés. The Cossacks—though being Eastern Slavs—were even seen as “Germanic.” Shortly before his suicide, Hitler described the “Slavic race” as stronger than the Germanic one, whose destiny it was to succumb.

ANDREAS UMLAND

See also: Czechoslovakia; Poland; “Racial Hygiene”; Slovakia; Soviet Union; Ukraine

Further Reading

Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001.

Dvornik, Francis. The Slavs in European History and Civilization. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1986.

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Slovakia

In 1919 the new country of Czechoslovakia was formed out of the Czech-speaking regions of Austria and the Slovak-speaking regions of Hungary, the former Austro-Hungarian, or Hapsburg, Empire having been dissolved by the postwar peace treaties of Saint Germain and Trianon. While the state was a democratic republic, it nonetheless came under pressure from Nazi Germany during the 1930s owing to its large German-speaking minority in the region known as the Sudetenland. Consequently, by the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Nazi Germany began to dismember the country by occupying the Sudetenland and then, in March 1939, invading and annexing the Czech areas of Bohemia and Moravia. An independent Slovakia became a puppet regime under Nazi German domination.

Prior to World War II, 135,000 Jews lived in Slovakia, though many sought to leave during the later 1930s; at a census on December 15, 1940, there were 88,951 Jews still in the country. After Slovakia became independent, a series of antisemitic measures were introduced, the first of which excluded Jews from the military and all government positions. Slovakia’s president, Monsignor Jozef Tiso, was himself thoroughly pro-Nazi and entered into negotiations with the German government to work on having the country’s Jews deported. A “Jewish Code,” based in part on Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, was passed in September 1941. Among other things, it banned Jews from intermarriage with other Slovaks, excluded Jews from many professions, and demanded that Jews henceforth wear a yellow armband. By October 1941, 15,000 Jews were ejected from Bratislava; 10,000 were expelled outright, and 5,000 who held work permits, were government employees, or were business professionals were permitted to stay with their families nearby. On October 28, 1941, the first transport of 238 Jews left Bratislava.

Earlier, in November 1940, Slovakia had affiliated the Axis alliance and then joined in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It declared war on Britain and the United States in December 1941.

Where the Holocaust was concerned, Slovakia was the first of Germany’s allies, in March 1942, to consent to the deportation of its Jewish population in pursuit of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” The Holocaust then became a distinctly Slovak national project, as the Slovak police and military, together with the antisemitic paramilitary Hlinka Guard, massed together more than 57,000 Slovak Jews between March and October 1942. These people were housed in locally built concentration camps at Sered, Novaky, and Vyhne.

Deportations of Jews from Slovakia to “the East” started on March 25, 1942, when the first transport, comprising almost 1,000 women, was sent to Auschwitz. Beyond this, Jews were transported to the Generalgouvernement in Poland, or Germany itself; here, the Slovak authorities turned their Jewish captives over to the SS, who in turn deported them to Auschwitz, Majdanek, or Sobibór. By October 1942 some 58,000 Jews had been deported. More than 99% of the 58,000 Jews deported between March and October were murdered. About 6,000 Slovak Jews fled to Hungary during this time. The deportations were halted on October 20, 1942.

The deportations were stopped largely on account of intervention from President Tiso. He had learned of the fate of Slovakia’s Jews via the papal nuncio in Bratislava, who had, in turn, been alerted from the Vatican after news was received from two Slovak Jewish leaders, Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl. After strenuous efforts at negotiation, they were successful in persuading the government to cease the deportations, and the remaining 24,000 Jews in Slovakia were not deported to their deaths.

The deportations resumed on September 30, 1944. Not only had the Soviet Red Army reached the Slovak border by this stage, but an uprising among Slovak nationalists had broken out on August 29. In response, German troops occupied all of Slovakia, and the country’s independent status came to an end. Nearly 14,000 Slovak Jews were now deported; 7,936 went to Auschwitz (where they were gassed on arrival) and 4,370 to nearby Theresienstadt (Terezín), with most of the rest murdered within Slovakia itself by German SS and Hlinka Guard units. This final round of deportations lasted until March 31, 1945, when the last group of Jewish prisoners was taken from Sered, where they were being concentrated and held, to Terezín.

When taken overall, it can be concluded that up to 70,000 Jews were deported from Slovakia across the duration of World War II. Of these, some 65,000 were murdered or died in concentration camps at the hands of German SS and Slovak police, troops, and Hlinka Guard militias. Throughout this period, thousands more Jews remained in hiding or did not identify themselves openly during the roundups or other actions. Although figures are difficult to fix, it has been estimated that up to 105,000 Slovak Jews, representing 77% of the prewar population, died during the war.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Auschwitz; Csatary, Lazlo; Czechoslovakia; Fleischmann, Gisi; Hlinka Guard; Majdanek; Munich Agreement; Slavs; Sobibór; Theresienstadt; Tiso, Jozef; Vrba, Rudolf

Further Reading

Deak, Istvan. Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II. Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2015.

Kirschbaum, Stanislav J. A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.

Ward, James Mace. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2013.

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Sobibór

Sobibór was a death camp established by the Nazis in Poland in April 1942. It was located in modern-day eastern Poland, five miles south of Włodawa, and like most death camps it was situated in a sparsely populated, remote area. Measuring 1,969 feet long and 1,312 feet wide, Sobibór was erected along the Chełm-Włodawa rail line, which facilitated the shipment of condemned Jews into the camp. Surrounded by a high, wire fence, it was masked by trees planted along its perimeter, so outsiders would not be aware of its true purpose. Beyond the fence and trees was a 50-foot-wide minefield to thwart escape attempts.

Sobibór was administered by 20–30 SS and security officials; the guard force numbered between 90 and 120 men, some of whom were Polish or Ukrainian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war. SS First Lieutenant Franz Stangl ran the facility from April until August 1942; he was replaced by SS Captain Franz Reichleitner, who headed the camp until it was decommissioned in November 1943. Most of the Jews sent to Sobibór were from the eastern and northern parts of Poland’s Lublin District, although Jews from Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Slovakia, Moravia, France, and the Netherlands were also sent there.

In May 1942 Sobibór officials began systematically gassing arriving detainees. As trainloads of Jews pulled into the reception area, they were herded onto platforms, had their valuables taken, and then were forced to disrobe. They were then led into the “tube,” a leafy and wooded tunnel that connected the reception area to the gas chambers. The system could accommodate up to 20 freight cars as a time. Once the victims were in the gas chambers, which the Germans cruelly told them were “showers,” the doors were sealed and they would be gassed to death with carbon monoxide. Sonderkommandos, prisoners forced to work in the camps, then emptied the chambers and buried the dead in mass graves; before doing so, they extracted any jewelry or gold fillings from the corpses.

Sobibór was the site of a major prisoner uprising in October 1943, led by Alexander Pechersky and Leon Feldhendler. On October 14, after learning that they would likely be deported to other camps where they would meet certain death, about 600 prisoners killed some 12 German prison administrators and guards. Amid the chaos, at least 300 prisoners managed to exit the camp. About 100 were caught in the days immediately after the uprising, and up to 60 managed to survive the war.

The following month, SS officials decided to close Sobibór. The remaining prison guards shot any surviving internees still in camp and were ordered to dismantle the gas chambers and bulldoze the facility to the ground. By March 1944, when the last of the guard contingent had left the area, trees had been planted over the site of Sobibór to mask its existence. No prisoners were taken to the facility after November 1943. Sobibór was one of six dedicated death camps operated by the Nazis and situated in Poland during the Holocaust.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Aktion Reinhard; Collaboration; Death Camps; Final Solution; Gas Chambers; Jewish Resistance; Liberation, Concentration Camps; Operation Harvest Festival; Pechersky, Alexander; Resistance Movements; Slovakia; Sonderkommando; Stangl, Franz; Süskind, Walter; Westerbork; Wirth, Christian

Further Reading

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Blatt, Thomas Toivi. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival. Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, 1997.

Schelvis, Jules. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007.

Rashke, Richard. Escape from Sobibor. London: Michael Joseph, 2013.

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Social Darwinism

A social theory developed in the second half of the 19th century that applied the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin to human society, social Darwinism was a significant element in Nazi ideology. Natural selection became a central concept in social and political thought soon after the first popularization of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, both in Europe and in North America. Socialist thinkers emphasized the inevitability of social evolution, at the end of which the classless society would arise. Others used Darwin’s thesis to justify the bourgeoisie’s claim to power and social distinctions. Conflicts within societies were now interpreted as much on the premise of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as on the premise of conflicts between peoples and nations. The oppression of colonial peoples and imperialistic expansion projects now acquired a significant natural scientific justification. But within Europe, too, representatives of certain nations such as Britain, France, and Germany thought of themselves as superior to each other and, with the help of Darwinistic ideas, argued the necessity of conflict. War and soldierly virtues were glorified as necessary and beneficial for humanity and progress.

With the popularization of racist ideas in the second half of the 19th century through Gobineau and others, a synthesis of racism and social Darwinism was quickly made. In order to be able to survive the necessary struggle between the nations, one’s own “race” must be strengthened. At the end of the 19th century many in Europe and North America thought that they could perceive massive signs of degeneration. The mass misery of the workers caused all kinds of rapid physical and mental decline, violent criminality, and alcoholism. Civilization was interpreted as a disturbance of natural selection, allowing a greater number of the allegedly biologically unfit to survive. Prophets of cultural pessimism prophesied unstoppable decline, unless and until the reproduction of “unworthy” life was blocked and the reproduction of the fittest furthered by massive state intervention.

Social Darwinism and racism were well entrenched both in North America and in Europe by the beginning of World War I. They entered even more into mainstream thinking, a store of ideas of which well-known politicians and scientists and many racist, völkisch, nationalistic, and fascist movements (but also reformist groups and splinter groups) could make use. From the beginning of the 20th century, population policy concepts developed both in Europe and in North America that were intended to assist natural selection through sterilization and control. Some of these concepts were implemented in a few of the U.S. states and in Sweden. Although the U.S. laws on sterilization of the seriously handicapped passed before World War I were applied only in a few cases, they were put forward as a model in Germany. In Sweden, a law was passed on January 1, 1935, that made possible the sterilization of persons with mental and physical illnesses, and it was applied as late as the 1970s.

Social Darwinism served National Socialist ideology as a justification for eugenics, euthanasia, the persecution of the Jews, and war. The radicalization of popular social Darwinism took place during World War I and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s. With Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, a man and a party came to power that implemented social Darwinistic ideas bound in with racism and antisemitism in a regime of terror. The Law on the Prevention of Reproduction by Those with Inherited Disorders, which came into force on January 1, 1934, belongs in this context, like the Nuremberg Race Laws of October 18, 1935, and the Marriage Health Law of October 18, 1935. After the beginning of World War II, all of the remaining barriers fell, and millions—including thousands of persons with mental and physical handicaps—were murdered in the “race war” in which the main targets were Jews and Slavs.

MICHAEL SCHÄBITZ (TRANSLATED BY CYPRIAN BLAMIRES)

See also: Eugenics; “Racial Hygiene”; Sterilization

Further Reading

Crook, Paul. Darwinism, War and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York: G. Braziller, 1965.

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Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français

Since 2000, France’s national railroad, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (National Society of French Railways, SNCF), has been the subject of several lawsuits by Holocaust survivors who claim that the railroad was complicit in carrying out the Holocaust during World War II.

In 1940, when the Germans occupied France and began to implement the Holocaust there, the French government owned 51% of SNCF, making it the majority shareholder. The railway is now completely owned by the French government. Since the end of the war in 1945, SNCF officials have acknowledged their company’s role in the Holocaust and have admitted transporting at least 76,000 Jews and other “undesirables” from Drancy, a transit camp outside Paris, to the death camp at Auschwitz. However, the company has resisted paying monetary reparations to non-French victims who were transported by SNCF. The company has claimed that it participated in the Holocaust only because it had been ordered to do so by German occupation officials and had no choice but to carry out those orders.

In September 2000, 12 U.S. Holocaust survivors brought suit against SNCF in a U.S. federal court. The suit (Abrams v. SNCF) claimed that the railway had committed crimes against humanity by knowingly sending civilians to German-run death camps in the east. SNCF claimed sovereign immunity to the lawsuit because it was majority owned by the French government at the time. It bolstered this defense by citing a 1976 statute extending sovereign immunity from lawsuits to foreign governments. The court dismissed the suit in November 2001.

In June 2003 the court’s decision to dismiss was appealed, with the plaintiffs’ lawyers arguing that the cited 1976 statute was not retroactive, meaning that it did not apply to actions occurring prior to 1976. On June 13, 2003, an appeals court overturned the lower court’s decision and ordered that same court to determine whether or not the 1976 statute was indeed retroactive. SNCF appealed this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004; the high court, ruling on another case, determined that the 1976 statute was retroactive. Meanwhile, it referred the Abrams case back to the appeals court, which dismissed the suit in November 2004. In February 2005 the Abrams plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, but that tribunal refused to hear the case.

With the Abrams suit seemingly at a dead end, in February 2005 U.S. Holocaust survivors filed a parallel suit (Freund v. SNCF). This time, the plaintiffs sought restitution from SNCF for personal property that had been confiscated on SNCF trains bound for death camps. The case was dismissed and appealed. In September 2010 an appeals court upheld the dismissal.

A number of Holocaust survivors provided eyewitness testimony to the events involving SNCF. Leo Bretholz, one of the star witnesses, asserted that SNCF was complicit in implementing the Holocaust because railway officials prevented deportees from escaping and subjected them to inhumane conditions.

Beginning in 2010, with the SNCF lawsuits in the United States all but dead and a similar case in France having been dismissed in December 2007, U.S. Holocaust survivors decided on another strategy. They began lobbying Congress to enact the Holocaust Rail Justice Act, which would permit U.S. Holocaust survivors to sue SNCF for damages and reparations in U.S. courts, thereby nullifying the 1976 statute, at least in this instance. Bretholz and others testified numerous times before congressional committees, and the act is still winding its way through Congress.

Meanwhile, the issue of SNCF reparations gained new traction when Keolis, a majority-owned subsidiary of SNCF, became involved in the potential building of new passenger rail lines in Florida, California, and Maryland. Holocaust survivors mounted a major effort to prevent Keolis from bidding on those projects unless SNCF agreed to pay reparations. By 2013 the French and U.S. governments were engaged in talks to include American Holocaust survivors in an already-existing program by which the French government pays reparations to Holocaust survivors. By early 2014 SNCF seemed more willing to consider reparations to Americans, largely because it feared it would be barred from bidding on a $6 billion contract to build a light rail line in suburban Maryland. In December 2014 SNCF agreed to pay up to $60 million worth of compensation to Holocaust survivors in the United States; this figure corresponds to approximately $100,000 per survivor.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Auschwitz; Bretholz, Leo; Drancy; Survivor Testimony

Further Reading

Broch, Ludivine. Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Gigliotti, Simone. The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

Jones, Joseph. The Politics of Transport in Twentieth-Century France. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984.

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Sondergericht

Germany’s police forces were significantly reorganized by the Nazis; most of the country’s civil and criminal courts were not. Prior to 1933 the Nazis stated that German courts were too liberal, with conventions that favored criminals rather than their victims. The NSDAP’s 25-point plan even talked of scrapping the entire court system and replacing it with a new system of National Socialist courts.

In response to the suspicious Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Adolf Hitler convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree in February 1933, which abolished the civil rights that had been granted to German citizens by the constitution of the Weimar Republic for the sake of “public safety.” Internal opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany was quashed; the Communist Party was disbanded and its members imprisoned, eliminating the Nazis’ strongest political competition. By the middle of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only legal political party operating in Germany.

The Nazis then reorganized the German judicial system according to their philosophy that the law should not be based on individual rights and equality but rather on the interests of the People’s Community (Volksgemeinschaft). Defined as ethnically bound characteristics of the German people, the supreme aims of the law should be the protection of the German (“Aryan“) race, national honor, defense capabilities, and public order. For political opponents and so-called “antisocials” as well as Jews and “foreigners,” special, tougher laws were introduced successively, in order to secure their total obedience to the new regime or to eliminate them. Perhaps because they feared that their court system faced abolition, Germany’s judges, lawyers, and legal experts caved in to many Nazi demands and expectations. The Nazis did not have to change the court system; the system simply changed for them.

Judges were at the heart of this transformation. They interpreted and enforced Nazi legislation, even their dubious racial and eugenics policies, for the most part without question. They did not question or criticize the Gestapo, which acted beyond the reach of the courts, and acquiesced to Nazi demands for tougher sentences for certain crimes.

After the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, the Nazis gradually supplanted the normal justice system with political courts with wide ranging powers, creating Sondergerichte (Special Courts), which operated outside and free of the previous constitutional court system.

A Special Court had three judges, and the defense counsel was appointed by the court. Even as heavy-handed as justice was in Nazi Germany, defendants were afforded at least nominal protections under the regular courts’ rules and procedures. These protections were swept away in the Special Courts, since they existed outside the ordinary judicial system. There was no possibility of appeal, and verdicts could be executed at once. The court decided the extent of evidence to consider, and defense attorneys were not permitted to question the proof of the charges.

Especially during the first years of their existence, Special Courts had a strong deterrent effect against opposition to the Nazis; the German public was intimidated, it was said, through arbitrary psychological terror. By 1942 the number of Special Courts had increased from 26 in 1933 to a high of 74.

The People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) was created as a Special Court in April 1934 for dealing with cases of treason or attacks on national or regional government members; it was created owing to government dissatisfaction with the fact that most of the communists charged with burning down the Reichstag were acquitted. The function of this court was just like that of the Special Courts, to suppress opposition to the regime.

The workload was thereafter divided between the People’s Courts and the Special Courts in such a way that the People’s Courts took the most important cases, while the Special Courts dealt with a wider array of “crimes” relating to anti-Nazi opposition. Eventually, virtually any crime, major or minor (including the frequent charge of being an “antisocial parasite”), could be tried in either court; punishment was almost always harsh, ranging from time in a concentration camp to execution. The Nazis had earlier introduced the concept called Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), allowing them to arrest and detain people without charges.

With the onset of war, the number and toughness of the laws and decrees from which the Sondergerichte and Volksgerichtshof acted increased dramatically. The Wartime Special Penal Code of August 1938 had already introduced the death penalty for espionage, guerrilla activities, and “defeatism.” In late 1939 several additional decrees broadened the use of the death penalty to crimes of sabotage, damage of military assets, theft under extraordinary wartime conditions (for example, pillage during and after air bombardments), and all crimes of violence. These laws were aimed at Germans as well as other nationals.

Also, Sondergerichte were set up in countries under German military occupation once the war broke out. The Special Courts played a major role in carrying out summary executions via judicial murder in Nazi-occupied Poland. Owing to increasing resistance in the occupied territories, a special penal code for Jews and Poles in the eastern territories annexed to the Reich was issued on December 4, 1941. It introduced extraordinarily harsh sentences, including death, punishment camp, or transfer to the Gestapo, for any kind of disobedience against the German occupants. The courts could effectively sentence Poles and Jews to death for anything. Terminology in the courts was full of statements such as “Polish subhumans” and “Polish rabble,” with some judges even declaring that Poles were to have lengthier sentences than Germans since they were racially inferior. Overall, between 1933 and 1945, 12,000 Germans were executed on the orders of the Sondergerichte set up by the Nazi regime.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Asocials; Enabling Act, 1933; Rothaug, Oswald; Schutzhaft; Volksgemeinschaft

Further Reading

Koch, H. W. In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler’s Germany. London: I. B. Tauris, 1997.

Majer, Diemut. “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

McKale, Donald M. The Nazi Party Courts: Hitler’s Management of Conflict in His Movement, 1921–1945. Lawrence (KS): University Press of Kansas, 1974.

Miller, Richard M. Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust. Westport (CT): Praeger, 1995.

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Sonderkommando

Sonderkommando is a term that refers to prisoners in Nazi death camps who helped herd newly arriving prisoners into the gas chambers and then deposited their corpses into crematoria. The term, meaning “special commandos,” was also used on other occasions to describe special killing units of the SS, which targeted Jews and other “undesirables” as German armies advanced into newly conquered territory. However, its most common usage refers to death camp workers.

Sonderkommandos were invariably young, able-bodied Jewish males who were selected for slave labor soon after their arrival in the death camps. They helped process newly arrived prisoners and readied them for the gas chambers. This included the removal of their clothing and the shaving of women’s heads. After the victims were gassed to death, they also gathered the personal possessions of those who had been murdered, removed any gold that victims might have had in their teeth, and moved the corpses from the gas chambers into the crematoria. The work was grim and gruesome, and shifts lasted for 12 hours, seven days a week.

Because the Sonderkommando were intimately familiar with the Nazis’ factory-like extermination procedures, they were housed in separate barracks, so they could not interact with other internees or tip them off as to their fate. And because the Nazis wished to keep the particulars of their death camps a secret, Sonderkommandos were routinely killed and replaced by newly arriving recruits. The average lifespan of a Sonderkommando was three to four months. To entice the workers to do such horrific labor, and to prevent them from influencing other inmates, the camp’s administrators usually gave the Sonderkommando special privileges, including better and more abundant food and better housing.

Only a very few Sonderkommando workers survived their ordeal, and some rebelled against their captors. On August 2, 1943, a number of Sonderkommando men participated in an uprising at the Treblinka death camp, and nearly 100 prisoners managed to escape. At Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944, a carefully planned revolt took place involving a number of men from the XII Sonderkommando, who managed to destroy one of the camp’s crematoria. For several months prior to the rebellion, prisoners had been hiding gunpowder, which was used to blow up one of the ovens. Almost all those who participated in this revolt were caught and executed.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Birkenau; Death Camps; The Grey Zone: Lange, Herbert; Majdanek; Robota, Roza; Salonika; Sobibór; Treblinka; Venezia, Shlomo

Further Reading

Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1979.

Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution. New York: Random House, 2005.

Venezia, Shlomo. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.

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Soos, Géza

Géza Soos was a member of the Hungarian resistance during World War II. Born in 1912, he became a member of the Reformed Church in Hungary, where he was head of the Soli Deo Gloria youth movement. Soos was a member of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry during the regency of Miklós Horthy and a key resister in the secret Hungarian independence movement against the Nazi occupation of Hungary.

Between July 6 and July 15, at Evian-les-Bains, France, an international conference called by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took place to discuss the problem of what to do about Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. Géza Soos, then in France representing Soli Deo Gloria at a conference, went to Evian, entirely on his own initiative, on July 5, 1938. It was from his attendance at this meeting that he gained a measure of appreciation of the situation facing Jews under the Nazis, and from this point on he realized that he should be doing something to assist them. By 1942 he was working actively with the Good Shepherd Committee of the Reformed Church, and with their assistance hid many Jews, both families and individuals.

As a member of the Hungarian Foreign Service, Soos was part of a cohort dedicated to resisting the Nazis, including László (Leslie) Veress, Domokos Szent-Iványi, and Ferenc Vali. Perhaps his most important contact was the Swedish emissary Raoul Wallenberg, with whom he developed a close working relationship dedicated to saving Jews. Their personal connection is unclear; perhaps they became friends, but this is not certain. Their cooperation was, however, an efficient one. Soos was the first non-Swedish official Wallenberg encountered after his arrival in Budapest in July 1944; together the two experienced related dangers requiring them to hide out in different places each night in various safe houses.

Soos, who was Szent-Iványi’s deputy both formally and within the Hungarian independence movement, is considered by some to be the Hungarian official who did the most to save Jews from deportation in 1944. At one point he acquired a motor vehicle with diplomatic plates enabling him to move Jews around Budapest to safe houses, and on another occasion he appropriated a military aircraft and flew to Rome, where he engaged in discussions with the Allies in the hope of giving Budapest the status of an open city and negotiating a separate peace—and, by doing so, sparing the population from unnecessary suffering. Activities such as these placed his life at risk, but he did so in order to provide help to those in need.

Arguably, the most vital service undertaken by Soos took place in the aftermath of the escape from Auschwitz on April 10, 1944, of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler. It seems that Soos obtained the German-language testimony through a member of the Budapest Jewish community, Resző (Rudolf) Kasztner. Soos gave it to József Éliás, head of the Good Shepherd Mission. Éliás’s secretary, Mária Székely, then translated it into Hungarian and prepared six copies. These were in turn forwarded to diplomats and Jewish leaders in Hungary and overseas. In an attempt to generate attention at the highest levels in Hungary, Soos also passed the report to Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, Horthy’s daughter-in-law. Taken overall, this was the first time that a complete and authentic report of the extermination operations at Auschwitz had been released to world leaders. Unfortunately, public acknowledgement of Vrba’s testimony was delayed for political reasons, just as the full force of the Nazi killing process fell on the Jews of Hungary. Arguments still reverberate as to whether the lives of hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved if the news from Soos had been made public and acted upon.

Nevertheless, when the Auschwitz report reached Horthy, he immediately acted to stop the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. While it is difficult to speculate as to why he did this, one suggestion could be that the intervention of Soos, through Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, played a role in his calculations.

Research into Soos’s activities during the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary is difficult, as most of what he did was illegal when measured against his formal duty as a government official. Documentation, therefore, is rare. As in many similar cases of helping activities, the only ones who know of Soos’s activities with any authority are those whom he helped directly—the survivors who owe him their lives.

When peace came in 1945, Soos returned to Hungary. The Soviet takeover of the country, however, placed him in an unsafe position given than he had been a leading civil servant of the Horthy regime. Communists expected him to join the party, which he refused to do. In 1946, therefore, he left for Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied for his ordination as a pastor. At the same time, he edited Hungarian-language journals for distribution around Europe.

In 1951 Géza Soos and his wife, Ilona Tüdös, together with their five children, moved to the United States, where they settled in North Carolina. Two years later, at the age of just 41, Soos died in a road accident, in what some asserted were suspicious (though unconfirmed) circumstances.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Auschwitz Protocols; Evian Conference; Hungary; Horthy, Miklós; Kasztner, Resző; Resistance Movements; Wallenberg, Raoul

Further Reading

Braham, Randolph L. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.

Braham, Randolph L., and Scott Miller (Eds.). The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Vági, Zoltán, Lászlő Csósz, and Gábor Kádár. The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide. Lanham (MD): AltaMira Press, 2013.

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Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or Soviet Union was a large Eurasian state with a 1940 population of some 193 million, of whom perhaps 7–8 million were of Jewish origin. The USSR was a polyglot entity of many different nationalities and religions, with at least 170 different languages and dialects spoken. The majority of the population—about 100 million people—lived in the largest Soviet republic of Russia. After the communists had taken control of Russia in the 1920s, Jews in general prospered under Soviet rule. While there was certainly antisemitism and discrimination, Jews did better than they had under czarist Russia. Between 1925 and 1940, nearly 40% of the Jews living in what had been the Pale of Settlement (roughly western Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, and Moldova) had left the grinding poverty of the countryside to relocate in Russia’s large cities, like Leningrad and Moscow. This mass migration meant that there would be fewer Jews in areas overrun by the Germans during World War II, sparing hundreds of thousands from the Final Solution. Jews in Russia concentrated on acquiring higher education, making them among the best-educated groups in interwar Europe.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, ever the scheming pragmatist, entered into a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939, after he was unable to secure a firm alliance with the Western European Allies. Among other things, the pact had clandestinely promised the Soviets free rein in eastern Poland and in parts of the Baltic countries once the war began between Germany and the West. When war did come in September, the Soviets wasted little time in securing what they believed to be their share of the spoils. In spite of numerous and increasingly disquieting signs that Germany was preparing to invade the USSR, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would break the 1939 nonaggression pact so quickly. Thus, when the Germans struck in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Soviets were ill-prepared for the onslaught.

By early 1942, German forces had occupied all of the former Pale of Settlement as well as Russia west of a line that ran from Stalingrad to Moscow to Rostov. In total, these conquered lands contained a Jewish population of approximately 5 million. The Soviets tried to evacuate as many Jews to the east as possible, mainly from western Russia, but their primary goal was to stop the German offensive before it reached Leningrad and Moscow. Perhaps 1 million Jews were successfully evacuated, leaving some 4 million to stand alone against the Nazi menace. Almost immediately after the June 1941 attack, German mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) began killing Jews, Roma, and communists in horrifying numbers. By the end of that year alone, the killing squads had murdered approximately 15% of the Jews in the newly occupied areas. Intent on exterminating all of the Jews, the Germans also deported them to concentration and death camps further west, where they were murdered en masse.

The Soviets finally stopped the German offensive at Stalingrad in February 1943, which was the turning point of the war in the east; from then on, the Germans would engage in a gradual fighting retreat that would not end until 1945, when Germany was defeated and Berlin lay in ruins. The USSR suffered grievously during the war, certainly more than any other belligerent in terms of human and material losses. Millions of civilians died from starvation, disease, or war violence and millions more were displaced. Much of the Soviet countryside in the western areas was decimated, first by retreating Soviet soldiers and then by retreating German forces. Estimates now place Soviet war deaths at 27–28 million, including 7–8 million military dead and 19–20 million civilian dead. The Soviets claimed that 1,700 towns and some 70,000 villages were destroyed, while major cities like Stalingrad, Odessa, Kiev, and Leningrad also suffered catastrophic damage. An estimated 25 million Soviets were left homeless by the end of the war, and estimates indicate that at least 25% of the total national wealth of the country was wiped out between 1941 and 1945.

For Jews, the losses were even more staggering. Almost all of the Jews in the former Pale of Settlement areas were killed. On the other hand, as many as 600,000 Jews fought in the Soviet army between 1941 and 1945, of whom approximately 143,000 were killed in action. Clearly, the epicenter of the Holocaust unfolded in areas that had been controlled by the Soviets prior to 1941.

After the war, Jews enjoyed a brief period of relative calm under Stalin’s watch. Although the dictator had taken an official anti-Zionist stance for years, he hoped that the creation of the State of Israel would usher in a socialist regime in the Middle East. Thus, he tacitly encouraged an Israeli state, which he believed would offset Western influence in the Middle East and which might be incorporated into the communist orbit. When that failed to materialize, he ordered an internal backlash aimed at Jews. In August 1952 Soviet authorities quietly arrested and executed 13 important Jewish actors, writers, poets, and other intellectuals. For years, the Soviets denied that these events took place.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Communists in the Holocaust; Einsatzgruppen; Estonia; Finland; Kharkov Trial; Kommissarbefehl; Lebensraum; Lipke, Janis and Johanna; Lithuania; Operation Barbarossa; Poland; Riegner Telegram; Riga; Slavs; World War II

Further Reading

Barber, John, and Mark Harrison. The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London: Longman, 1991.

Garrard, John (Ed.). World War II and the Soviet People. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Linz, Susan J. The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union. Totowa (NJ): Rowman and Allanheld, 1985.

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Spain

A country in southwestern Europe, Spain had a long Jewish history stretching back many centuries. Within two years of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, some 3,000 Jews had entered Spain as refugees, and by the time the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 this had increased to around 6,000. The civil war was fought between left-wing Spanish Republicans and far-right Nationalists, in many respects a fascist political movement led by General Francisco Franco. He, in turn, received considerable support from Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini; both sent naval, military, and air support (in the Italian case, in strength), and each used the war as a mask to test new military technology.

Where the Jewish community was concerned, the Spanish Civil War saw synagogues closed down, even though there were no overt or official expressions of antisemitism. Most of the Jews who had fled other parts of Europe also fled Spain during the war, while nearly all Jewish organizations remaining within Spain by the end of the war were shut down the moment Franco became dictator.

Franco was not interested in engaging in fighting when World War II broke out in 1939, even though both Germany and Italy had helped secure a victory for the Nationalists. Not technically neutral, but instead choosing a state of nonbelligerency, Franco did not provide military support, but, with a similar political ideology and his signature in 1936 on the Anti-Comintern Pact, chose instead to support the Axis Powers in other ways, such as through the provision of various raw materials. He did, however, supply a division of “volunteers” (the so-called “Blue Division”) to aid Germany in its invasion of the Soviet Union after the summer of 1941.

In June 1940, after the surrender of France to the Germans, thousands of French refugees bolted for the Spanish boundary. Even though strict immigration regulations were still in place, thousands were able to move into Spain without a visa or proper documentation. For many of the European refugees, Spain was only a partial destination, since they had intentions to leave Europe entirely from a port in either Spain or Portugal. However, those who missed their boats or were found without proper visas or documentation were sent to Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, a detention center intended for political adversaries of the Franco regime, or were sent back to France.

In October 1940 Hitler and Franco met in Hendaye, a coastal town in southwest France, to discuss Spain’s possible involvement in the war. Hitler wanted to use Spain as a point of transit for Germany to attack Great Britain. However, Spain was still devastated from the aftershocks of the Spanish Civil War, with many of its citizens starving. Franco demanded provisions and military equipment, along with Spanish control of Gibraltar and French North Africa. Still coming to terms with the new developments in France, Hitler could not concede to Franco’s demands, and Spain continued its neutrality. Additionally, Franco refused to hand over foreign Jews living in Spain, a task other Axis countries and German-occupied territories were expected to do. Hitler spoke to Mussolini after his time in Hendaye, stating in relation to Franco, “I would rather have three or four teeth extracted than go through that again.”

Jewish refugees were able to pass from Germany to France and into Spain until 1941. The Nazis prohibited people in German territory from leaving, and Spain closed its borders in order to provide some sense of cohesion with Germany. By then, however, an estimated total of up to 25,600 Jews had made it through Spain, using the country as an escape route provided they could produce evidence that they were transiting to other places. Even after the Nazis banned emigration from German territories, Jewish refugees were still able to move into Spain, particularly when the Nazis began to deport Jews from the Low Countries. Those who were caught by the Spanish government were meant to be sent back to France, but the Allied Powers intervened, warning the Spanish government against sending these refugees to their deaths. As a result, in 1943, Spain began accepting European refugees once more. Near the end of the war, another 7,500 Jews were able to move into Spain as a temporary safe haven.

In addition to all this, when World War II broke out in 1939 some 4,000 Spanish Jews were in German or soon-to-be German-occupied territories. Due to Spain’s neutrality, these Jews were also under the protection of the Spanish government, which meant that many Jews living outside of Spain were forced to rely on the mercy of these Spanish representatives for help in the event that they had been mistreated. In 1943 the Germans demanded that Spain remove all Spanish Jews then living in German-occupied territory. However, instead of saving the 4,000 Jews who were still living in Europe, Spain only chose to become even more selective when it came to granting visas, and only allowed 800 Spanish Jews to reenter Spain.

Despite this, many of the representatives of the Spanish government, as well as civilians, were responsible for helping hundreds of Spanish Jews in several German-occupied territories, such as Hungary. The best known examples of such diplomatic effort on behalf of Jews caught in the Nazi net were Spanish diplomats such as Ángel Sanz Briz and Giorgio Perlasca, who together protected some 4,000 Jews in Budapest.

Although Spain seemingly played a more active role in helping Jews escape deportation to the concentration camps than other neutral countries, there has been debate about Spain’s wartime attitude toward Jewish refugees. While it is true that Franco’s regime did not evince the same degree of radical antisemitism of the Nazis, it is also true that his government only permitted Jewish transit through Spain rather than long-term settlement. Moreover, Franco provided a safe haven, of a different sort, to Nazis, fascists, and collaborators fleeing the victorious Allies at the end of the war. It is interesting to note that after Germany’s defeat in 1945 the Spanish government attempted to destroy all evidence of cooperation with the Nazis, seeking rapid rehabilitation and reentry to the family of “respectable” nations.

DANIELLE JEAN DREW

See also: Perlasca, Giorgio; Ratlines

Further Reading

Avni, Haim. Spain, the Jews, and Franco. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982.

Bowen, Wayne H. Spain during World War II. Columbia (MO): University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Bowen, Wayne H. Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration in the New Order. Columbia, (MO): University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Lipschitz, Chaim U. Franco, Spain, the Jews, and the Holocaust. New York: Ktav, 1984.

Payne, Stanley G. Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Speer, Albert

Albert Speer, an architect by profession, made his greatest contribution to the Nazi regime in the critical area of armament and munitions production. He used his exceptional organizational skills as well as the forced labor of millions of concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war to keep the Nazi military machine armed and in the fight for much longer than would have otherwise been the case.

Born into a comfortable middle-class family in Mannheim on March 19, 1905, Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer became an architect, as his father and grandfather before him. He joined the Nazi Party in March 1931, finding in Hitler not only an inspiring speaker but also the answer to his concerns about communism and Germany’s need to return to its past glory.

After successfully renovating the Berlin headquarters of the Nazi Party and providing plans for the Nuremberg rally of 1933 that met with Hitler’s approval, Speer quickly found himself with constant—often daily—contact with Hitler, who designated Speer the Nazi Party’s chief architect in early 1934. With successful projects, including the building of a huge stadium in Nuremberg designed to hold over 300,000 people and a pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris that conveyed the dominance of Germany, Speer was soon the inspector general of the Reich.

Although the start of World War II prevented many of his architectural plans—including the rebuilding of Berlin to achieve its rightful splendor—from moving forward to construction, Speer’s proven efficiency and business skills put him in position to replace Fritz Todt—who died in an airplane accident on February 8, 1942—as minister for armaments and war production. His first focus was to bring the German economy up to the level needed for wartime production. Since so much of the German economy was now based on military production, he effectively found himself in charge of the entire economy.

The results of Speer’s efforts were truly impressive. In 1943 he was able to greatly increase tank and airplane production, and dramatically reduce the time to bring a German submarine from the planning stage to its launching, all despite the fact that Germany was the subject of massive Allied bombing. Although detached from day-to-day operations due to a three-month-long illness, Speer was able to fight off the efforts of others—including Göring, Bormann, and Himmler—to take over some of his areas of responsibility. With Hitler’s support, this situation was quickly resolved in Speer’s favor.

After’s Hitler’s death, Speer worked in the government of Karl Dönitz—Hitler’s handpicked successor—until he was arrested by the British. It was not just Speer’s success in greatly increasing Germany’s weaponry that caused him to be indicted in the trial of major war criminals (the International Military Tribunal) held in Nuremburg following the war; it was the fact that Speer attained that success by the use of forced labor—including millions of Jewish concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war—in factories around the Reich, in horrid conditions that resulted in death for many of the workers. Accordingly, he was charged with planning and/or participating in a war of aggression, conspiring to plan a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was convicted on the last two charges.

During the trial, Speer was the only defendant who acknowledged responsibility for the crimes of the Reich and for his role in them. He contended that he knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews and that he plotted to kill Hitler in 1945—contentions that were and continue to be seriously doubted—but his was a unique response to the charges of the tribunal. Speer was sentenced to and served 20 years in Spandau Prison, from which he was released on October 1, 1966. He then authored three books, including Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. He died in London on September 1, 1981.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Bormann, Martin; Crimes against Humanity; Göring, Hermann; Himmler, Heinrich; Nuremberg Trials; Slave Labor; War Crimes; World War II

Further Reading

Fest, Joachim E. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1999.

Read, Anthony. The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. New York: Norton, 2005.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

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SS St. Louis

On May 13, 1939, a German luxury cruise ship, the St. Louis, set sail from Hamburg carrying 937 German Jews who were seeking refuge abroad. To contextualize this journey, it is important to look back a little and see what caused these people to make what proved to be, in the words of one study, a “voyage of the damned.”

The Kristallnacht of November 9–10, 1938, was, for many Jews, the final prod needed to realize that no accommodation could be reached with Nazism. If ever there was a time to leave, it was now. However, the inhibitions to successful emigration were many, not the least of which was a hardening of attitudes in countries around the world to the admission of Jews. Visas were often practically unachievable, and the speed with which they were needed—given that lives were on the line—only served to place further obstacles in the path of German and Austrian Jews seeking sanctuary.

For those who managed to obtain passage on the St. Louis, therefore, this seemed to be not only their best chance to leave Germany but also their opportunity to start a new life in a free country. Not only that, Gustav Schroeder, the captain of the German luxury liner, did everything in his power to make his passengers comfortable. He removed a picture of the Führer from the social hall of the boat and permitted Jewish religious services to take place, much to the consternation of some Nazi crew members.

When the ship left Hamburg, its destination was Havana, Cuba. Adding to the optimism of those on board, it had been arranged that most of the Jewish passengers would have visas enabling them to land temporarily while they obtained permanent residence elsewhere.

The St. Louis was a German ship which worked the Atlantic route between Hamburg and the Americas. On a voyage in 1939 the ship carried over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany, but upon their arrival in Cuba they were denied entry even though many were bearing legitimate landing visas. After repeated further denials in the United States and Canada, the ship turned back to Germany. Many managed to find sanctuary in Britain, while others were eventually accepted by various European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Many were later murdered during the Holocaust. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Upon their arrival, however, the president of Cuba, Federico Laredo Bru, refused the ship permission to dock; under such circumstances, the passengers would be unable to land. In an attempt at making profit from the refugees’ plight, Bru demanded a payment of $500,000 as an entry fee. After a great deal of hesitation, negotiation, and standoff, only 22 Jews were permitted to land.

What made the situation even more intolerable was the fact that some 700 of the refugees possessed U.S. immigration quota numbers that would have seen them eligible for entry to the United States at some point within the next three years.

Denied entry to Cuba, and with no other alternative but to leave, the ship turned toward the Florida coast, in the desperate hope that the refugees might perhaps negotiate with the American authorities for an earlier entry.

The government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, was adamant: no early admissions, no landing of refugees, and no docking of the St. Louis. Some accounts refer to vessels from the U.S. Coast Guard having been ordered to intercept the ship so as to ensure that it would not enter U.S. territorial waters. In reality, however, the Coast Guard had actually been sent following a request of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. Far from seeking to deny the St. Louis entry, he was concerned for the passengers’ welfare and wanted the ship followed in case a change in government policy would allow it to land. He was practically alone, however, as the government was not about to retreat from its stated position.

American Jewish organizations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee, then worked feverishly on the refugees’ behalf. Knowing that the U.S. option was unlikely to be successful, pleas were made to secure admission to any Western Hemisphere country. Again, none of these amounted to anything.

With little other alternative available, and with both food stocks and patience dwindling, the ship turned around; first, it left American waters and returned to Cuba, and then, a few days later, the captain, following orders from the ship’s German owners, made the decision to return to Europe. Captain Schroeder devised a plan to run the St. Louis close to the Sussex coast of England and set the ship on fire, allowing the passengers to escape ashore. While this scenario did not play out, in the meantime negotiators from the American Joint Distribution Committee worked around the clock to make arrangements for the passengers to enter Belgium, Holland, France, and Britain. On Tuesday, June 13, 1939, the world learned that the refugees would not be returning to Germany.

The St. Louis docked at Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939. After further negotiations involving the Joint Distribution Committee, most of the Jews on board were accepted for temporary refuge by a number of countries including Britain (228 refugees), Belgium (214), France (224), and the Netherlands (181).

Of those admitted into Britain, all but one survived World War II—a victim of a German air raid in 1940. After the Nazis ran all over Western Europe, however, many of the others did not share the fate of those who went to the United Kingdom. Nearly 90 managed to reemigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940, but some 532 St. Louis passengers were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Among the 254 who were murdered subsequently, 84 had been granted refuge in Belgium, 84 in Holland, and 86 in France.

Their heartbreaking fate was to become victims of the Holocaust—a fate they could have escaped had their initial visas been accepted and the gates of the refuge they had sought not been barred.

The story of the St. Louis has become symbolic of the failure of the countries of the Americas to assist the Jews of Nazi Germany in their hour of need, a symbol brought into even starker relief by the legitimacy of the documentation the refugees possessed. The definitive study of their nightmare, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts in 1974, was titled Voyage of the Damned. In light of subsequent events, it might be said that no truer statement, embedded within a book title, could have been made.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Kristallnacht; United States Response to the Holocaust

Further Reading

Ogilvie, Sarah A., and Scott Miller. Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Thomas, Gordon, and Max Morgan Witts. Voyage of the Damned. New York: Stein and Day, 1974.

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SS-Totenkopfverbände

Specially trained SS personnel whose primary job was to provide administrative and guard duties for Nazi German concentration camps. The term SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) can be translated as “Death’s Head Squad.” By early 1934, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had gained control over Germany’s nascent system of concentration camps and created an Inspectorate of Concentration Camps under Theodor Eicke as chief inspector. Eicke already had charge over the camp at Dachau, which would serve as a model for all subsequent camps. In April 1934 he established the SS-TV. All SS-TV personnel were highly trained and were thus well placed to maintain day-to-day operations in the camps including discipline, which, as time progressed, became more and more brutal for those incarcerated. In 1937 there were just four concentration camps in Germany; that number increased dramatically as Germany established many other camps within its borders as well as in those areas occupied by German troops after the war began in 1939. In 1939 the SS-TV had some 24,000 personnel, a number that had nearly doubled to 40,000 by early 1945.

After 1938, concentration camps became important not only in terms of the Holocaust but also as a centerpiece of Germany’s forced labor system, particularly in occupied areas outside Germany. The SS-TV created a string of forced labor camps, which farmed out prisoners as slave labor to civilian contractors for a profit. In some instances, the SS-TV actually owned companies, using concentration camp prisoners as forced labor. Meanwhile, in 1939 a combat division of the SS-TV was formed, which later became part of the Nazi Party army, the Waffen-SS. The uniforms of the SS-TV, designed by Hugo Boss, were adorned with a menacing skull-and-crossbones patch, a grim reminder of its major role in the Holocaust.

Between 1939 and 1945 alone, it is estimated that the SS-TV was directly responsible for the murders of at least 2 million people. They included Jews, political dissidents, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, alleged career criminals, and others. After the war ended in 1945, a number of SS-TV officers were tried for various war crimes and crimes against humanity.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Boss, Hugo; Concentration Camps; Death Camps; Eicke, Theodor; Himmler, Heinrich; Pohl, Oswald

Further Reading

Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Weale, Adrian. Army of Evil: A History of the SS. New York: NAL Caliber, 2012.

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St. Hedwig’s Cathedral

St. Hedwig’s Cathedral is the seat of the Catholic archbishop of Berlin. Modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, it was built between 1747 and 1773 as Prussia’s first Catholic church since the Protestant Reformation. In allowing it to be built, King Frederick II offered Catholic immigrants, especially those from Upper Silesia, a place of worship. The church was dedicated to the patron saint of Silesia, St. Hedwig of Andechs.

There was nothing specific in the cathedral’s history that would mark it as a place to stand out against the Nazis during the Third Reich, but the elevation of a new bishop in 1935, Konrad Graf von Preysing, provided a portent of how things might go, for, even prior to his move to Berlin, he was known to be an opponent of Nazism. Immediately after the Nazis came to power in January 1933, he became one of the most consistent senior Catholics opposing the government.

Born into an aristocratic Bavarian family on August 30, 1880, von Preysing became a law student at the University of Munich in 1898 before moving to the University of Würzburg in 1901. Choosing to become a priest, he was ordained in Munich on July 29, 1912. In 1913 he earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Innsbruck. In 1932 he was appointed personal secretary of the archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Franziskus von Bettinger. On July 6, 1935, he was named bishop of Berlin, and he argued that strong opposition should be mounted by the church against the Nazis.

On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued Mit Brennender Sorge, an encyclical reinforcing the inviolability of human rights and accusing the Nazi government of “systematic hostility” toward the church and what it stood for. Von Preysing was a member of the commission that prepared this strong anti-Nazi statement.

On August 24, 1938, he became one of the co-founders of the Welfare Office of the Berlin Diocese Office. Through this he made himself personally responsible for the care of Catholics of Jewish background as well as unbaptized Jews. In 1940 and 1941 he also protested the Nazi euthanasia program, in which those with mental and physical disabilities and incurable diseases were murdered by the state. He sent numerous letters to his priests urging them to protest similarly.

One of these was the rector of St. Hedwig’s, Father Bernard Lichtenberg. In 1931 he had been appointed rector of St. Hedwig’s, and even by this stage he had shown himself to be opposed to Nazism. In 1931 he underwrote an invitation to Catholics to watch a performance of the American antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), which led to a personal attack on him by the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff.

Then, on March 31, 1933, Lichtenberg arranged for the Jewish banker Oskar Wassermann to meet with Adolf Cardinal Bertram, archbishop of Breslau and president of the German Episcopal Conference, in a vain attempt to convince Bertram to intervene in the antisemitic boycott of Jewish businesses planned by the government for the next day. Bertram, however, held that the matter lay outside the church’s sphere of activity, and no action was taken. Lichtenberg had marked himself out as an opponent of Nazism who needed to be watched in the future.

In 1937, having already worked with Bishop von Preysing on Jewish matters, Lichtenberg was elected cathedral provost, a role that saw him thrust deeper into helping Berlin’s Jewish community. In August 1938 he was put in charge of the Relief Office of the Berlin episcopate, assisting Catholics of Jewish descent desperate to emigrate from Nazi Germany. When the Kristallnacht pogrom took place on November 9–10, 1938, Lichtenberg prayed publicly for the Jews during services, proclaiming to his congregation: “The burning synagogue outside is also a house of God!” At the time of his protest, he was one of only a few Catholic prelates to do so. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, Lichtenberg continued his protests in another area, this time writing to the air raid authorities remonstrating against an order dated December 14, 1939, decreeing racial segregation in Berlin’s air raid shelters.

Lichtenberg was warned repeatedly that he should be careful lest he be arrested, but he continued with his protests, even organizing demonstrations outside concentration camps. He was finally denounced by two female students who had heard him pray publicly for Jews and concentration camp inmates, and he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 23, 1941. Under interrogation he refused to retract his words, even going so far as to condemn Hitler’s Mein Kampf as antithetical to Christianity. Under cross-examination he stated that no matter what his fate, he would not desist from expressing his beliefs or stop praying for the Jews. In May 1942 he was duly sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, and when asked if he had anything to say upon sentencing, he asked that no harm should come to citizens who pray for the Jews.

Toward the end of his prison term he was given the opportunity to remain free provided he undertook to refrain from preaching for the duration of the war. The offer was conveyed to him by Bishop von Preysing on orders from the Gestapo. In response, Lichtenberg requested instead that he be allowed to accompany the deported Jews and Jewish Christians to the Łódź ghetto.

With little other alternative, it was ordered that he be sent to Dachau, where all anti-Nazi priests were imprisoned. On November 5, 1943, while in transit, he collapsed and died. The circumstances of his death were never made public. No one among the Nazi hierarchy regretted his death. Joseph Goebbels, who considered him a nuisance, was joined by SS Chief of Police Reinhard Heydrich, who referred to him as the “gutter priest from Berlin.”

Shortly after Lichtenberg’s arrest in 1941, Bishop von Preysing appointed another anti-Nazi opponent, Margarete Sommer, to take his place. A teacher, in 1934 she was forced to resign after she refused to teach her students the Nazi laws regarding compulsory sterilization. She then worked at the Episcopal Diocesan Authority in Berlin, counseling “non-Aryan” Christians through Caritas Emergency Relief. In this way she was able to assist those forced to leave the Third Reich. In 1939 she became increasingly involved in the work of the relief agency of the Berlin Episcopate, founded in August 1938 at Bishop von Preysing’s initiative.

After Lichtenberg’s arrest she took immediate charge of operations and began coordinating Catholic aid for victims of racial persecution, providing them with food, clothing, and occasionally financial assistance. She also began to gather information regarding Nazi antisemitic measures from Catholic workers across Germany. She began to employ this material in a series of reports, one of which, in August 1942, was conveyed to the Vatican under the title “Report on the Exodus of the Jews.” Bishop von Preysing gave her his full support and endorsement throughout this time.

In 1943 Sommer and von Preysing drafted a statement for consideration by the German bishops, rebuking Hitler for human rights abuses and mass murder. It began, “With deepest sorrow—yes even with holy indignation—have we German bishops learned of the deportation of non-Aryans in a manner that is scornful of all human rights. It is our holy duty to defend the unalienable rights of all men guaranteed by natural law.” It was a very clear statement, which, if accepted and read publicly, would have left the Nazi regime in no doubt as to the official attitude of the Catholic Church in Germany. The statement was not, however, published.

A further dimension of Margarete Sommer’s efforts on behalf of Jews involved her employing her legal skills to challenge the Third Reich’s laws on mixed marriages. Again, Bishop von Preysing gave her his support, even though it did not stop the Nazis.

Throughout all this, Bishop von Preysing also worked with leading members of the German resistance, particularly Carl Goerdeler and Helmuth James von Moltke. One of his pastoral letters was even broadcast in German by the BBC in London. Finally, in 1944, he met with resistance leader Claus von Stauffenberg prior to the failed July Bomb Plot that attempted to assassinate Hitler. Von Preysing blessed von Stauffenberg and wished him well in his endeavor, though expressing misgivings as to whether killing Hitler would be permitted under church law.

In 1946 von Preysing was elevated to the position of cardinal by Pope Pius XII, a position he held until his death, in Berlin, on December 21, 1950. His remains, and those of Father Lichtenberg, rest in the crypt of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. Lichtenberg was beatified as a Blessed Martyr by Pope John Paul II on June 23, 1996. After the war Margarete Sommer continued to work at the Episcopal diocesan authority in Berlin, assisting survivors looking to pick up the threads of their destroyed lives. She died in Berlin on June 30, 1965, and on May 5, 2003, was posthumously recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. On July 7, 2004, Bernhard Lichtenberg was similarly recognized.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Catholic Church; Lichtenberg, Bernhard; Upstander

Further Reading

Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1939–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Riebling, Mark. Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War against Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Rychlak, R. J. Hitler, the War, and the Pope. Huntington (IN): Our Sunday Visitor, 2000.

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Stangl, Franz

Franz Stangl was a Nazi extermination camp commandant. Born in Austria on March 26, 1908, his original profession was as a weaver. In 1931 he became a police officer and soon thereafter joined the then-illegal Austrian Nazi Party, but the German Anschluss with Austria provided him with opportunities denied him under domestic Austrian rule. By 1940 he had become the superintendent at Hartheim Castle, where he oversaw the mass murder of people with physical and psychological disabilities, under the auspices of the T-4, or “euthanasia,” program.

In 1942 Stangl was transferred to the new death camp at Sobibór as commandant. During his term there, between March and September 1942, Stangl’s approach to the mass annihilation of Jewish prisoners won him admiration in Berlin. As a consequence, he was moved on to another death camp, this time at Treblinka, where he served as its commandant from September 1942 through the camp’s closure in August 1943. While at Treblinka, Stangl was responsible for the system that would see the murder of most of Treblinka’s 870,000 Jewish victims.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945, Stangl went into hiding, was identified and interned in Austria, then escaped to Syria with the assistance of Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican such as Bishop Alois Hudal. In 1951 he was spirited into Brazil, where he lived until he was tracked down by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and extradited to Germany in 1967. In 1970, following a trial, Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. In prison, British journalist Gitta Sereny conducted some 70 hours of interviews with him, attempting to penetrate to the core of his consciousness vis-à-vis his role as a mass murderer. Her study of Stangl based on these (and other) interviews was published in 1974 as Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. On June 28, 1971, the day after Sereny completed the last of her interviews with him, Stangl suffered a heart attack and died.

Throughout his trial, Stangl claimed that his conscience was clear; this he reaffirmed in his last interview with Sereny, adding that he “never intentionally hurt anyone…. But I was there [and] in reality I share the guilt.”

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Euthanasia Program; Franz, Kurt; Hudal, Alois; Ratlines; Sobibór; Treblinka; Wiesenthal, Simon

Further Reading

Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

Franz Stangl was an Austrian-born SS officer. He was appointed as the first commandant of Sobibór extermination camp, where he served during 1942. In August 1942 he became commandant at the newly opened death camp of Treblinka. In August 1943 Stangl was transferred to Trieste, where he helped organize the campaign against Yugoslav partisans and local Jews. After the war he escaped to Brazil, where he was arrested in 1967. He was extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. This photo is of Stangl accompanied by police officers on his arrival at Dusseldorf Airport in Germany on June 23, 1967. (AP Photo)

Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage, 1974.

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Stein, Edith

Germany’s Edith Stein was a Jew whose study of philosophy and metaphysics led her on a religious odyssey from the Judaism of her family through atheism and eventually to an embrace of Catholicism. In 1933 she became a Catholic nun, but her association with the church did not spare her from persecution as a Jew in the Holocaust during World War II. The Catholic Church has honored Stein not only for her religious struggles but also for her bravery in the face of death, canonizing her in October 1998.

Stein was born in Breslau, Germany (present-day Wrocław, Poland), on October 12, 1891. She was the youngest of seven children in a religiously observant Jewish family. Her father ran a lumberyard, and when he died suddenly in 1893, his wife, Auguste, was left to take over not only as head of the household but also head of the business. Auguste was a resourceful woman, however, and proved an extremely successful businessperson.

Stein herself proved equally resourceful, though more restless than her mother. At the age of six, she demanded to be admitted to school early. At 13, she made a permanent decision to reject Judaism and declared herself an atheist. In 1911 she entered the University of Breslau but quickly became disillusioned with the intellectual opportunities there.

Although Stein hated the idea of leaving her mother, her intellectual curiosity took her to Göttingen, where she studied with Edmund Husserl, a philosophy professor who was building a reputation for his innovative theories on human thought and experience. Stein struggled through her years as a student, often feeling overwhelmed and depressed. She interrupted her studies during World War I to work as a volunteer nurse. In 1916 she managed to finish her dissertation, graduated summa cum laude, and continued to work as an assistant to Husserl, who was now in Freiburg. He proved a difficult boss, giving her little credit for her work editing his manuscripts. Her own academic future remained highly uncertain since most universities remained adamantly opposed to hiring a female philosophy professor.

In 1921 an entirely different path opened for Stein. After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, she was so affected that she not only rejected atheism but converted to Catholicism. On January 1, 1922, she was baptized in her new faith. Her mother refused to accept her conversion, and many of her friends cut off contact with her altogether.

Stein gave up her position with Husserl and began teaching at a Dominican college in Speyer. During her tenure there, which lasted until 1932, she translated St. Thomas Aquinas’s De veritate (On Truth). After leaving Speyer, Stein took a position at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster. She was forced to resign the post a year later as a result of antisemitic laws passed by the new Nazi government. Alarmed by Nazi activity, Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI asking him to condemn Nazi antisemitism. Her letter went unanswered.

In October 1933 Stein entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne, where she was given the religious name of Teresa Blessed by the Cross. Although now a nun, she continued to pursue her scholarship. While in Cologne she completed a metaphysical work, Finite and Eternal Being, which was an effort to reconcile the philosophies of Aquinas and her former mentor, Husserl.

In 1938 Stein’s life in Cologne was disrupted by the growing threat of Nazi persecution of all Jews. For her protection, Stein was transferred to the Carmelite convent at Echt, in the Netherlands. As she was forced to flee, she expressed concern for the plight of her family, but she looked to her religious training, both old and new, for consolation. On October 31, 1938, she wrote of her religious exile: “I keep having to think of Queen Esther who was taken from among her people precisely so that she might represent them before the king. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther, but the King who chose me is infinitely great and merciful. That is such a great comfort.” Stein hoped that her conversion to Catholicism might now serve her in aiding her fellow Jews.

Stein’s move to the Dutch convent secured her safety for only a short period of time. On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. In 1942, to punish the Catholic community for criticism of the Nazi regime by the Dutch bishop, Catholics of Jewish background began being deported to Auschwitz. Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert living in the Echt convent, were among those sent to the death camp. Both women were gassed at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

Edith Stein has proved as controversial to the religious community in death as she did to her friends and family in life. The Catholic Church chose to honor her as a martyr for her faith. On May 1, 1987, Pope John Paul II beatified her, but efforts to declare her a saint created dissent among Jewish leaders, who pointed out that she was sent to her death not for her Catholic faith but for her Jewish background (as the Nazis would have contended, for her Jewish “race”). The Catholic Church, however, has remained committed to its veneration of Stein, officially canonizing her in a ceremony held on October 11, 1998.

ILISA HOROWITZ

See also: Aryan Paragraph; Birkenau; Catholic Church

Further Reading

Baseheart, Mary Catharine. Person in the World: Introduction to the Philosophy of Edith Stein. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1997.

Graef, Hilda C. The Scholar and the Cross: The Life and Work of Edith Stein. Westminster (MD): Newman Press, 1955.

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.

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Sterilization

Sterilization, in the context of the Holocaust, is defined as meaning the prevention of reproductive capacities of individuals by medical surgeries, and of groups by social segregation. Surgically, it renders a person physically incapable of producing offspring. Within the terminology of genocide, sterilization is the surgical destruction of reproductive organs, as well as the segregation of intended victim groups into intentionally destructive living conditions.

As Richard Evans has stated, sterilization, in the forms of surgical interventions and ghettoized segregation, initiated the genocidal Nazi social order and murderous Holocaust policies. Legally, Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide permits compulsory sterilization of members of a group to be classified as genocide.

Initially during the Holocaust, surgeries prevented births. Later, victim groups suffered intentionally destructive living conditions in camps and ghettos.

Theories, and later practices, of rendering a society sterile of unwanted subsections originated with 19th-century social Darwinist segregation. In 1895 Alfred Ploetz began the German Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) movement. Ploetz viewed modern medicine as counterselective to the observed natural order of stronger organisms dominating their physically weaker neighbors. For privileged Europeans struggling with the demands of emerging interdependent societies, the state had inadvertently developed policies of racial degeneration. Social Darwinists called for artificial selections within their communities. Ploetz suggested withdrawing medical care for people he termed “the weak.” This model became active during the Holocaust when segregated ghettoization included the removal of state support deliberately to hasten the destruction of groups collectively termed Untermenschen (“subhumans”). Targets included Jews, Slavs, and those with physical or psychological disabilities.

Several barriers to overt Nazi destructive social engineering were initially lowered in Britain and the United States. Efforts to control breeding, including surgical sterilization, grew in popularity prior to the Third Reich. In 1883 the eugenics ideology of Sir Frances Galton hoped to increase the reproduction rates of Britain’s educated classes. Galton united British and German social Darwinists in his honorary roles as president of both the Eugenics Education Society and the Society for Race Hygiene. Reacting to the increasing proportion of uneducated children and adults, eugenicists adapted their positive hopes to grow wealthier families into preventive attempts to limit further additions of poorer Britons and Americans.

Journalist Edwin Black has expertly traced the influential American eugenics movement. His work from 2003, War against the Weak, demonstrably highlights the links between Aryan and Nordic racism and genocide as committed by American and German forced surgical sterilization programs. Unable to contrive legally sanctioned surgeries in the United Kingdom, informal segregation within inner-city slums attempted to maintain some limitations upon industrialized laborers. In 1907 the United States implemented surgical sterilization as a practice of preventative eugenics. It is important to recognize pre-Nazi events in the development of genocidal sterilization. Democracies, not dictatorships, eroded moral limitations by empowering eugenicists to experiment and enact social Darwinist theories. Failed positive and preventive breeding measures to regenerate imagined degenerate Western societies incited negative eugenics, the intentional destruction of perceived inferiors as occurred in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The application of sterilization during the Holocaust owed much to Ploetz’s generation. The theoretical development of Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) directly influenced destructive Nazi practices. In April 1933, too elderly to maintain his ideological ambition toward a racially sterilized Germany, Ploetz wrote to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler to endorse the new leader’s eugenic policies. In July 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring ushered in the social Darwinist mission of the National Socialist regime. Nazis adapted American eugenic statutes that targeted people deemed by law to be feebleminded, mentally and physically impaired, blind, deaf, and alcoholic. In Germany, compulsory reproductive destruction impacted as many as 400,000 surgical victims. In addition to surgically sterilizing perceived inferiors, Nazi segregation attempted to legally prevent births between Jews and “Aryan” Germans. The 1935 Nuremberg race laws redefined Jews as “subhumans,” a socially unacceptable group for procreating German citizens. Social sterilization, as legal segregation, set the precedent for deliberately destructive ghettoization of groups defined as subhumans during the Holocaust.

CHRISTOPHER L. HARRISON

See also: Brack, Viktor; Eugenics; Homosexuals; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; “Life Unworthy of Life”; Medical Experimentation; Ploetz, Alfred; “Racial Hygiene”; Rhineland Bastards; Ritter, Robert; Roma and Sinti; Social Darwinism

Further Reading

Black, Edwin. War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.

Engs, Ruth C. The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia. Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2005.

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Streicher, Julius

Julius Streicher was a German politician and rabid antisemitic Nazi propagandist, born in Fleinhausen (Bavaria) on February 12, 1885. Choosing to become a schoolteacher, in 1909 he took an administrative post at a secondary school in Nuremberg. He saw military service during World War I, and in the immediate aftermath of that conflict he became involved in radical, right-wing politics. Shortly thereafter he founded the Nuremberg chapter of the German Socialist Party, an entity that was in fact not socialist at all but rather fiercely antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and intensely nationalistic. Streicher helped merge the party with the incipient National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party) in 1922, making him one of Adolf Hitler’s oldest political associates.

Julius Streicher was one of the most notorious antisemites in history, whose newspaper, Der Stürmer, became one of the core texts employed by the Nazis in their propaganda against Germany’s Jews. It reached a peak circulation of 600,000 in 1935. Appointed as Gauleiter (Nazi local governor) of the Bavarian region of Franconia (embracing Nuremberg), Streicher became isolated when war came in 1939, largely owing to his excesses in office. One of his leading opponents was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. After the war, Streicher stood trial at the International Military Tribunal, was convicted of crimes against humanity, and executed. (AP Photo)

A year later, in 1923, Streicher began publishing Der Stürmer (The Attacker), a reactionary antisemitic newspaper that served as a useful tool for Nazi propaganda and which reinforced the party’s bizarre racial policies. As the founder, editor, owner, writer, and publisher of this weekly Nazi Party newspaper, he excelled in producing graphically violent, obscene, and pornographic stories about “Jewish perfidy.”

After participating in Adolf Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Pusch later that same year, Streicher was fired from his teaching position. Thereafter, he concentrated on his newspaper, which grew substantially in readership, and engaged in illicit right-wing political activities. From 1924 until 1932 he also held a seat in the Bavarian assembly. After Hitler was released from jail, he named Streicher head of the Nazi Party’s Franconia District, which included Streicher’s hometown of Nuremberg.

After Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, Streicher organized the April 1 boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany. In 1935 he helped formulate the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which formed the basis of German racial policies and, later, of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Streicher’s newspaper and other publishing ventures had reached the pinnacle of success, and he continued to enjoy Hitler’s confidence. Nevertheless, Streicher was viewed by many Nazi leaders as a loose cannon; he was vain, mercurial, and greedy. His political downfall came in 1939, when he was foolish enough to publicly castigate Reich Marshal Herman Göring. This episode resulted in his effective internal banishment from the inner echelons of the Nazi Party. He was forbidden to issue any public statements and, by 1940, had been stripped of his rank and other offices. Der Stürmer continued on, however, until early 1945.

In May 1945, after Germany was defeated, Allied troops took Streicher into custody and charged him with crimes against humanity. He was convicted by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946. Julius Streicher was hanged on October 16, 1946, in Nuremberg. His last words were reported as “Heil Hitler” and “Purimfest,” an allusion to the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible in which the enemy of the Jews, the prime minister of Persia, Haman, was also hanged on the gallows.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Antisemitism; Der Stürmer; Göring, Hermann; National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Nuremberg Laws; Nuremberg Trials; Propaganda in the Holocaust

Further Reading

Bytwerk, Randall L. Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.

Showalter, Dennis E. Little Man What Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic. Hamden (CT): Archon Books, 1982.

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Strobos, Tina

Tina Strobos was a Dutch medical student in Amsterdam who, with her mother, helped save more than 100 Jews from the Nazis during World War II by giving them refuge on the upper floor of her Amsterdam home.

Born Tineke Buchter in Amsterdam on May 19, 1920, Tina was an only child. She came from an activist family: her mother, who raised Tina after her divorce, was a socialist (and atheist) who had housed refugees during World War I; her grandmother (whom Tina was later to describe as “the only person I know who scared the Gestapo”), had been involved with the Dutch labor movement in the latter part of the 19th century.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, Tina was almost 20, a university student working toward a degree in medicine. When she and her classmates refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the medical school was forced to close down; many students, including Tina, then joined the underground movement.

At first, this involved assisting those fighting in the resistance. Tina smuggled guns, explosives, and radios by hiding them in the basket of her bicycle as she rode around the countryside. Then, however, as the nature of resistance became transformed into acts of sabotage and targeted assassinations, Tina’s acts themselves changed. Instead of engaging in or assisting with acts of physical violence, she found another outlet for her opposition to the Nazis: helping Jews.

Fluent in German, she would ride her bicycle relatively unmolested while at the same time carrying ration stamps to Jews hiding on farms. She created false identity papers in a variety of ways: sometimes she would steal legitimate documents from guests at her mother’s boarding house; sometimes she would arrange for pickpockets at train stations to “lift” documents from travelers; on one occasion, when attending a family funeral, she even searched through mourners’ coats looking for documents.

Her early motivation might have been found in the need to save her Jewish fiancé, Abraham Pais, who later became a celebrated physicist serving as an assistant to Niels Bohr and working with Albert Einstein at Princeton University. Tina arranged hiding places for Pais and other Jews in Amsterdam. When the Germans began forcing the Dutch Jews into a ghetto, Tina found a place for his sister Annie and her husband Hermann to hide; sadly, they did not take up the opportunity, and Annie was later murdered at Sobibór. Tina also found a refuge for Pais’s parents on a farm outside Amsterdam, from where they were able to survive the war.

Her relationship with Pais notwithstanding—and their marriage ultimately did not take place—Tina’s efforts did not stop there. In what became a conspiracy of goodness, she and her mother, Marie Schotte, helped shelter more than 100 Jewish refugees, in small groups, for short periods. The upper floors and attic of their three-story boarding house, located at 282 Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal (just behind the royal palace, in the center of Amsterdam), saw the creation of a secret compartment that could hold up to four people behind a hard-to-spot door in the attic. While the refugees were in this sanctuary, Tina, her mother, and her grandmother provided them with food and medical care. Through her contacts in the resistance, as well as through her own earlier experiences, Tina was able to provide false passports that would assist the Jews in the next step of their journey to safety.

The house was just a few blocks away from another safe house located at 263 Prinsengracht. This was where Miep Gies and others were hiding the family of Anne Frank, a young German-born diarist who hid with her family at the same time as Tina Strobos was rescuing other Jews.

The work Tina was doing was not without risks, of course. Her grandmother had a radio transmitter hidden in the house, which was used to pass messages from the underground to the Dutch military authorities in London, and discovery could have exposed the house at any moment. Indeed, the house was searched by the Gestapo, Dutch police, and Dutch Nazis on at least eight occasions, and Tina herself was arrested and questioned by the Gestapo nine times. On one of these, she was physically manhandled and left unconscious after she had been thrown against a wall.

When asked later why she engaged in these hazardous actions, she said that in her view what she did was “just the right thing to do.” Another time, she admitted that “I never believed in God,” but, rather, always “believed in the sacredness of life.”

In 1946, with the end of the war and the liberation of the Netherlands, Tina resumed her medical studies at the University of Amsterdam. Earning her degree, she went on to further study in London under the direction of Anna Freud, the celebrated psychoanalyst and daughter of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

In 1947 she married Robert Strobos, a neurologist, and together they had three children. They were later divorced, and Tina married Walter A. Chudson, an economist. In 1951 she migrated to the United States, where she became a U.S. citizen and practiced psychiatry in New York until the age of 89. In 1989 Yad Vashem recognized Tina Strobos and her mother, Marie Schotte, as Righteous among the Nations, and in 2009, in further recognition of her efforts to save Jewish lives, Tina received a special award from the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center of New York. On February 27, 2012, Tina Strobos died of cancer in Rye, New York, aged 91.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Gies, Miep; Rescuers of Jews; Resistance Movements; Righteous among the Nations

Further Reading

Gilbert, Martin. The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

Land-Weber, Ellen. To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue. Champaign (IL): University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Stein, Andre. Quiet Heroes: True Stories of the Rescue of the Jews by Christians in Nazi-Occupied Holland. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

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Stroop, Jürgen

Jürgen Stroop was an SS general during World War II. He was in command of Nazi troops during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, in victory, wrote the Stroop Report, a book-length account of the operation.

Jürgen Stroop was an SS general during World War II, notorious for having commanded the German troops that suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 with such ferocity. Reducing the ghetto by fire, block by block, he was responsible for a massive loss of Jewish lives as a result. After this he commanded SS forces in Greece, with brutality on a similar scale. Prosecuted by the Americans after the war, he was extradited to Poland where he was tried for crimes against humanity, convicted, and hanged. The photo here shows Stroop in command during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

He was born Josef Stroop on September 26, 1895, in Detmold, in the state of Lippe, Germany. His father, Konrad Stroop, was Lippe’s chief of police; his mother, Katherine Stroop, was a devoutly religious woman, whom Jürgen alleged subjected him to childhood physical abuse. After an elementary education, he was apprenticed with the land registry in Detmold. During World War I he served in several infantry regiments on the Western Front. Wounded in action in October 1914, he returned after eight months’ sick leave and fought in Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Austrian Galicia, and Romania. He was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class on December 2, 1915.

After demobilization, Stroop returned to the land registry. He joined the National Socialist Party and SS in 1932, and in 1933 he was appointed leader of the state auxiliary police; later he worked for the SS in Münster and Hamburg.

In September 1938 Stroop was promoted to the rank of an SS colonel, initially serving in the Sudetenland. After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, he commanded the SS section in Gnesen (Gniezno). He was then transferred to nearby Poznań (Posen) to head the so-called “self-defense” group of local ethnic Germans.

In May 1941 Stroop changed his name from Josef to Jürgen in honor of his dead infant son. From July 7 to September 15, 1941, Stroop served with the SS on the Eastern Front and received further military awards.

One day later, on September 16, 1942, he was promoted to SS general and posted as an inspector of the SiPo and SD of the Higher SS, and police leader for Russia. In this position he worked to help secure a key logistical route for German forces on the Eastern Front. From October 1942 Stroop commanded an SS garrison at Kherson, before becoming the SS and police leader (SSPF) for Lvov (Lviv) in February 1943.

Stroop is notorious for his role in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was sent to Warsaw on April 17, 1943, by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to suppress the Jewish revolt. Stroop was put in charge of two Waffen-SS battalions, 100 infantry, units of local police, and local Security Police. It was the function of the latter to accompany SS units in groups of six or eight, as guides and experts in ghetto matters.

Stroop ordered the entire ghetto to be systematically burned down and blown up, building by building. With the exception of a few who made it into the Aryan side of Warsaw via the sewers, nearly all of the survivors, including men, women, and children were either killed on the spot or deported to extermination camps.

Stroop expressed bewilderment that the ghetto’s Jewish combatants, whom he viewed as “subhumans,” had fought so tenaciously against his men. After the uprising was suppressed, he ordered that Warsaw’s Great Synagogue be blown up and destroyed as a symbol of Nazi victory and the total subjugation of the Jews. He then formally assumed the position of SS and police leader of Warsaw, and on June 18, 1943, was presented with the Iron Cross First Class for the Warsaw Ghetto “action.”

Stroop created a detailed 75-page report with 69 pictures, along with communiques relevant to the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The report covered the period April 24, 1943, to May 24, 1943. Bound in black leather and titled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!, the report was intended as a souvenir album for Heinrich Himmler.

Stroop was subsequently placed in charge of the SS and police in Greece on September 8, 1943. The local civilian administration found his methods and behavior unacceptable and withdrew cooperation, forbidding the local Order Police from having anything to do with him, which made his position untenable. Consequently, Stroop was removed and on November 9, 1943, was appointed commander of SS in Wiesbaden, Germany, serving there until the end of the war.

Stroop was involved in the purge of anti-Nazi Germans that followed the failure of the July 20, 1944, Bomb Plot against the life of Adolf Hitler. For his involvement, Stroop claimed to have offered Field Marshal Günther von Kluge a choice between suicide and a show trial before the notorious judge of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler. Kluge demanded his day in court, and Stroop personally shot Kluge in the head. Himmler announced that the field marshal had committed suicide.

Between October 1944 and March 1945 nine men of the U.S. Army Air Corps were summarily executed after being shot down and captured in Stroop’s district.

On May 10, 1945, carrying forged discharge papers, Stroop surrendered to the American forces in the village of Rottau, Bavaria. It was two months before he admitted to his actual identity on July 2, 1945. He was then prosecuted during the Dachau Trials. He pretended no knowledge of the killings of the American servicemen, despite the fact that as senior commander of the SS and police he would have given the orders for their execution. After an eight-week trial, Stroop was convicted on March 21, 1947, for the shooting of the American POWs and was sentenced to death by hanging. In November 1947, however, before the sentence was carried out, Stroop was extradited to Poland.

Stroop’s trial in Poland began on July 18, 1951, at the Warsaw Criminal District Court. It lasted for just three days. Duly tried, he was convicted on July 23, 1951, and on the evening on March 6, 1952, was hanged at Mokotów Prison for crimes against humanity.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Anielewicz, Mordecai; Jewish Fighting Organization; Schutzstaffel; Waffen-SS; Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Uprising; Zuckerman, Yitzhak

Further Reading

Moczarski, Kazimierz. Conversations with an Executioner. Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1981.

Porat, Dan. The Boy: A Holocaust Story. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

Stroop, Jürgen. The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

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Struma Disaster

The Struma disaster refers to the sinking of a ship, the MV Struma, on February 24, 1942. The Struma had been responsible for taking several hundred Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to the British Mandate of Palestine. The Struma was a small vessel with a detailed history encompassing a series of fluctuations in its use and many changes of name. It was built in 1867 as a British nobleman’s luxury steam yacht and ended 75 years later as a Greek and Bulgarian diesel ship for carrying cattle on the Danube River. The Struma was launched as SS Struma, but successively carried the names Sölyst, Sea Maid, Kafireus, Esperos, Makedoniya, and finally Struma. It was only 148.4 feet (45 meters) long, 19.3 feet (6 meters) wide, and had a draught of 9.9 feet (3 meters). In spite of the Struma’s small size, an estimated 781 Romanian refugees were packed into it.

On December 12, 1941, the Struma left Constant¸a, Romania, and ventured into the Black Sea. The waters off Constant¸a were mined for defense, so a Romanian vessel escorted the Struma clear of the minefield. The Struma’s diesel engine failed numerous times before it arrived in Istanbul, Turkey, on December 15. The little ship remained there at anchor while British diplomats and Turkish officials discussed the fate of the passengers on board. Due to Arab and Zionist turbulence in their territory of Palestine, Britain had resolved to apply the full measure of the conditions imposed by the White Paper of 1939 in order to lessen Jewish migration to Palestine. Adopted by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in response to the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, the White Paper provided details for the establishment of a Jewish national home in an independent Palestinian state within 10 years, but it also limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 for five years. While British officials implored the Turkish government to prevent the Struma from continuing its voyage, the Turkish government refused to allow its passengers to come ashore, and as a consequence, while awaiting Turkish and British officials to come to an agreement in Istanbul, the Struma ran short of supplies.

After weeks of intense discussion, the British decided to accept the expired Palestinian visas held by a few of the Struma’s passengers, who were then permitted to continue their journey to Palestine by land. On February 12, British officials approved that children between the ages 11 to 16 on the ship would be given Palestinian visas, but an argument erupted with the Turks regarding their transportation to Palestine. Britain refused to send a ship for the released children, while Turkey denied them permission to travel by land.

On February 23, 1942, with the ship’s engine still unworkable and the desperate refugee passengers still aboard, Turkish authorities attempted to board the ship. They were met with resistance by the passengers. A larger group of about 80 police came and surrounded Struma with motorboats. After about half an hour of confrontation, Turkish officials were able to come aboard, detached the Struma’s anchor, and hauled the ship from Istanbul through the Bosphorus waterway in northwestern Turkey, and out to the coast.

On the morning of February 24 there was an enormous explosion, and the Struma sank. Years later, it was discovered that it had been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, which had also destroyed the Turkish vessel Çankaya the night before—notwithstanding the fact that the Soviet Union and Turkey were not at war, and that Turkey was actually a neutral in the wider conflict of World War II. The Soviet torpedo attack killed all 780 refugees and 10 crew members, making it the Black Sea’s largest fully civilian naval disaster during World War II.

Some passengers aboard the Struma survived the sinking by hugging pieces of debris, but for hours no rescue came. All but one of the passengers died from drowning or hypothermia; only 19-year-old David Stoliar survived. He survived the blast and hung onto a floating piece of what remained of the ship’s deck. Later, he was united with the ship’s Bulgarian first officer. Stoliar later claimed that the first officer told him that he saw the torpedo before it sank the Struma. The officer eventually died overnight.

The Struma disaster, combined with the sinking of SS Patria 15 months earlier in 1940, carrying 1,800 Jewish refugees and killing 267 people, became a rallying point for Jewish underground movements in Palestine, particularly the Irgun and Lehi, and encouraged violent responses against the British presence in Palestine. It is generally recognized today that the neglect and abandonment of the Struma passengers was a major catastrophe that could have been avoided if the will to do so had existed.

DANIELLE JEAN DREW

See also: British Response to the Holocaust; Turkey

Further Reading

Enghelberg, Hedi, and David Stoliar. The Last Witness: The Politics and the Human Dramas behind the Sinking of SS/MV Struma, February 24, 1942. Fort Lauderdale: ENG Publishing, 2013.

Frantz, Douglas, and Catherine Collins. Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

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Stuckart, Wilhelm

Wilhelm Stuckart was a Nazi Party lawyer who co-wrote the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 and coauthored a follow-up commentary on them in 1936. His notoriety also emanated from his attendance at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, called to settle procedural, jurisdictional, and legal questions regarding the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

Stuckart was born on November 16, 1902, in Wiesbaden, Germany. The son of a railway employee, he had a Christian upbringing. In 1919 he joined the far right Freikorps to resist Allied occupation in the Rhineland, centering on the French in the Ruhr Valley. In 1922 he began his studies of law and political economy at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich, and at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. He joined the Nazi Party in December 1922 and remained a member until the party was banned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. To support his parents, Stuckart had to defer his studies temporarily, only completing his degree in 1928.

Passing the bar examination in 1930, Stuckart served as a district court judge. There he renewed his association with the Nazi Party and provided party comrades with legal counseling. As judges were prohibited from being politically active, Stuckart’s mother joined the party on his behalf.

From 1932 to 1933 Stuckart was a member of the SA, working as their lawyer and legal secretary in Stettin. With the recommendation of SS chief Heinrich Himmler he joined the SS on December 16, 1933; eventually, by 1944, he had reached the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer.

Stuckart’s quick rise in the German state administration was unusual for a person of modest background, and it would have been impossible without his long dedication to the National Socialist cause. Having been a party member since December 1922—that is, before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923—he held the coveted Golden Party Badge.

On April 4, 1933, he became the mayor and state commissioner in Stettin, and he was also elected to the state parliament and the Prussian council of state. On May 15, 1933, he was appointed ministerial director of the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts, and on June 30, 1933, he was made a state secretary.

In 1934 Stuckart was intimately involved in the dubious acquisition, by the Prussian state under its prime minister, Hermann Göring, of the Guelph Treasure of Brunswick—a unique collection of early medieval religious precious metalwork, at that time in the hands of several German Jewish art dealers from Frankfurt, and one of the most important church treasuries to have survived from medieval Germany. Disagreements with his superior led Stuckart to leave the ministry and move to Darmstadt, where he worked for a few weeks as the president of the superior district court.

On March 7, 1935, he began serving in the Reich Ministry of Interior, with responsibility for constitutional law, citizenship, and racial laws. In this role, on September 13, 1935, he, together with Bernhard Lösener and Franz Albrecht Medicus, was given the task of co-writing the antisemitic Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law. Together these are better known as the Nuremberg Laws, which enacted the legal basis of Nazi racial policy, removing Jewish participation in “Aryan” society. The laws deprived Jews of citizenship, prohibited Jewish households from having German maids under the age of 45, prohibited any non-Jewish German from marrying a Jew, and outlawed sexual relations between Jews and Germans. Drafted in two days, the laws were imposed by the Nazi-controlled Reichstag on September 15, 1935.

In 1936 Stuckart, as the chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, co-authored (with Hans Globke) the Nazi government’s official Commentary on German Racial Legislation in elaboration of the Reich Citizenship and Blood Protection Laws. The commentary explains the basis of these laws on the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (“People’s Community”) to which every German was bound by common blood. The individual was not a member of society (a concept viewed by the Nazi legal theorists as a Marxist one), but a born member of the German Volk, through which he or she acquires rights. The interests of the Volk were to always override those of the individual. People born outside of the Volk were seen to possess no rights, and in fact to represent a danger to the purity of the people’s community. As such, antimiscegenation legislation was justified, even necessary.

On August 18, 1939, Stuckart signed a confidential decree regarding the “Reporting Obligations of Deformed Newborns,” which became the basis for the Nazi regime’s euthanasia of children.

In October 1939 Stuckart was given the task of investigating the comprehensive rationalization of the state administrative structure by decentralization and simplification. He proposed that the state and party should effectively be combined in an overarching concept of the Reich, and should cooperate at the highest levels of power so that ground-level friction between the institutions could be solved by referencing upward. The transformation of the state administration from a technical apparatus for the application of norms to a means of political leadership was the central idea in Stuckart’s model: the ideal Nazi civil servant was not to be a passive lawyer of the bygone “liberal constitutional state” but a “pioneer of culture, colonizer and political and economic creator.” The administrative structure of the Reichsgaue (district), where the party and state authorities were combined and the Gauleiter, or district head, fielded almost dictatorial powers over his domain, reflected Stuckart’s theorization.

In 1940, he participated in the preparatory measures designed to deprive Jews of their German citizenship, working out a proposal by 1941 for having Jews inside the German Reich wear distinguishing marks.

At the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, which discussed the imposition of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage), Stuckart represented Wilhelm Frick, then interior minister. According to the edited conference minutes, Stuckart objected to the Nuremberg Laws being ignored by the SS in fulfilling the “Final Solution” and pointed out the bureaucratic problems of such a radical course of action, insisting that mandatory sterilization for persons of “mixed blood” (Mischlinge) instead of evacuation (extermination) would preserve the spirit of the Nuremberg laws.

However, Reinhard Heydrich, chairing the meeting, informed Stuckart that the decision to exterminate the Jews had been made by Adolf Hitler and that according to the Führerprinzip Hitler’s word was above all written law. Stuckart and several others at the conference recognized that Hitler did not give this order in writing.

Heydrich called a follow-up conference on March 6, 1942, which further discussed the problems of “mixed blood” individuals and mixed marriage couples. At this meeting, Stuckart argued that only first-degree Mischlinge (persons with two Jewish grandparents) should be sterilized by force, after which they should be allowed to remain in Germany and undergo a “natural extinction.” He was also concerned about causing distress to German spouses and children of interracial couples.

In May 1945 Stuckart served briefly as interior minister in Karl Dönitz’s “Flensburg Government,” the short-lived government of Nazi Germany during a period of three weeks following the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30. With the end of the war he was arrested and tried by the Allies in the Ministries Trial for his role in formulating and carrying out anti-Jewish laws. The court characterized him as an ardent Jew-hater, who pursued his antisemitic campaign from the safety of his ministerial office. Former co-worker Bernhard Lösener testified that Stuckart had been aware of the murder of the Jews even before the Wannsee Conference. The defense argued that his support for the forced sterilization of Mischlinge was in order to prevent or delay even more drastic measures. The court, unable to resolve the question, sentenced him in April 1949 to three years and 10 months’ imprisonment, which, because of his preceding detention, was counted as having been served.

In 1951 he was tried in a denazification court, classified as a “fellow traveler” (Mitläufer) of the Nazis. For this, in 1952 he was fined 500 Marks.

Stuckart was killed on November 15, 1953, near Hanover, West Germany in a car accident a day before his 51st birthday. Ever since, there has been speculation that the accident was set up by persons hunting down Nazi war criminals still at liberty.

EVE E. GRIMM

See also: Euthanasia Program; Frick, Wilhelm; Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor; Mischling; Names under the Nazis, Legislation; Nuremberg Laws; “Racial Hygiene”; Schutzstaffel; Volk; Volksgemeinschaft; Wannsee Conference

Further Reading

Jasch, Hans-Christian, “Civil Service Lawyers and the Holocaust: The Case of Wilhelm Stuckart.” In Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin (Eds.), The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice. New York: Berghahn, 2013, 37–61.

Jasch, Hans-Christian. Staatssekretär Wilhelm Stuckart Und Die Judenpolitik: Der Mythos Von Der Sauberen Verwaltung. Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaft Verlag, 2012.

Roseman, Mark, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration. New York; Metropolitan Books, 2002.

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Sturmabteilung

The Sturmabteilung (storm troopers, or SA) was a German paramilitary organization operating as an integral part of the Nazi Party during the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis used the SA during their rise to power as a tool to intimidate opponents and protect their own meetings and rallies from attack. Later, after the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, the SA engaged in key episodes of violence to destroy such civic institutions as newspapers and unions that stood between the Nazis and the exercise of dictatorial power. It also played a crucial role in boycotting Jewish-owned businesses and intimidating and oppressing German Jews prior to World War II.

The Sturmabteilung, or SA, was the first paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. Known colloquially as the Brownshirts, the SA was important in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. As a private party army, the SA saw itself as an extra-military force and evolved military titles for its members. A private bodyguard unit for Hitler, wearing black shirts, was formed from the SA; this became the Schutzstaffel, or SS. In 1934 Hitler purged the SA in order to centralize power in his own hands, and its role as an enforcing body for the party was effectively toppled. The movement remained an extant organization, however, until the end of World War II. (AP Photo)

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler created the SA in 1921. The uniform he adopted for its members was a brown shirt and pants, and they were nicknamed the Brownshirts or Storm Troopers. The SA provided security at party meetings, protected Hitler, and went in force to the rallies of the communists and the German Social Democratic Party in order to heckle their speakers and break up their meetings.

Street fighting was one of the SA’s most characteristic duties, and its members were a fierce and violent addition to the political landscape of Weimar Germany. Many of its members were veterans of World War I who had found it difficult to assimilate back into society. They found refuge in one of the hundreds of Freikorps, private paramilitary groups that proliferated in Germany to put down leftist revolts and uprisings during the period 1919–1920.

In January 1931 Ernst Roehm was appointed leader of the SA. A World War I veteran, Roehm was a prime example of a tough street fighter. He took the socialist aspects of the Nazi Party program more seriously than most Nazis, hoping to fashion the SA into a proletarian army and use it to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Roehm also wanted the SA to form the nucleus of the new German Army, which was limited to 100,000 men under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. In 1932 the SA had perhaps 400,000 men; by the time Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in January 1933, it had about 2 million members.

Roehm’s aspirations for the SA clashed with the political realities Hitler faced as the leader of Germany. The army generals feared Roehm as a rival and wanted Hitler to reduce both his influence and the size of the SA. Wealthy industrialists who had financed Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s also did not appreciate Roehm’s emphasis on socialism and the need for a “second revolution.” Roehm finally pushed Hitler too far, and in June 1934 Hitler reluctantly ordered the SS to arrest the leadership of the SA in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Roehm and his top officers were summarily executed.

Thereafter, the SA continued to exist, but it ceased to play a major political role in Nazi affairs. The organization was subsequently headed by Viktor Lutze, who now directed most of the SA’s energy toward intimidating Germany’s Jewish population. Indeed, the SA played a pivotal role in the nationwide pogrom against Jews on November 9–10, 1938, which is known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. That event witnessed the damaging or destruction of nearly 200 synagogues, more than 7,000 Jewish-owned stores, shops, and businesses, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and private homes, and, according to Nazi figures, the deaths of at least 95 Jews (though the figure is almost certainly higher). As many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to forced labor or concentrations camps. After 1939 the SA further diminished in membership and importance and was largely superseded by the SS. By then, many SA members were serving in the Wehrmacht (German Army).

After Lutze died in 1943, SA leadership fell to Wilhelm Schepmann, who presided over a rapidly shrinking organization. The SA’s role was so diminished that it was not even declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after the war.

LEE BAKER

See also: April Boycott; Enabling Act, 1933; Frank, Hans; Göring, Hermann; Himmler, Heinrich; Kristallnacht; National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Röhm, Ernst; Schutzstaffel; Wirth, Christian

Further Reading

Evans, Richard. The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Littlejohn, David. The Sturmabteilung: Hitler’s Stormtroopers 1921–1945. London: Osprey, 1990.

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Stutthof

Stutthof was a Nazi forced labor and concentration camp located in a sparsely populated area west of the town of Stutthof, some 22 miles east of Danzig (Gdansk), Poland.

The camp was established in September 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of Poland on September 1. Initially, it served as a civilian prison camp and was administered by the Danzig police; in November 1941, it became a “labor education” camp, which was supervised by the Sicherheitzpolizei (German Security Police, or SiPO). In January 1942 it became a fully fledged concentration camp. At that time, the SS provided guards for the facility, and these were joined by Ukrainian auxiliary personnel beginning in early 1943. The camp expanded exponentially between 1939 and 1944, eventually encompassing 105 subcamps throughout central and northern Poland. The two principal subcamps were Elbing and Thorn.

Nearly all the prisoners at Stutthof were compelled to work as forced laborers. Some worked in workshops on premises, while others worked in local agriculture, various privately owned industries, brickyards, or the German Equipment Works (DAW). Overwork and exhaustion were commonplace, and a sizable number of prisoners became sick or died as a result. The camp was greatly enlarged in 1943, as a new camp was built adjacent to the original facility. In 1944 a large aircraft manufacturing facility was built in nearby Stutthof, which caused the prisoner population to increase markedly.

At first, most of Stutthof’s prisoners were non-Jewish civilian Poles. Later, as the Jewish population increased, many Jews from Białystok and Warsaw were housed there. Beginning in 1944, as Soviet troops pushed east, the Germans transferred a large number of Jews to Stutthof from concentration camps located in the Baltic States. It is estimated that Stutthof and its subcamps housed more than 100,000 prisoners in its six-year lifespan.

Conditions at Stutthof were grim. Food and adequate clothing were always in short supply, living conditions were squalid, and medical care was nonexistent. Typhus epidemics took a dreadful toll during the winters of 1942 and 1944. Guards routinely brutalized prisoners, and those who fell ill from disease or overwork were gassed in the on-site gas chamber. Others were given lethal injections.

As Allied forces began to press into the region, in January 1945 the Germans decided to evacuate Stutthof’s prisoners. At least 50,000 prisoners, most of them Jews, were force marched out of the camp. Some 5,000 people were marched to the Baltic Sea, forced into the water, and mown down by machine-gun fire. Most of the others were marched into eastern Germany amid brutal cold and snow. Many died of exposure or were killed by guards. In April 1945 the rest of the prisoners were forced toward the sea, where hundreds were murdered. About 4,000 were sent to Germany by boat, and a sizable number drowned during the perilous voyage. At least 25,000 prisoners died during the evacuations alone, or one out of every two detainees. A total of 60,000 prisoners died between 1939 and 1945. When Soviet troops liberated the camp in May 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners, who had survived the camp’s final liquidation by hiding in order to escape the brutal evacuations.

In the aftermath of the war, four Stutthof trials were held in Gdańsk against former guards and kapos, who were charged by the Polish government with crimes of war and crimes against humanity. The first trial was held against 30 former camp personnel between April 25, 1946, and May 31, 1946. All were found guilty, and 11 were sentenced to death, while the others were sentenced to a range of terms of imprisonment. The second trial, held between October 8 and 31, 1947, saw charges brought against 24 former Stutthof officials and guards. Found guilty, 10 received the death penalty. The third trial was held across the period November 5–10, 1947. Twenty were brought before a Polish Special Criminal Court; 19 were found guilty, and one was acquitted. The final trial, a short time later, was held from November 19 to November 29, 1947. Twenty-seven were tried, of whom all but one were found guilty.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Concentration Camps; Death Marches; Slave Labor

Further Reading

Clark, Peter B. The Death of East Prussia: War and Revenge in Germany’s Easternmost Province. Chevy Chase (MD): CreateSpace, 2013.

Ferencz, Benjamin B. Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1979.

Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

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Sugihara, Chiune

Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who issued travel visas in direct defiance of his government’s wishes, enabling more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape to safety from German-occupied Lithuania during World War II.

Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara, Japanese vice-consul in Kovno (Kaunas) during 1939 and 1940. He issued thousands of travel visas to Jews, enabling them to transit through the Soviet Union to temporary refuge in Japan. From here, they could move safely to more permanent havens. He was forced to leave his diplomatic career after the war, possibly because of his disobedience in contravening Japanese immigration regulations back in 1940. (The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)

He was born on January 1, 1900, to Yoshimizu and Yatsu Sugihara in Yaotsu, Gifu Prefecture. He was one of six children, with a sister and four brothers. Yoshimizu raised his children under the strict code of ethics that characterized Japanese samurai tradition, but after finishing his secondary education with honors Chiune Sugihara defied his father’s wish that he enter the medical profession and instead enrolled at Waseda University in 1918 to study English literature. A year later he moved to a foreign language institute in Harbin, Manchuria, to study Russian, after first passing an overseas studies exam administered by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He graduated in 1924 and began a diplomatic career by accepting a clerical position at the Japanese consulate in Harbin. While there, he continued to study the Russian language and also acquired proficiency in German.

In 1932 Sugihara was promoted to deputy consul in the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Manchuria. In that capacity, he successfully negotiated the purchase of the Northern Manchurian Railroad, a vital component of Manchuria’s economic infrastructure, from the Soviet Union. He also converted to Orthodox Christianity during that time. In 1934 he resigned his consular post in protest at Japan’s treatment of the Chinese in occupied Manchuria following the Manchurian invasion. He returned to Tokyo the following year, where he married Yukiko Kikuchi.

Sugihara received a new assignment in 1937, when he was sent to work in the Japanese embassy in Helsinki as interpreter and secretary. He remained there for two years, after which, in March 1939, he was sent to Kovno (Kaunas), then the capital of Lithuania, to open a new embassy there as vice-consul.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 thousands of Jewish refugees fled to Lithuania to escape Nazi atrocities. On June 15, 1940, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Lithuania, and Soviet authorities would not allow Jews to emigrate from Soviet-occupied territory without special travel documents. Although Germany and the Soviet Union were not yet at war, Soviet antisemitism was strong and Nazi troops were very close to the border, prompting substantial numbers of Jews in Kovno to line up outside the Japanese embassy in hopes of securing transit visas to East Asia.

Soviet authorities then issued an order requiring that all foreign embassies vacate Lithuania by July 1940. Sugihara was able to negotiate a three-week extension, during which time he risked his career, and possibly his life, to issue more than 2,000 travel visas covering entire families, facilitating the escape of more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory. To make the situation of the refugees easier, the Dutch consul in Kovno, Jan Zwartendijk, was at the same time working to provide Jewish refugees with visas issued on his own initiative to the Dutch colony of Curaçao, which, he argued, did not possess any restrictive entry requirements. The advantage of this lay in the fact that the Japanese government demanded that anyone granted a visa for Japan should also have a visa to a third destination, which meant, in reality, that Japan was only allowing Jews short-term transit privileges.

Aware that the Jews were in grave danger of their lives if they remained, Sugihara started granting visas without further consultation. He knew that his actions contravened official Japanese policy but proceeded regardless. Throughout July and August 1940, with help from his wife Yukiko, he wrote out and signed thousands of visas by hand, barely pausing to eat or sleep. He handed out the last of these from the window of his train as it left Kovno station on September 1, 1940.

Many of the refugees he saved ended up in Shanghai, China, resulting in the growth of an already flourishing Jewish refugee community there. Despite the insistence of their German allies, the Japanese government proved to be unwilling to round up and murder Jews; in like manner, they did not follow through on their preliminary plans for mass deportation.

After the Kovno mission was closed, Sugihara was reassigned to Berlin and then Prague, where he served between March 1941 and late 1942. He then went to Königsberg and Bucharest, and remained in Romania through the end of World War II. His family’s return to Japan was delayed, however, by a period of imprisonment in a Soviet internment camp, as Japan and the Soviet Union had been at war since August 9, 1945. Released in 1946, they traveled across the Soviet Union and returned to Japan. Sugihara was asked by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to resign in 1947—some, including Yukiko Sugihara, asserting later that it was because of his disobedience in Kovno back in 1940.

In 1978 the government of Israel honored Sugihara for saving the lives of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, and in 1985 he was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations. By this time he was too ill to travel to Israel, so Yukiko Sugihara and her son went to Jerusalem to accept the honor on his behalf. Chiune Sugihara and his descendants were then awarded honorary Israeli citizenship.

On July 31, 1986, he died at his residence in Fujisawa at the age of 86, recognized around the world and in his home country as one of Japan’s foremost humanitarians.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations

Further Reading

Levine, Hillel. In Search of Sugihara. New York: Free Press, 1996.

Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma. Westport (CT): Praeger, 1998.

Sugihara, Seishiro. Chiune Sugihara and Japan’s Foreign Ministry: Between Incompetence and Culpability. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001.

Sugihara, Yukiko. Visas for Life. San Francisco: Edu-Comm Plus, 1995.

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Survivor Testimony

Survivor testimonies play the most crucial role in forming our understanding of what life was like during the Holocaust. As first-hand narratives written by people who lived through the barbarities of the Nazi system, testimonial accounts are among our primary links to the SS state. As such, it can be argued that all accounts, regardless of their artistic quality or historical accuracy, must be considered and respected. There is merit in every survivor account, even those that at first glance would seem to be of little use to the historian.

The authors of survivor accounts come from all walks of life and from all corners of Europe. Their accounts were produced contemporaneously: from the perspective of a few months or after the reflection of many years. They offer a representative sample of the Holocaust experience and what the survivors wish to be understood about that experience.

There are a number of issues relating to the distinctive quality of survivor testimony that need to be considered, however. For a start, we must ask whether (and to what degree) we can utilize survivor accounts as accurate pieces of history. For many, this is far from a clear-cut issue; some scholars actually situate their discussions of survivor testimony in the category of literature rather than memoir or autobiography, oblivious to the fact that literature is precisely what testimonial accounts are not.

Testimonies therefore need to be questioned if they are assessed as a reliable source. After all, most accounts were written after the fact, when the survivors were safely away from the Nazis and their experience was but a nightmarish memory. Moreover, such accounts were for the most part not recounted by accomplished writers. Further, more often than not they were written for publication, suggesting that a sifting process could have taken place in an author’s mind or by an editor’s hand, in which some elements of memory had to be sacrificed for the sake of publication while others were retained—and possibly even enhanced for the same reason.

Such considerations alert us to a type of memoir that needs to be read differently from other forms of historical documentation. Published survivor accounts are quite clearly subjectively true, in that they chronicle events either directly witnessed by their authors or told to them by others at the time of their ordeal. It is this truth, and these events, that survivors attempt to impart to their readers. Survivors aim to tell their stories in as clear a manner as possible, the better to be able to convey to their audience the essence of what they went through.

In a court of law, such evidence serves a different purpose from that of the historian. To those who would argue that the only standard of proof to be adopted by a scholar should be that found in a courtroom, it must be pointed out that the evidence a judge is looking for is altogether different from that of the historian. In a courtroom, the prosecution, defense, judge, and jury all look for specific evidence of a precise type—the kind of evidence that will either acquit or convict a person against whom a certain charge has been brought. The questions asked, therefore, are of a very special nature; generally speaking, they do not look for the textures, smells, sights, and contours of a person’s experience, nor do they explore the wider contextual backdrop against which things occurred.

Given the event-laden historical richness within which the Holocaust took place, in which there was an enormous amount of activity occurring in many areas, it is perhaps surprising that all too often there are major gaps in the historical record, but it is through testimonies that we can appreciate the fears, miseries, and other features of life characterizing the Holocaust. Even one survivor account can place us in a better position to try to understand what people went through, and we therefore find ourselves relying on whatever we can find to begin the long process of comprehending what happened.

It is thus necessary to consider every piece of survivor testimony individually and to assess each on its merits. What historians make of these accounts must be up to them, and any scholar contemplating the study of the Holocaust is counseled to treat the subject with a combination of both rigor and respect. If all we have to go on as we attempt to reach an understanding of the Holocaust experience are the written accounts of survivors, it is important that we treat these accounts seriously.

Above all, we must be aware of just what it is the survivors are trying to convey. Generally speaking, they seek to convey a sense of what happened to them, as they remember it. Overall, however, the reflections and reminiscences of Holocaust survivors are intimate accounts of individual experiences that the survivors wish to share with others.

How representative are survivor accounts? When assessing a given situation, can the memoir of any single survivor be held up as exemplary of life and conditions in, say, Auschwitz, and as therefore representative of all other survivor accounts? Do their accounts tell the full—or only—story? Given that every survivor’s experience was unique and intimate to themselves, we must look at the totality of their experience alongside those of as many of their fellows as we can find and ask broad questions that might be capable of being narrowed down later. Certain survivors might provide aspects of the picture that are neater, sharper, or more elegantly defined, but none can tell the whole story alone.

For most survivors, the experiences they depict have become embedded in their souls, and the descriptions they provide almost always recount an atmosphere that is true if not necessarily believable. Not all accounts were written by educated people; many lack self-control and grammatical discipline, but they are no less true for that. Some accounts provide dates, for example, which we know are incorrect, and in other cases even a full chronological sequence of events is dubious. But we need to bear in mind that the Holocaust was a time that was not always dictated by a calendar in the sense that we understand it. What is true of dates, moreover, is equally true of numbers, of Nazi institutions and ranks, and even of activities undertaken by Jews in different parts of the same country. It must be borne in mind that trying to make sense of the whole from ground level was invariably impossible. And all this, of course, was compounded by language differences. Usually, all a survivor could “know” was the reality of which he or she formed a part. The rest inevitably had to be filled in later.

Thus, survivor accounts do not ask us to try to “imagine” the Holocaust; for the most part, that is not what they are attempting to achieve. For many survivors—possibly most—it is sufficient simply to tell their story, to record, to bear witness, to show that the world through which they lived was in fact all too real. The challenge is one of conveying to the world an understanding of what the survivor went through, of explaining the essence of the evil that one group of people inflicted upon another group of people, as seen from the perspective of one who was there as a participant-observer-victim. Survivor testimonies do not attempt to make magic, nor do they attempt to imagine the unimaginable. They simply try to tell the story from their own individual perspectives.

Ultimately, a survivor’s testimony should be regarded as much as a historical document as a contemporary government memorandum, a diary entry, a letter, or a newspaper account. As with all documents, its applicability to a particular type of historical writing should be weighed prior to its use, and employed or rejected on that basis rather than according to some more subjective standard. All survivor testimony has its place. It is just a matter of finding where and how to use it.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies; Maus and Maus II; Pivnik, Sam; Second Generation; USC Shoah Foundation; Weiss, Helga; Wiesel, Elie; Yad Vashem; Yoran, Shalom

Further Reading

Ball-Kaduri, Kurt Y. “Evidence of Witnesses, Its Value and Limitations.” Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959), 79–90.

Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Westport (CT): Praeger, 1998.

Patterson, David. Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. Syracuse (NY): Syracuse University Press, 1998.

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Süskind, Walter

Walter Süskind was a German-born Jewish businessman of Dutch background. Born on October 29, 1906, in Ludenscheid, Germany, he became a manager for the German company Bolak in 1929. In 1935 he married Johanna (known as Hannah) Natt, and in March 1938 they, together with Johanna’s mother Fran Natt and Walter’s mother Frieda Süskind, moved to Amsterdam. With other family members already in the United States, the intention was to find a way to migrate there later.

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, however, the family became trapped. In July 1942 the Nazi-imposed Amsterdam Jewish Council (Joodse Raad) appointed Süskind, as one with management experience, to manage the Hollandsche Schouwburg (Dutch Theater), which was renamed the Jüdische Schouwburg and utilized for the purpose of holding Dutch Jews who were apprehended prior to being sent to the transit camp at Westerbork. From there—though it was not widely known—they were deported regularly to their deaths at Sobibór and Auschwitz.

Right opposite the Dutch Theater was a nursery, where the Nazis preferred to place young Jewish children. Süskind, together with another member of the theater administration, Felix Halverstad, and the director of the nursery, Henriette Henriques Pimentel, established a means whereby Jewish children could be rescued. Children were brought secretly to the Hervormde Kweekschool (Reformed Teacher Training College), two houses from the theater, and, with the assistance of the college director, Johan van Hulst, passed through the garden and into the theater.

From within the Dutch Theater registry, Süskind and Halverstad then manipulated the records to show that these children were not registered; in this way, their names did not appear in any official capacity. They would sneak the children out from under the Nazis’ gaze using a variety of ruses, whisking them off to safer locations out of the city. During the 18 months that Süskind was in charge of the Dutch Theater he was able to save the lives of some 600 Jewish children. In this he was helped by a number of different Dutch resistance groups.

Such rescue came at a price, however. In order to remain at his post he had to show himself to be an effective administrator of Nazi dictates, which meant organizing the deportation of thousands of Jews to the euphemistically named “East.” Moreover, to achieve such effectiveness he was obliged to develop a relationship with the Nazi in charge of the deportations, Ferdinand aus der Fünten, at that time a senior officer of Amsterdam’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Süskind was therefore seen by many to be a Jewish collaborator, the more so as he used his position in order to secure the safety of his wife Johanna and their daughter, Yvonne.

During the entire operation, Süskind and those around him were never betrayed or discovered by the Nazis, even as he worked seemingly hand-in-hand with aus der Funten. Only a few people, moreover—those directly involved with the escapes—ever knew the details of Süskind’s activities.

Süskind experienced considerable turmoil over his role, particularly the dilemma over the issue of saving his family or saving others. Every leader of every Jewish Council throughout Europe was confronted with one fundamental question: should the Nazis be met with opposition at every turn, or should one collaborate with them if by doing so it would be possible to save at least some lives? Does one become a traitor, or a hero? After his realization of what the Nazis were actually doing by sending transports to the East, he sought to thwart their deportation plans so far (at least) as the children were concerned.

On September 2, 1944, time and luck ran out for the Süskind family. They were sent to Westerbork, but, even there, Süskind attempted to find a way to help people escape. In this endeavor, however, he failed. From Westerbork, in October 1944, the family was deported to Theresienstadt. As this happened, a forged letter, purportedly from a high-ranking Nazi, was in Süskind’s possession. It described how Süskind had been valuable to the Nazi administration in Amsterdam, and he hoped it could serve as some sort of guarantee for him and his family. He attempted to present it to the commandant of Theresienstadt, Karl Rahm, but a kapo got in the way and instead pushed him into a railcar headed for Auschwitz.

Johanna and Yvonne Süskind were murdered immediately upon arrival. The fate of Walter Süskind himself has been disputed. Most accounts argue that he was believed to have died on February 28, 1945, on a death march somewhere in Central Europe, but another version is that he was murdered by Dutch prisoners in Auschwitz who believed he was a collaborator.

In 2012 a Dutch film was made about the exploits of Walter Süskind. The eponymously titled Süskind, directed by Rudolf van den Berg, compares well, in several areas, to what is possibly the best-known of all Holocaust movies, Schindler’s List (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993). In fact, a number of parallels can be drawn between the two. One vitally important difference can be observed, however, apart from the obvious fact that Oskar Schindler was not Jewish, while Walter Süskind certainly was. Unlike Schindler’s List, there is nothing remotely resembling a happy ending in Süskind. The heartbreaking end of the movie mirrors the tragic reality that was Walter Süskind’s own story.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Birkenau; Children during the Holocaust; Sobibór; Westerbork

Further Reading

Paldiel, Mordecai. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution.” Rockville (MD): Schreiber, 2000.

Wasserstein, Bernard. The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2014.

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Sweden

Sweden is a Scandinavian country situated in northern Europe. Sweden’s population in 1939 was approximately 6.5 million, with only a tiny minority of Jews, perhaps numbering only several hundred. The country had a long-standing tradition of neutrality and had remained aloof from World War I. When World War II began on September 1, 1939, the Swedish government immediately declared its neutrality, although the nation was tied to Germany economically. At the time, Sweden was supplying some 50% of Germany’s iron-ore imports.

In the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, Sweden provided moral support for the Finns, and at least 10,000 Swedes volunteered to fight on Finland’s behalf; however, the Swedes were careful not to be drawn directly into the conflict themselves. When Germany invaded Norway and Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Swedish government augmented its defenses but insisted on retaining its neutrality.

Eventually, Sweden was cut off from much of the rest of the world and fell increasingly within the German orbit. To prevent a German invasion and occupation, the Swedes temporarily accommodated Berlin, including permission to employ Swedish rail lines to supply German troops in Norway. Germany also compelled Sweden to permit the passage through Sweden of a German army division in preparation for the June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa.

By the late summer of 1943, with German military fortunes flagging and under pressure from Allied nations, Sweden revoked its transit arrangements with the Germans. Thereafter, although it remained neutral, Sweden in fact generally worked with the Allies to bring an end to the war. It did not, however, insert any of its military forces into the fighting.

During the war, Sweden ended up becoming a significant refuge for Jews fleeing persecution and potential death in other areas of Europe. In fact, numerous Swedes, encouraged by their government, undertook a sizable number of rescue missions. In the fall of 1943 some 5,500 Danish Jews were spirited out of that country and sent on small boats to Sweden, where they took up residence until the end of the war. Many Swedes in fact supported and aided the Danish resistance movement. Beginning in the summer of 1941, at least 900 Jews from Norway took up temporary asylum in Sweden. Sweden also became a destination for Jews fleeing the war in the Baltic States.

In the late winter and spring of 1945, as the war in Europe was drawing to an end, the Swedish Red Cross, along with Danish officials, launched a major campaign to rescue prisoners being held in various European prisoner-of-war and concentration camps. The effort began as a way to rescue prisoners of war but was soon expanded to include civilians as well. After being rescued, most were transported to Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross reported that 15,345 prisoners were rescued, of whom half were Scandinavian and the rest from other parts of Europe. Only a minority of these individuals were Jews, but the effort helped Sweden overcome suspicions that it had accommodated the Nazis too generously in the early years of the war.

Arguably the most important Swedish contribution to the saving of Jewish lives during the Holocaust can be attributed to Swedish diplomats in foreign missions. In this regard, names such as Raoul Wallenberg, Per Anger, and Valdemar Langlet stand high in the annals of goodness in the face of the Nazi genocide.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Norrman, Sven; Operation Barbarossa; Rescuers of Jews; Resistance Movements; Segerstedt, Torgny; Wallenberg, Raoul

Further Reading

Carlgren, W. M. Swedish Foreign Policy during the Second World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

Levine, Paul A. From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–44. Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1998.

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Switzerland

Switzerland has had a history of being a neutral country since the 19th century and was a state under a position of armed neutrality during World War II. Switzerland also has a pattern of accepting refugees in times of war. Although taking thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II, its record is a mixed one—often bordering on exclusion of Jews while taking in refugees from other backgrounds.

Leading up to and during the war, Switzerland permitted 23,000 Jewish refugees to enter, but frequently this was only in order to transit to another destination. These refugees were safe from the war but were not given the same assistance that non-Jewish refugees were given. During the war the Swiss Aid Society for Jewish Refugees, a collaborative group of Swiss Jewish aid organizations, was established. In 1939, when war broke out after the German invasion of Poland, Switzerland immediately began to mobilize its troops.

Earlier, after Hitler and the Nazis had risen to power in 1933, thousands of Jews left Germany and tried to gain entry to Switzerland. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the number of refugees increased. However, the Swiss government divided these refugees into three groups: political refugees, who were granted immediate entry; Jews, who were granted entry for a short period of time, and only allowed to use Switzerland as a transit area to a final destination; and other refugees, who were rejected and removed as soon as possible. The Swiss government was able to talk the German government into stamping a “J” in Jewish passports, to further distinguish Jewish refugees from the non-Jews who were fleeing Germany. This was intended to enable the Swiss border authorities to be even more selective of those who crossed into the country.

In October 1939, only a month after the war had started, the Swiss government began to approve a series of laws that made it more difficult for immigrants, and particularly Jews, to enter the country. This was mostly because Switzerland, although remaining neutral, was nonetheless still dependent on Germany economically. After France surrendered to Germany in the summer of 1940, the Swiss government knew that a German invasion was a real possibility. In order to combat the genuine possibility of future German aggression, the Swiss government effectively closed the Swiss border to immigrants and delivered 20,000–25,000 fleeing Jewish refugees into German hands.

This action was because of direct fear of German invasion, and the Swiss government felt that turning these refugees back to the Germans was a means of tamping down any invasion prospects. The German army, however, had a plan to invade Switzerland, Operation Tannenbaum, as soon as France surrendered. The Nazis had their eye on the country due to part of its population being ethnically German, and therefore they wanted to bring them into the Reich. Additionally, Switzerland’s Italian-speaking regions were desired by Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s ally and Italy’s fascist dictator.

Eventually, Operation Tannenbaum was cancelled and never carried out. A small Nazi support group within Switzerland tried to gain support for the country to be annexed by Germany as Austria had been, but this movement never took strong hold and was put down quickly. With a fear of invasion in 1940, the Swiss military, under the leadership of General Henri Guisan, was ready to defend Switzerland from the Germans. This fear, however, never came to fruition.

In 1941 the Swiss government was more accepting of Jewish refugees from Belgium and the Netherlands, and this saved thousands of lives. However, in 1942 the Swiss border police force was able to pass a regulation refusing travelers the defensive status of “refugee” on racial grounds, which meant that their Jewish background denied them the protections of a refugee. Most of those who made it through the border left Switzerland for another destination. Toward the end of the war, only 25,000 Jews had been granted refuge in Switzerland. From World War II’s beginning to its completion, Switzerland took in approximately 300,000 refugees; of these, only 26,000 were Jews. It has been estimated that over 30,000 Jewish refugees were denied protection in Switzerland during the war, with at least 10,000—and perhaps many more—Jewish children among those who were refused entry.

DANIELLE JEAN DREW

See also: Credit Suisse; Grüninger, Paul; Lutz, Carl; Refoulement; Riegner Telegram; Szálasi, Ferenc

Further Reading

Codevilla, Angelo M. Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000.

Forman, Frieda. Jewish Refugees in Switzerland during the Holocaust: A Memoir of Childhood and History. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009.

Hasler, Alfred A. The Lifeboat Is Full. New York: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1969.

Kreis, Georg. Switzerland and the Second World War. London: Frank Cass, 2000.

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Szálasi, Ferenc

Ferenc Szálasi, as the leader of the infamous pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party and government, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews during the last six months of the existence of the Jewish community in Hungary. Born on January 6, 1897, in Kassa, Hungary, Szálasi was brought up in a strict family with a very religious mother. Like his father, Szálasi pursued a military career and served as liaison with the General Staff during World War I. He was promoted to captain in 1924, appointed to the General Staff in 1925, and by 1933 was a major.

During his rise in the military ranks, Szálasi began developing his own political-ideological program for the restoration of the Hungarian state following its dramatic reduction in size due to the post–World War I Treaty of Trianon. He did this as a member of the secret Hungarian Life League—a “race-protecting” organization—that he joined in 1930. His first published work—the Plan for the Construction of the Hungarian State—reflected his sense that he had a messianic role to play in the resurgence of Hungary.

After resigning from the military in 1934, Szálasi established a number of ultra-nationalist, right-wing parties, including the Party of National Will (sometimes the “Nation’s Will Party”) in 1935, and the Hungarian National Socialist Party in 1937, both of which were banned by the government as being too extreme. The parties he founded drew most of their support from the lower classes, due, in part, to the centrality of nationalism, anticommunism, and antisemitism in their policy positions.

Szálasi founded the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilas in Hungarian) in 1939. It won 25% of the votes in the Hungarian Parliament that year, but it was banned by Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy when World War II broke out. It combined elements of Italian fascism and German National Socialism, but it differed from Nazism in its goal of creating a Greater Hungary (a goal contrary to Germany’s vision of Nazi dominance throughout Europe) and in its approach to the Jews. Rather than focusing on extermination as the answer to the Jewish Question, the Arrow Cross Party looked more to emigration. That, however, soon changed.

Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944. In October, it removed Regent Horthy (in the so-called Nyilas coup), in part because of his reluctance to allow mass deportation of Jews. The Nazis installed the Arrow Cross Party as a puppet-government with Szálasi as “Leader of the Nation.” The Arrow Cross government then went on a six-month reign of terror.

With Szálasi at the head of the new government, deportations of Jews resumed after a pause that Horthy had earlier imposed. By this time, Adolf Eichmann had already supervised the deportation of about 440,000 Jews from Hungary, mostly to Auschwitz, leaving the Jews in Budapest as the last Jewish community extant in Hungary. There they were consigned to “yellow star” houses, making them very vulnerable to gangs of Arrow Cross members that roamed the city, randomly assaulting Jews with impunity, including killing hundreds of them after marching them to the banks of the Danube. In November 1944 a ghetto was established for about 70,000 of the city’s Jews. On Eichmann’s command, Szálasi ordered that approximately 25,000 Jewish men and 10,000 Jewish women be marched out of the city to build fortifications around Budapest. In addition, also beginning in November 1944, he ordered that about 80,000 Jews be forced to march toward the Austrian border.

Szálasi never had time to implement his ideology of “Hungarism”—his own mixture of fascism, Hungarian nationalism, and antisemitism—due to the surrender of Hungary to the Soviets on February 13, 1945, less than six months after Szálasi’s installation as head of government. During that short time, however, he and his Arrow Cross Party were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.

Szálasi fled Hungary but was captured and returned by American troops in May 1945. He was tried in a Hungarian court in Budapest, found guilty of war crimes and high treason, and was hanged on March 12, 1946.

MICHAEL DICKERMAN

See also: Arrow Cross; Eichmann, Adolf; Hungarian War Crimes Prosecutions; Hungary

Further Reading

Braham, Randolph L. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Lacko, M. Arrow-Cross Men: National Socialists 1935–1944. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1969.

Lendvai, Paul. The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2003.

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Szenes, Hannah

Hannah Szenes was a Hungarian-born Jewish paratrooper trained in Palestine to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. She was born into an assimilated family in Budapest on July 17, 1921. Her father, Béla Szenes, had been a well-known writer and playwright, but he died when Hannah was six years old, leaving her and her brother, György, to be raised by their mother, Katharine. Following her famous father, she demonstrated literary talent, keeping a diary from the age of 13 until shortly before her death.

Hannah Szenes was a Hungarian-born Zionist who migrated to Palestine during World War II. In 1943 she enlisted in the British Army in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and began training as a paratrooper for the British Special Operations Executive. She was one of 37 Jewish SOE agents who parachuted into Yugoslavia to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz. Arrested by Hungarian authorities almost as soon as she crossed the border, she was imprisoned and tortured before being tried for treason in October 1944. She was executed by a German firing squad on November 7, 1944. The photo here shows her in the garden of her home in Budapest in 1937. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Beit Hannah Senesh)

As a student she attended a high school for Protestant girls that also accepted Catholics and Jews, and it was here that she first experienced antisemitism. As she grew older, she sought to learn more about what it meant to be Jewish; she adopted Zionism as her political lodestone and joined Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist youth movement that helped to develop her skills in Hebrew and her love for Eretz Yisrael.

In 1939 Hannah finished school and made the decision to emigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. She studied first at the Girls’ Agricultural School at Nahalal, and then, in 1941, settled at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, near Haifa. She continued the diary she had begun in Hungary, as well as writing poetry and even a play about kibbutz life. The work in which she was engaged included working in the communal kitchen and the kibbutz laundry.

In 1943 she joined the Palmach (the combat units of the Haganah) and was soon training for a special mission: a secret scheme that would see her join the British army and be parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe. She would assist Allied efforts behind the lines and make contact with resistance fighters in an attempt to offer aid to European Jewry. At first she studied wireless operation procedures, and in January 1944 she moved to Egypt to be trained as a paratrooper. She was one of a unit of 33 people of both sexes.

In mid-March 1944 they were dropped into Yugoslavia, where Hannah spent three months with Tito’s partisans. Entering Hungary had to be put on hold for a time, as the parachute drop coincided directly with the German invasion of Hungary. Instead, Hannah worked with the partisans until the time was opportune to cross into Hungary.

On June 7, 1944, just as the deportation of the Hungarian Jews was at its most intense, Hannah decided to move into Hungary with the aim of reaching Budapest. It was an extremely dangerous time; in fact, her two partners on the mission, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein, both counseled against proceeding. In spite of their caution, she decided to go ahead alone. Within hours of crossing the border she was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes; finding her British military credentials and radio transmitter, they imprisoned and tortured her for the transmission code so they could track down all the other parachutists. She was tortured repeatedly for months but refused to divulge anything about her mission. When the authorities arrested her mother (who did not know Hannah had moved to Palestine or that she was back in Budapest on a secret military mission), she still would not speak.

Seeing themselves with little other option, the Hungarian fascist authorities tried her for treason and spying. The trial began on October 28, 1944, its outcome a foregone conclusion. Convicted as a spy, she was sentenced to death by a German (not Hungarian) firing squad on November 7, 1944. When facing her executioners she refused a blindfold. At the time of her death she was 23 years old.

In 1950 the remains of Hannah Szenes were taken to Israel and reburied in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. A tombstone was erected for her in November 2007 at her kibbutz in Sdot Yam, and with the end of the Cold War a Hungarian military court overturned the original decision and posthumously exonerated her.

Hannah’s diary was published in Hebrew in 1946. Her poetry contains lines that have become iconic in Israeli literature, the best known of which is the poem “Halikha LeKesariya” (“A Walk to Caesarea”), commonly known as “Eli, Eli” (“My God, My God”), set to music by David Zahavi and sung or played in most Jewish remembrance services to this day. Another of her poems, “Ashrei Hagafrur” (“Blessed Is the Match”), equals it for recognition and has been quoted frequently since the Holocaust. Written after she was parachuted into Yugoslavia, the most crucial lines are:

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Hannah Szenes remains a national heroine in Israel, where she is representative of all that Israeli society seeks in terms of idealism and self-sacrifice in the face of adverse circumstances. As a resister, she was unable to achieve her objectives, but the symbolism of her actions was (and remains) immense.

PAUL R. BARTROP

See also: Jewish Partisans; Hungary; Yugoslavia

Further Reading

Atkinson, Linda. In Kindling Flame: The Story of Hannah Senesh, 1921–1944. New York: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard Books, 1985.

Binney, Marcus. The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Women Agents of SOE in the Second World War. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002.

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Szeptycki, Andreas Alexander

Andreas Alexander Szeptycki was a Polish-born Ukrainian-Greek Catholic priest and prelate who served as the archbishop of Lvov (Lviv) in southeastern Poland from 1901 until 1944.

Szeptycki was born on July 29, 1865, in Przylbice, Poland, into an aristocratic family with strong ties to the church. He studied in Kraków and Wrocław, earning a doctorate in law in 1888. He then entered a seminary in Domobryl, taking the name Andrew (Andreas); his given name had been Roman. He was ordained a deacon in August 1892 and became a priest in the Order of St. Basil that same year. In 1894 he earned a doctorate in theology from the Jesuit seminary at Kraków. A well-respected and learned clergyman, Szeptycki was named bishop of Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanisławow) in 1899. The following year he was appointed archbishop of Lvov and was confirmed in that position in 1901. He was to hold his place here for the remainder of his life.

In the early 1900s Szeptycki visited the United States and Canada, where he ministered to Ukrainian Greek Catholic enclaves. He spoke out against the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and was arrested and jailed by Russian authorities. Szeptycki had always been a proponent of religious ecumenism, and his interest in this went beyond Christian denominations. Indeed, he had studied Hebrew in the seminary and regularly visited Jewish communities, where he read and preached from the Torah.

On September 22, 1939, Soviet troops rushed into Lvov, which had been under Polish control, and occupied the city. Meanwhile, as German troops occupied western Poland, an influx of some 200,000 Polish Jews flooded into the city. The Soviets forced many of Lvov’s Jews to liquidate their businesses and close their synagogues, part of a wider effort to “Ukrainize” the city. Archbishop Szeptycki publicly denounced Soviet policy, but his protestations had little impact on Soviet occupation authorities.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans occupied Lvov and began to implement the Final Solution there. Jews were targeted, persecuted, rounded up, placed in a squalid ghetto, and many were deported to death camps. Szeptycki was outraged and deeply troubled by German policies toward Jews, and he took an early public stand in which he denounced anti-Jewish activities. He also instructed his clergy to report to him antisemitic activities and to preach against antisemitism. He even wrote and distributed a pastoral letter titled “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” which was aimed at German occupation officials, and threatened to excommunicate anyone in his flock who collaborated with the Nazis. By 1943 the archbishop was sheltering 21 Jews in his home and cathedral and had facilitated the sheltering of as many as 200 other Jews in monasteries and convents under his control.

Archbishop Andreas Szeptycki was later hailed by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations, and in general his tenure in office brought much good to the archdiocese. He died in Lvov on November 4, 1944. He is considered the 20th century’s most influential prelate in eastern Poland and Ukraine.

PAUL G. PIERPAOLI JR.

See also: Rescuers of Jews; Righteous among the Nations; Ukraine

Further Reading

Korolevsky, Cyril. Metropolitan Andrew, 1865–1944. L’viv: Stauropegion, 1993.

Magosci, Paul Robert (Ed.). Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts’kyi. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1989.