Category Archives: Holocaust

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was Reichsfuhrer (supreme leader) of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the highest-ranking Nazi leader after Hitler and Hermann Goering. As the leader of the SS, Himmler was directly responsible for ordering and overseeing the detention, transportation and annihilation of the Jewish people.

Early life

Born in Munich to a family of devout Catholics, Himmler was a sickly and physically weak child and a loner, but a bright student. As a teenager, he attempted to enter the army but was rejected. Instead, he turned instead to paramilitary groups, joining an anti-Semitic group in 1922.

In the early 1920s, Himmler took a job in a manure-processing factory near Munich. During this period he came into contact with the growing Nazi Party and became a member. Himmler participated in the NSDAP’s ill-fated Munich putsch in November 1923. He later left the party for a time and worked as a chicken farmer.

In 1926, Himmler joined the SS, at the time a small but specialised division of the much larger Sturmabteilung (SA). Himmler’s fascination with discipline, control and organisation impressed Hitler, who in 1929 placed him in charge of the struggling SS. This was a fateful decision that initiated the SS’s rise to dominance.

Establishing the SS

Few in the NSDAP believed Himmler could maintain the SS, let alone manage its expansion. But despite his unimpressive, bookish appearance, Himmler was a racial fanatic who nurtured a vision of the SS as a vanguard of both racial purity and paramilitary elitism. He was determined to raise the profile of the SS and establish it as an elite army of Aryan warriors.

Himmler did this by selling the idea to Hitler. By the end of 1933, he had become one of Hitler’s most trusted advisors. With the Fuhrer’s blessing, Himmler set about reforming, rebranding and expanding the SS.

Membership was restricted to those of verifiable Aryan racial heritage. Aspiring SS officers had to demonstrate the absence of undesirable racial influences in their background by tracing their family tree back three centuries. SS officers and soldiers were also forbidden from marrying, conceiving children or having sex with non-Aryan women.

Himmler also instilled the SS with rigorous discipline and fanatical loyalty to Hitler, two attributes missing from the SA. This appealed to many ex-soldiers unhappy with the rowdiness and disorder of the SA. By late 1939, SS membership had swelled to around 512,000 men.

Himmler’s racial views

In late 1933, Himmler was given control of all concentration camps. In 1936, Hitler appointed him chief of all German police forces, including the notorious Gestapo. By this time, Himmler had found himself a willing deputy, a former naval officer named Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi as efficient and effective as he was ruthless.

This oversight of concentration camps gave Himmler responsibility for what he later described as a difficult but necessary task: ridding Germany of its Jewish population. According to historian Christopher Hale, Himmler saw Germany as the “custodian of human culture” and his anti-Semitism was driven largely by conspiracy theories:

“Like many others, he was taken in by that faked blueprint for Jewish world conquest: ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. Himmler added Freemasons and Jesuits to his growing list of villains, and astrology, hypnotism, spiritualism and telepathy to his enthusiasms.”

While Himmler was intensely anti-Semitic, his racism extended beyond a hatred of Jews. He considered all non-Aryan races to be untermensch (‘sub-human’) and marked for either expulsion or extermination. In a January 1937 speech, Himmler claimed “there is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp”, full of “hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews; a considerable number of inferior people.” His self-declared mission was “the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans all over the world who are in league against Germany”.

Minister of death

The onset of World War II gave Heinrich Himmler the opportunity to put this plan into operation. As SS Reichsfuhrer, he had overall command of the concentration camps, most labour camps, the extermination centres and the einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squadrons).

Himmler’s evils were chiefly bureaucratic: he murdered with orders and policies, his weapons the pen and telephone. It is unlikely Himmler ever killed anyone himself, in fact, one anecdotal account claims that he vomited after being sprayed with blood at an execution.

To many historians, Himmler ordered the construction of death camps and the other instruments of the Final Solution but for the most part remained distant and detached from its horrific realities. It is perhaps for this reason the deluded Himmler believed he could negotiate peace with the Allies in 1945, avoiding trial or punishment. In his own twisted mind, he had done nothing beyond what might normally be expected of a military commander in a time of war.

Complicity in the Holocaust

The weight of historical evidence lays responsibility for the Holocaust directly at Heinrich Himmler’s feet, probably more so than any other individual, including Hitler. Himmler’s awareness of the Final Solution, its motivations, objectives and methods can be found in hundreds of documents, written orders and speech transcriptions, including some pre-dating the war.

In one famous address to SS officers, given at Posen in October 1943, Himmler said:

“We have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it. Everyone shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again if it were necessary. I am talking about the ‘Jewish evacuation’: the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you. “Perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them. Ha! A small matter.”… But all together we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our people. And in doing so, we have taken on no defect within us, in our soul or in our character.”

1. Heinrich Himmler was the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, putting him in charge of internal security. He was the overseer of the Final Solution and Hitler’s most loyal ally.

2. Himmler had no war or military service but his fascination with discipline, organisation and structure, as well as his intense racism and anti-Semitism, earned him favour with Hitler.

3. Himmler was given command of the SS in 1929. With Hitler’s backing, he transformed it into a highly disciplined and racially pure paramilitary group.

4. Himmler was also the Nazi Minister of the Interior, responsible for domestic security. He also had oversight over the network of Nazi concentration camps and, later, labour and death camps.

5. Historians have debated his contribution to Nazism but his role as an instigator of the Holocaust is not in dispute.

Citation information
Title: “Heinrich Himmler”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/heinrich-himmler/
Date published: August 29, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is the rejection or refusal to accept elements of the Holocaust. The extent of Holocaust denial can vary. Some deny certain aspects of the Holocaust or claim the Holocaust was not as deadly or as centrally organised as claimed. Some go so far as to claim the Holocaust did not occur at all but is a fiction invented for political purposes.

Background

All events of historical significance invite a measure of debate and disagreement among historians. While the vast majority of historians accept that the orchestrated mass killing of Jews during World War II occurred, this has been challenged by a handful of individual historians, writers and political figures. These alternative theories are broadly described as ‘Holocaust denial’.

Some Holocaust deniers contend that the mass killings of the 1940s have been grossly exaggerated, either accidentally or wilfully. Others claim that while Jews were killed in large numbers, there was no systematic or deliberate program to exterminate them.

Holocaust denial is generally associated with modern far-right-wing and anti-Semitic groups, such as neo-Nazi organisations or the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). There are also denialist historians and writers who adopt a similar position but have no apparent affiliations with these groups.

David Irving

Perhaps the best-known exponent of Holocaust denial is David Irving. A British historian with a record of questionable views and statements, Irving does not deny the Holocaust occurred but argues that it was not a deliberate policy of the Nazi government.

In his 1977 book Hitler’s War, a sympathetic account of Adolf Hitler’s political and military leadership, Irving claimed Adolf Hitler had no direct knowledge of the Holocaust. Instead, he suggested the mass murder of European Jews was conducted by “nameless criminals”, a group including rogue elements of the Schutzstaffel (SS), hostile civilians and, in a few cases, Allied soldiers.

Irving’s subsequent books grew more strongly denialist and at times lurched into anti-Semitism. His 1981 book Uprising, for example, suggested that Jewish conspirators were behind the brutal communist regime in 1950s Hungary.

Among other claims made by Irving in the 1980s were that the Holocaust was a series of spontaneous and unconnected atrocities, rather than a national policy; and that some Jewish bodies photographed in liberated death camps had in fact been killed by the Allies.

Denialist claims

Some of the specific claims and arguments advanced by Holocaust deniers include:

Lack of a systematic policy. Perhaps the most frequent claim made by Holocaust deniers is that the Nazis had no systematic policy for exterminating Jews. Deniers argue that examination of surviving documentary evidence, such as written orders and directives, fails to clearly demonstrate genocidal intent on the part of the Nazi government. They admit many Jews were undoubtedly murdered but claim this was the work of zealous or bloodthirsty officers and soldiers, rather than official policy.

Hitler was not involved. Some denialist theories emphasise the lack of written orders signed or approved by Hitler. As a consequence, they allege that Hitler issued no direct orders for the extermination of Jews and may have had no knowledge of it. Anti-Jewish killings were carried out by Hitler’s subordinates, possibly because they believed it was what he wanted or expected – but was not ordered or approved by him. The question of Hitler’s culpability for the Holocaust has been explored and debated by many historians.

Exaggerated death toll. Another common argument relates to outcomes. Many Holocaust deniers refute the accepted Jewish death toll of six million people. They argue that in the breakdown of order that followed World War II, it was impossible to keep accurate figures about civilian movement, resettlement, deaths from disease and malnutrition and so forth. The figure of six million deaths is an estimate derived from the available evidence – but many deniers claim it has been grossly exaggerated, either by accident or design.

War propaganda. This line of Holocaust denial suggests that stories of death camps, gas chambers, crematoria and corpses were fabricated or exaggerated by Allied soldiers during the final year of World War II, in order to demonise Germany and her people. Stories of anti-Jewish violence were employed as war propaganda and are therefore open to scrutiny. Anti-Semitic deniers go further to suggest extermination facilities were constructed by Jewish-Zionist interests, as a means of garnering world sympathy.

Flawed evidence. Holocaust deniers commonly claim existing evidence of the Holocaust has been fabricated or altered. Documents have been forged; photographs of buildings and facilities manipulated to give the impression of gas chambers and crematoria; oral testimonies have either been concocted or distorted. These claims are an attempt to undermine, discredit or refute existing understanding about the Holocaust.

The ‘Holohoax’. The most bizarre claim made by denialists, usually from radical anti-Semitic groups, is that the entire Holocaust is a myth. The ‘Holohoax’, they claim, was a public relations exercise of massive proportions, engineered by Jewish conspirators and fabricated by pro-Jewish governments and media outlets. Its function was to generate sympathy for the Jewish people, to suppress awareness of their ‘global control’ and encourage international support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

Seeds of denial

Holocaust deniers frequently refer to or exploit certain conditions and historical factors. One of their usual focal points is the ‘scorched earth’ policy employed by Nazi forces as they retreated from Western Europe in late 1944.

During this period, SS officers received orders from Himmler that no evidence of the Final Solution was to be left behind to fall into Allied or Soviet hands. As a consequence, retreating SS troops engaged in widespread destruction: burning paperwork, tearing down buildings, destroying extermination facilities and crematoria. The bodies of Jews and other civilians shot by the einsatzgruppen years before were exhumed and incinerated.

Because of this campaign of destruction, Holocaust deniers cite a lack of physical evidence that concentration camps were actually used for slave labour and genocide.

Nazi euphemisms

Another complicating factor is that the true meaning of the Final Solution was rarely expressed in writing by Nazi leaders and bureaucrats. They tended to employ euphemisms, such as “resettlement” and “special treatment”, when referring to the mass killing of Jews and other ‘race enemies’.

Another sticking point is the absence of definitive written orders from Adolf Hitler. This is not proof that Hitler was unaware of the Final Solution, though it reflects his lax leadership style. Hitler was a strong and forceful orator but a lazy political operator who hated dealing with paperwork. His preferred method of leadership was to give broad verbal instructions to subordinates and let them worry about the detail.

If Hitler gave instructions to initiate the genocide of all European Jews, they were almost certainly verbal. If he did not, it is difficult to imagine how or why it could be carried out without his knowledge.

The weight of evidence

In reality, the evidence for the Holocaust is overwhelming, both in quantity and validity. There are millions of documents, statistical records, photographs and eyewitness testimonies which, taken together, verify consensus views about the Final Solution.

The ‘scorched earth’ policy employed by the Nazis in 1944-45 is offset by the fact they were fastidious record-keepers. So while an enormous amount of evidence was destroyed, enough documents remain to provide evidence of a systematic policy.

From written orders and memos issued to camp commandants and officers; to railway movement orders to deport Jews en masse; to orders and requisitions for Zyklon B gas; to plans and goods orders for the construction of crematoria, there is compelling documentary evidence of a policy of genocide.

Oral and eyewitness histories

The weight of oral testimony from camp survivors, relatives, German civilians, Allied soldiers and even former SS guards is also significant. Allied commanders who liberated the camps in 1945 had the foresight to collect as much evidence as they could.

United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower personally inspected several concentration and internment camps and sent for additional photographers and cinematographers to document what remained. When asked why Eisenhower purportedly said, “Because the day will come when some son of a bitch will say this never happened”.

Parliamentary and civilian delegations from several Allied nations also toured the death camps and saw first-hand evidence of what had occurred there.

Outlawing denial

Today, 15 European countries have laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, making the publication or circulation of denialist theories a criminal offence. These laws are themselves controversial became they limit free speech and may impede further research on the subject.

Austria was the first to outlaw Holocaust denial (1947) but other nations did not pass similar laws until the 1990s, to combat a surge of denialist theories and neo-Nazism. French author Roger Garaudy was one of the first prominent writers to be prosecuted, after repeating certain ‘myths’ about the Holocaust.

In 2005, David Irving was arrested and placed on trial in Austria, where he pleaded guilty to “trivialising and denying the Holocaust”. Irving was sentenced to three years’ in prison. He was released on probation after serving 13 months and banned from ever entering Austria again. Irving has also been deported from Canada and denied entry to Germany, Italy, Australia and New Zealand.

The harshest sentence given under these laws was in Austria in 2008, when right-wing extremist Wolfgang Frohlich was sent to prison for a cumulative six-year term. Frohlich had written letters to several politicians and leaders declaring the Holocaust “a Satanic lie”.

“Holocaust deniers deny well-established facts about the Holocaust. They assert that the murder of approximately six million Jews during World War II never occurred and that the Germans are victims of a Zionist plot to extort vast sums of money from them on the basis of a hoax… Under the guise of a reasonable person’s search for truth, Holocaust deniers spread falsehoods and misinformation that appears reasonable to the uninformed reader. Often times they claim the mantle of free-speech saying they are for “continued research” into a “complex” and “misrepresented” history; yet, their method is never truly historical. Deniers do not rely on artifactual and documentary evidence to create their hypotheses, instead, they develop a history of opinion in which any manipulation or distortion of history is acceptable as one’s personal belief.”
Deborah Lipstadt, historian

holocaust denial

1. Holocaust denial involves arguing that the Holocaust or various components of it, such as the extent or the killing or Nazi government policies, did not exist.

2. Holocaust deniers employ several arguments, such as the lack of a clearly articulated Nazi government policy or the absence of other evidence.

3. The best-known Holocaust denialist is British author David Irving, who accepted that some mass killing occurred but that Hitler was not directly responsible for it.

4. Collective documentary and eyewitness evidence for the Holocaust is overwhelming, however, and denialist arguments are easily refuted.

5. Several countries have laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and providing for fines and prison sentences. These laws are controversial because they impede free speech and may stifle future research.

Citation information
Title: “Holocaust denial”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/nazi-fugitives/
Date published: August 22, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Liberation of the camps

The Nazi Arbeitlager camps and death camps were liberated by Allied forces during late 1944 and 1945. In most cases, these camps were partially destroyed and abandoned by the fleeing SS. The liberation of the camps exposed the full horror of the Nazi Final Solution and the mass killing of Jews and other minorities.

The Allies approach

The liberation of the camps began with the Allied landing in Normandy on D-Day. From this point, the Nazis were caught between two fronts: the Americans, British and others moving towards Germany from the west and the Soviet Red Army advancing from the east.

In the summer of 1944, Soviet forces in central Poland advanced west into Nazi-occupied territory.

The Soviets were closer to the six most notorious ‘death camps’: Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first three of these were already closed, shut down by the Nazis in the summer and autumn of 1943.

Belzec, where up to 500,000 Jews and Romany were killed using carbon monoxide gas generated by petrol engines, was closed in June 1943. Belzec had been a victim of its own efficiency: it had killed so many so quickly that the south-east sector of Poland was virtually cleared of Jews.

At Treblinka, more than 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated before it was liquidated in August 1943, following a prisoner riot. At Sobibor, the easternmost of the six death camps, more than 250,000 Jews were killed before a successful mass break-out saw it closed down in October 1943.

Destroying evidence

By late 1944, as the Soviets displaced the Nazis from Poland, Berlin moved to conceal the worst of the Final Solution. Orders were issued for the liquidation of concentration camps. Camp facilities were to be dismantled and any evidence of genocide – surviving prisoners, gas chambers, crematoria, corpses, inmates’ belongings and written records – were to be burned.

Later, similar orders were given for camps elsewhere. SS Reichsfuhrer Himmler issued the following directives for camps in southern Germany:

To the camp commandants of Dachau and Flossenbuerg:
Surrender is out of the question! The camp is to be evacuated immediately. No prisoner is to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.
Heinrich Himmler, April 1945

Delays in receiving these orders, the speed of the Soviet advance and panic amongst Nazi troops meant these orders were rarely carried out in full.

Majdanek

The first major camp liberated by the Soviets was Majdanek in central Poland in late July 1944. Majdanek’s guards had set fire to the crematoria before fleeing, but most of the camp was left intact, along with ample evidence of the murder which had occurred there.

On January 17th 1945 Russian troops also captured Chelmno, the smallest of the extermination facilities, though the Nazis had destroyed most of the camp. There were no surviving prisoners.

Auschwitz

On the same day the Soviets were inspecting Chelmno, SS guards were beginning to evacuate Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost 60,000 surviving prisoners were forced to march for days to the Czechoslovakian border, as many as one-quarter of them dying en route.

Those who survived this death march were then redistributed to other concentration camps across Germany and Austria. Most ended up in Bergen-Belsen, including teenage diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Both died there from typhus in March 1945.

Around 7,000 prisoners who were too ill or malnourished to march were left behind at Auschwitz, unguarded and without food. Soviet soldiers found these prisoners when they entered the complex on January 27th 1945. With the assistance of Russian soldiers, some emaciated prisoners found and feasted on stores of German tinned meat; several of them died because their deprived digestive systems could not cope.

Shortly before evacuating Auschwitz, the SS started fires in all three camps but with only partial success. A few warehouses were destroyed and there was some damage to gas chambers and crematoria. There was still considerable evidence of genocide and atrocities around the compound, including piles of bodies buried under snow or crammed into storerooms.

German camps

Concentration camps in Germany itself were liberated by soldiers from the United States and Britain. The first to be liberated by American troops was Buchenwald, near Weimar.

The Nazis began to evacuate Buchenwald in early April 1945, forcing thousands of prisoners to relocate further east out of Allied reach. On April 11th, a group of prisoners seized control of the camp, fearing that the retreating SS guards would attempt to slaughter them. The Americans arrived later that day.

US soldiers liberated Dachau on April 29th, finding horrific scenes such as railway cars full of corpses that had been decaying for weeks. So angered were some American troops that they murdered between 30 and 100 of the SS guards who had surrendered. Later, US commanders forced civilians from the nearby town to inspect the camp, to inspect what they had either tacitly supported or turned a blind eye too.

The British also liberated concentration camps and labour camps in northern Germany, such as Bergen-Belsen (April 15th) and Neuengamme (May 4th).

Foreign reporting

When the American and British forces liberated these camps, they were often accompanied by civilian journalists. American war correspondent Edward R. Murrow was one of the first journalists to arrive at Buchenwald. He later described some of its horrors to his listeners on CBS, closing with the statement: “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

British reporter Richard Dimbleby with soldiers at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Dimbleby filed a 14-minute radio report in which he broke down several times. So graphic and unbelievable was his report that the BBC initially refused to broadcast it, later putting to air an editing version.

In April 1945, the British government assembled a filmmaking crew, headed by Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock, to produce an extensive documentary record of the Nazi death camps. They visited 14 different locations and shot hours of film, some of which was later used at the Nuremberg trials. The final film, “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” was never completed or shown to the public until 2014.

The US and Soviet Union also produced documentary films of the camps and their human suffering. “Death Mills”, a 22-minute film by American Billy Wilder, was created for the purpose of showing Germans what had taken place at the hands of their government.

1. The invasion of the Soviet Union (1941) and the Allied D-Day landings saw Germany fighting a two-front war.

2. As Soviet forces pushed from the east, they approached the Nazi death camps operating in Poland.

3. The SS attempted to conceal their genocidal activity by evacuating inmates and destroying evidence.

4. Soviets liberated Majdanek in July 1944, then Chelmno and Auschwitz in January 1945, exposing Nazi atrocities.

5. In 1945 US and British troops liberated concentration camps in Germany, such as Buchenwald and Dachau.

Citation information
Title: “The liberation of the camps”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/liberation-of-the-camps/
Date published: August 18, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Jewish property seizures

As they invaded and occupied the nations of Europe, the Nazis raided local economies and seized anything of value. No group lost as much as the Jews. Hitler’s Final Solution was not just an act of genocide, it was also a campaign of organised theft. The Nazis carried out a program of Jewish property seizures that stripped European Jews of billions of dollars worth of cash, housing, businesses and personal belongings.

Motives

These Jewish property seizures were ideologically driven, designed to eradicate the economic influence of Jews while contributing the war effort – but greed also played its part, with plenty of Jewish wealth finding its way into the hands of corrupt Nazis officers and supporters.

Placing a figure on the amount stolen from Jews between 1933 and 1945 is impossible. Even the more conservative estimates begin at $US8 billion. The vast majority of this stolen property was privately owned by individual Jews and Jewish families.

In many cases, Jewish property stolen by the Nazi regime or their collaborators was never returned and no compensation was ever forthcoming.

Commercial pressure

The seizure of Jewish property began in Nazi German prior to World War II. Under Hitler’s rule, German Jews were subjected to a range of pressures intended to force them to surrender or sell their property to non-Jews.

The Sturmabteilung (SA) ran boycott and picketing campaigns targeting Jewish businesses that reduced their customers, sales and revenue. The Nazis exerted pressure on suppliers or wholesalers that left many Jewish businesses without stock. From 1936, the allocation of raw materials was regulated by the Nazi regime, which naturally denied them to Jewish companies. Nazis and Nazi sympathisers in local government often raised rates and rentals on Jewish stores and offices.

These pressures made many Jewish businesses unviable, so thousands ran at a loss or slipped into bankruptcy. When Hitler came to power in January 1933 there were around 100,000 Jewish-owned businesses registered in Germany. Within five years, around two-thirds of these businesses had either closed or been transferred to non-Jewish ownership.

Demands for stronger action

By 1938, many in the Nazi Party were demanding even stronger action. They wanted the complete Aryanisation of German business and the extraction of Jews from the economic life of Germany. Jewish property, they argued, should be seized and put to use for the nation.

Some, like party official and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, wanted Jewish property given directly to Nazi Party members:

“The transfer of Jewish businesses to German hands gives the Party the opportunity to proceed with a healthy policy… It is the Party’s duty of honour to support Party comrades who, because of their membership, have suffered economic disadvantages and to help them achieve an independent livelihood… It is the Party’s duty to ensure that the Jew does not receive an inappropriately high purchase price. In this way, Jewry will make reparation for part of the damage that it has done to the German people.”

‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish property

In 1938, the Nazi government moved to hasten and complete the ‘Aryanisation of Jewish property’. In April a decree issued by Nazi leader Hermann Goering ordered Jews to compile and submit details of all private property valued at in excess of 5,000 Reichsmarks.

Across Germany, Jews were required to fill out a comprehensive inventory and lodge it with the government before the end of June. Some did so with indifference – like the conductor Victor Klemperer, who said that “We have become so used to living in this condition of lost rights… that it hardly disturbs us any more”.

These inventories compiled under the April 1938 decree would be used to compile a ‘register of Jewish wealth’. Similar requirements were enacted in Nazified Austria and, later, in occupied Europe.

The ‘flight tax’

Businesses that remained in Jewish hands also came under increased pressure during 1938. In March, the Nazi regime decreed that it would no longer sign contracts or do business with any Jewish-owned company. Jewish businesses were denied public contracts, tax incentives, access to government services, raw materials and foreign exchange.

Finding it impossible to operate, these businesses either closed down, changed hands or – in the case of large corporations – voted out Jewish directors and stockholders. In June and July 1938, Jewish stores in several German cities including Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Hanover were attacked, picketed and daubed with insults and Stars of David, severely affecting their trade.

Another significant avenue of Jewish property confiscation was the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or ‘Reich Flight Tax’. As the name suggests, this law required Jews fleeing Germany to pay a substantial levy before they were granted permission to leave.

The flight tax was not an invention of the Nazis; it was passed by the Weimar Republic in 1931 to prevent Germany from being drained of gold, cash reserves and capital. But the Nazi regime expanded and increased the flight tax considerably, revising the law six times during the 1930s. In 1934, it was increased to 25% of domestic wealth, payable in cash or gold. Further amendments in 1938 required emigrating Jews to leave most of their cash in a Gestapo-controlled bank.

The Reichsfluchtsteuer generated enormous amounts for the Nazi regime. In its first year of operation (1932) it had raised less than one million Reichsmarks of government revenue – but by 1938, this amount had skyrocketed to more than 342 million Reichsmarks.

After Kristallnacht

The most significant pre-war confiscation of Jewish property followed the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. The government held Jews responsible for this violence and ‘fined’ the Jewish population a total of one billion Reichsmarks. This amount was to be paid with cash or through the requisitioning of other portable wealth, such as gold, gemstones and jewellery.

On November 12th, Hermann Goering passed the Decree Excluding Jews from German Economic Life, which effectively banned Jews from conducting any form of retail business. Thousands of Jewish shops and stores, which had held out against earlier pressures, were now obliged to close.

A further decree on the ‘utilisation of Jewish property’ in December set time limits for the sale, transfer or winding up of Jewish companies. The few Jews who still owned businesses were besieged by non-Jews, many of them government insiders, offering to purchase them for extortionate prices. Intimidation and blackmail were often used; there were reports of the SS threatening deportation to Dachau or other labour camps for those who refused to sell. When the deadline expired, any businesses still in Jewish hands were confiscated by the government and put up for public auction.

Beneficiaries of property seizures

The majority of seized Jewish property was remitted to the Nazi government, either through taxes or confiscations – but a large amount was also siphoned off to individuals in the SS and other Nazi agencies.

While the official Nazi position was that Jewish property belonged to the state, there was a strong view that it should also be redistributed among the German people or (as suggested by Martin Bormann above) to loyal Nazi Party members. Many Nazi bureaucrats and SS officers, filled with this sense of self-entitlement, breached government regulations to line their pockets with Jewish wealth.

This corruption was worse in occupied Europe, where there was less oversight and the SS tended to act as a law unto itself. Many high-ranking Nazis moved into palatial homes confiscated from wealthy Jews. SS officers responsible for administering Reich finances, government contracts and confiscated Jewish property benefited from bribes, backhanders and ‘skimming’.

In 1943, Heinrich Himmler claimed that the SS had cleansed Europe of its Jews without stealing a penny – but this was far from the case.

“When it came to robbing the Jews, very little was missed. Jewish bank accounts, insurance policies, securities, jewellery, property, businesses, pensions, art wine, book, manuscript and stamp collections were all catalogued, accounted for and redistributed. Clothes, shoes, hats, household and business goods were even utilised for resale, state use – or simply collected for museum exhibits, all dedicated to an extinct culture, according to Nazi assertive belief.
Gregg J. Rickman, historian

1. From 1933 Jewish business owners were subjected to Nazi pressures to sell or relinquish control to Aryans.

2. The process of ‘Aryanisation’ increased in 1938 with the state passing decrees to ‘eliminate Jews from economic life’.

3. In late 1938 Jews were banned from owning or operating retail businesses, which were sold or surrendered cheaply.

4. Jews were also stripped of personal wealth by the Nazi ‘flight tax’ and a hefty ‘fine’ imposed after Kristallnacht.

5. More than $8 billion of Jewish property was stolen between 1933-45, either by the Nazi regime or corrupt individuals.

Citation information
Title: “Jewish property seizures”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/jewish-property-seizures/
Date published: August 4, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Nazi fugitives

Aware they would be arrested, investigated and dealt with by the Allies, scores of Nazi fugitives went into hiding or attempted to flee Europe. Evading capture was not difficult in the chaos and confusion of the end of the war. Western Europe was filled with refugees and displaced persons, former prisoners of war and demobilised soldiers. Nazi fugitives also benefited from support given by sympathisers across Europe. It would take years – and in some cases, decades – to locate these suspected war criminals and bring them to justice.

Avenues for flight

Allied investigations into Nazi war crimes started even before the end of the war and progressed quickly in 1945-46. The task of gathering evidence, processing hundreds of thousands of prisoners, interviewing victims and identifying potential suspects, however, was overwhelming. All but the most prominent Nazi fugitives were able to evade capture by dressing as civilians or enlisted soldiers, sometimes with forged or stolen identity documents.

Some Nazi fugitives who attempted to flee benefited from support networks, particularly in Italy and Franco’s Spain. Some were also assisted by a clique of German-Austrian priests within the Vatican. Several ‘ratlines’ (escape routes for Nazis) operated in these countries, allowing Nazi fugitives to move unmolested to ports such as Genoa and Cadiz.

Fugitives with adequate funds and false documents could buy passage and leave these ports for almost any destination around the world. Some ended up in the US, Canada, Africa, even Australia.

Most chose South America, however, where there was a healthy support network for fugitive Nazis. Argentina, in particular, became a haven for former Nazis. Its quasi-fascist dictator, Juan Peron, provided both informal protection and government support, offering several former Nazis Argentine citizenship and employment.

Adolf Eichmann

Nazi fugitives were investigated and hunted not just by the Allies and but the government of the newly formed Jewish state of Israel. Several Holocaust survivors, including Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman and Elliot Welles, became ‘Nazi hunters’, gathering information and evidence about SS war criminals to locate and bring them to justice.

One of their highest-profile targets was Adolf Eichmann. A lieutenant-colonel in the SS, prior to the war Eichmann had been assigned to the Jewish Emigration Office, an agency responsible for assisting Jews to leave Nazi Germany. He helped draft a proposal called the ‘Madagascar Project’, which called for the entire Jewish population of Europe to be forcibly relocated to a large island off the east coast of Africa. Hitler approved this plan but it was never carried out.

In 1941 Eichmann was told of the Final Solution, the plan to exterminate of all European Jews. The following year, Eichmann attended the Wannsee Conference, where he recorded the minutes and resolutions of the meeting.

Eichmann’s flight and capture

Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution was mainly bureaucratic. He planned, organised and managed train systems that relocated Jews from their homeland or ghettos to the concentration camps. He carried out these duties with precision and cool detachment, with little concern that his work was responsible for the deaths of millions.

In 1945, Eichmann escaped via the ‘ratlines’ to Argentina, settling in Buenos Aires under the false name of Ricardo Klement. Strangely, his wife and children kept their own names, a decision that resulted in his detection.

Eichmann was kidnapped in 1960 by Israeli agents who smuggled him out of the country without the knowledge or cooperation of the Argentine government. Eichmann was put on trial in Israel, found guilty of war crimes and hanged in 1962.

Other notable fugitives

Klaus Barbie was a Gestapo captain who served in the French city of Lyon, where he personally assaulted, tortured and murdered hundreds of people, both Jews and members of the French Resistance. Barbie also organised the deportation of local Jews and is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 14,000 people. Barbie fled to Bolivia after the war but was deported in 1983, aged 69. He was sentenced to life in prison, dying there in 1991.

Franz Stangl was an SS captain who served as commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps. During his command, these camps murdered an estimated 300,000 people, mostly Jews. Stangl was arrested after the war but escaped to Syria via Italy, aided by a Catholic bishop. In 1951, Stangl relocated to Brazil, where he obtained work and lived unmolested under his own name. He was located and arrested in 1967 then deported to West Germany for trial. In October 1970 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, though he lived only another nine months.

Gustav Wagner was an SS sergeant who served at the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was notoriously brutal towards inmates. According to one report, Wagner would snatch Jewish babies from their mothers’ arms and literally tear them to pieces. Wagner escaped to Brazil after the war, obtaining work and citizenship there. He was identified and arrested in 1978 but requests for his deportation were refused by the Brazilian government. He died in 1980, aged 69, probably murdered.

Josef Schwammberger was an SS lieutenant given responsibility for several labour camps and Jewish ghettos in southern Poland, mostly around Krakow. Schwammberger was known for his ruthlessness and brutal tantrums, which invariably ended with prisoners being shot in numbers. Schwammberger evaded capture after the war and, in 1948, relocated to Argentina. He was located, arrested and identified in the late 1980s after the West German government posted a large reward. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1992 and died in custody in 2004.

Josef Mengele

Despite the sustained efforts of Nazi hunters in Israel and elsewhere, some Nazi fugitives continued to elude location and capture. One of the worst war criminals in history, Josef Mengele, was never brought to justice.

Mengele was an SS captain and a qualified doctor who was posted to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. Only 32 years old, Mengele was given significant responsibilities there, including participating in selections on new arrivals, deciding which would be used for labour and which would be sent for extermination.

Mengele’s most horrific crimes, however, were medical and anatomical experiments he performed on camp inmates: dissections, vivisections, amputations, castrations, blood transfusions, forced conceptions and caesarian births, all conducted without anaesthetic or pain relief. Mengele had a special interest in twins, once sewing one pair of twins together to make conjoined or ‘Siamese’ twins.

Mengele went into hiding after the war, working as a farmhand until 1949 then fleeing to Argentina via Italy. He prospered there until 1955, working first as a labourer before returning to medical practice (though he had to do so illegally). He also divorced his wife and remarried.

Mengle moved in the same social circles as several other Nazi fugitives, including Adolf Eichmann. During Eichmann’s arrest and kidnapping in 1960, Mengele was spotted by Mossad agents, who reported his whereabouts to Nazi hunters.

Spooked by Eichmann’s capture, Mengele obtained documentation and relocated to Paraguay, then Brazil, where he died in 1979 while swimming in the ocean. His body was exhumed and positively identified in 1985. According to Mengele’s letters and anecdotal accounts, he remained a loyal Nazi until his death, firmly believing that he had done nothing wrong.

Operation Paperclip

Not all former Nazis were subject to arrest or trial. Both the United States and Soviet Russia rounded up and recruited German specialists, many of whom were SS officers, Nazi Party members or sympathisers, in order to deny the other of their expertise.

The US was particularly active in this regard. In mid-1945, Washington launched Operation Paperclip, a large campaign to gather information on Nazi scientists, technicians and engineers. Several of these specialists were located and moved to US-occupied Germany, out of Soviet reach.

Of particular interest to the Americans were the men who had worked on Hitler’s V-2 program, unmanned rockets that were used to launch deadly attacks on Britain in the final two years of the war. Washington coveted their expertise and hoped to harness it in their own ballistic missile program.

Some of these men had been implicated in or accused of war crimes. Hubertus Strughold was a medical expert recruited as part of Operation Paperclip, who became an important contributor to America’s space program. It later emerged that he was probably involved in human experimentation while stationed at Dachau. The Americans also recruited former Nazis as agents, such as Wehrmacht general Reinhard Gehlen, who would later set up a 4,000-man spy ring inside Soviet-occupied Europe.

“[Eichmann said] ‘I never found any pleasure in shooting to kill. I think the man who can look through the sights of his rifle into the eyes of a deer and then kill it is a man without a heart in his body. I thanked God that in the war I had not been made the actual instrument of killing anybody.’ Such was the magnitude of Eichmann’s self-delusion. He would continue to deny his role as an instrument of slaughter for the rest of his life. But for the time being, he had his own pelt to save. ‘I was the quarry now’, he acknowledged.”
Guy Walters, historian

nazi fugitives

1. Toward the end of the war, hundreds of Nazis attempted to flee Europe along so-called ‘ratlines’.

2. They were given assistance in this by pro-Nazi regimes in Spain and Italy, as well as other people and groups.

3. Many settled in the relative safety of South America, where support networks for fugitive Nazis existed.

4. One notorious escapee was SS doctor, Josef Mengele, who lived comfortably in South America until his death.

5. Not so lucky was Adolf Eichmann, who was tracked down, kidnapped, tried and executive by Israeli authorities.

Citation information
Title: “Nazi fugitives”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/nazi-fugitives/
Date published: August 20, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Schindler’s List

The 1993 film Schindler’s List depicts Oskar Schindler, a German-speaking Czechoslovakian businessman and Nazi Party member. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schindler sheltered and protected around 1,200 Jewish employees from persecution, deportation and extermination. His story was recognised

Pfefferberg and Keneally

The story of Oskar Schindler has been known to Jews for three generations but was revealed to the rest of the world comparatively late, more than four decades after the end of World War II. The man who gave it wider exposure was Thomas Keneally, an award-winning Australian writer.

In 1980, Keneally called into a Los Angeles store to inquire about buying a briefcase. The store’s owner was Poldek Pfefferberg. After discovering Keneally was a writer, Pfefferberg recounted his own story as a Holocaust survivor in Nazi-occupied Poland. He convinced Keneally to write a book about Oskar Schindler, whose actions had saved Pfefferberg’s life.

Intrigued by the story, Keneally spent a year researching and writing about Schindler. In 1982, he published Schindler’s Ark, a novel based on the story of Schindler, Pfefferberg and his fellow survivors. Schindler’s Ark went on to win a Booker Prize and sold well in both Europe and the United States.

Schindler’s List

Almost immediately, Schindler’s Ark was touted for adaptation into film. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg was first invited to take up the task in 1983. Raised as an Orthodox Jew and acutely aware of the Holocaust, Spielberg was fascinated by the story. He was unsure if he possessed the maturity, experience and gravitas for such an important film, however, so declined.

After spending ten years trying to convince other directors to take on the project, Spielberg relented and directed it himself. The entire three-hour movie was shot inside 12 weeks in original locations in Poland, particularly Krakow and Auschwitz.

Schindler’s List was released in 1993 to enormous public and critical acclaim. It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is through Schindler’s List

that millions of people became broadly aware of Oskar Schindler and his involvement in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Schindler’s background

Oscar Schindler was born in 1908 in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, an area later occupied by the Nazis shortly before World War II. His family was strongly Catholic, though as a boy Schindler had several Jewish friends.

Schindler’s life before the war was unremarkable. He tried several jobs and business ventures but none proved successful. He became a member of the NSDAP or Nazi Party in 1939, and for a time worked as an agent for the Abwehr, a secret information-gathering agency.

After the war broke out, Schindler moved to Nazi-occupied Poland and obtained control of a Krakow enamelware factory that had been seized from its Jewish owners. With the assistance of SS officers, Schindler recruited a small workforce from detainees in the nearby Jewish ghetto.

DEF in Krakow

By 1943, Schindler’s Krakow factory (Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik or DEF) was a successful manufacturing firm that employed more than 1,000 Jews and other civilians.

Schindler left the organisation and financial management of the factory to Jewish accountants, such as Itzhak Stern, but he nevertheless played a critical role in its success. He frequently dined or caroused with high-ranking SS officers and offered them gifts and bribes. In return, these officers granted Schindler’s factory lucrative contracts to provide goods to the SS and German military.

By the end of 1943, DEF was supplying the SS with mess kits, equipment and uniforms. These transactions, coupled with the inexpensiveness of forced Jewish labour, made Schindler a very wealthy man.

A safe haven

Though Schindler had supported the Nazis in the 1930s, the violence in Krakow troubled him. Schindler took steps to protect his employees from disease, starvation or violence. His employees were provided with extra food and clothing while Schindler’s wife, Emilie, supported his efforts by smuggling food and setting up a secret medical clinic (a contribution not highlighted in Spielberg’s film).

Later, Schindler was able to remove SS guards from the floor of his factory. On at least two occasions he extracted Jewish workers from the clutches of the SS, saving them from torture or execution. Those who worked for Schindler came to appreciate being under his protection. They began referring to themselves as Schindlerjuden (‘Schindler Jews’).

Schindler’s business activities and treatment of his Jewish employees was potentially dangerous and he occasionally found himself in difficulty. He was arrested three times for trading on the black market but was able to use bribery and his powerful SS connections to extract himself from trouble.

Relocation to Brunnlitz

In 1943, Schindler became acquainted with an SS captain, Amon Goeth, the commandant of a labour camp in nearby Plaszow. Goeth was known for his brutal mistreatment and summary execution of Jewish inmates, though Schindler remained on friendly terms with him.

In 1944, Goeth received orders to relocate all Krakow Jews to concentration camps. At this point, Schindler was able to bribe Goeth to secure the evacuation of his own workforce. They were relocated to a labour camp, Brunnlitz, near Schindler’s hometown.

The Schindlerjuden remained in Brunnlitz for the duration of the war until they were liberated by Russian soldiers in May 1945.

After the war

After the war, Schindler failed at most things he attempted. He abandoned his wife and emigrated to South America, where he started several businesses, all of which failed. At several times, Schindler received financial assistance from the Jews he had protected during the Holocaust.

Schindler eventually returned to Germany, where he died bankrupt in 1974. After his death, he was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Mount Zion, Jerusalem. The state of Israel granted him the title ‘Righteous among the Nations’, an honour given to non-Jews who protected or sheltered Jews during the Holocaust.

“To many ‘Schindlerjuden’, Schindler was a god-like figure. They overlooked Schindler’s human failings and continually searched for ways to help their flawed hero maintain some semblance of a normal life, first in Germany and later in Argentina. They helped him financially and looked for ways to honour him and tell the world about his unique efforts to save them during the Holocaust. When faced with Schindler’s shortcomings, particularly after the war, many would explain that it was these character flaws that made him so effective during the Holocaust… Some would simply shrug off talk about his drinking and womanising and say ‘Oh, that’s just Oskar’.”
David Crowe, historian

1. The movie Schindler’s List portrays the actions of a Czech-born Nazi, Oskar Schindler, during the Holocaust.

2. Schindler formed social contacts with high-ranking Nazis and used these to advance his business interests.

3. He obtained an enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland, and profited from the forced labour of 1,200 Jewish Poles.

4. Schindler protected his employees by providing them with necessities and sheltering them from the SS.

5. Toward the end of the war, he spent a fortune to have them relocated to the relative safety of his Czech homeland.

Citation information
Title: “The story behind Schindler’s List”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/schindlers-list/
Date published: August 17, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Auschwitz

The distinctive arched railway entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

The largest and best known of the Nazi concentration camps was Auschwitz in southern Poland. Today, 75 years after its liberation, the name Auschwitz transcends language barriers to provoke images of death, suffering and misery. At Auschwitz, human beings revealed both their brutality and their genocidal efficiency.

The ‘factory of death’

Auschwitz was little more than a factory of death. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, other racial minorities and political prisoners passed through its gates, never to return.

As they entered, they travelled under a metal banner bearing the cynical promise ‘Arbeit Macht Frei‘ (‘Work makes freedom’). The chilling reality was that work and time only moved inmates closer to death, either by starvation, disease or in the camp’s grotesquely efficient gas chambers.

Even today, historians debate and dispute the death toll at Auschwitz, with figures ranging from 1.1 million to more than three million. The only concrete fact is that Auschwitz was a place of absolute murder.

Construction

Auschwitz is the Germanised name for Oswiecim, a town in southern Poland located approximately 20 miles to the west of Krakow.

Construction of a concentration camp in Oswiecim started in May 1940, the first phase involving the conversion of abandoned Polish military barracks. Schutzstaffel (SS) troops cleared the area of Polish civilians and commandeered several hundred Jewish workers to construct new buildings and adapt existing buildings for military use.

The officer appointed to command this new facility was Rudolf Hoess. A 38-year-old Obersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant-colonel) who joined the SS in 1934, Hoess had previous experience as an adjutant at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in north-east Germany.

Growth

For a year, Hoess oversaw the establishment and growth of Auschwitz, from 16 single-storey barracks to a complex concentration camp network.

Auschwitz was initially intended to house career criminals from Germany and Polish political prisoners. But in June 1941, Hoess received new orders, as he later testified at the Nuremberg trials:

“In the summer of 1941, I was summoned to Berlin to Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler to receive personal orders. He told me something, I do not remember the exact words, that the Fuhrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, were to carry out that order. If it is not carried out now then the Jews will later on destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation … He told me that I was not even allowed to say anything about it to my immediate superior Gruppenfuhrer Glucks. This conference concerned the two of us only and I was to observe the strictest secrecy.”

A network of camps

Auschwitz was not one single camp but a network of labour and extermination camps. There were three primary camps – Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz – along with 45 smaller satellite camps. The three main camps each fulfilled different roles:

Auschwitz I was the main administration centre or ‘headquarters’. At 60 square kilometres, it was the smallest in area of the three main camps. It was the location where SS doctors like Josef Mengele conducted medical experimentation on inmates, particularly infants, twins and dwarves.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau was the main extermination facility of the Auschwitz complex. Its construction began in October 1941 and it was complete by mid-1942. Auschwitz II was the first camp to have a gas chamber and crematorium installed. Crematoria II was constructed in early 1943 and Crematoria III, IV and V were all in operation by June. The majority of victims at Auschwitz II-Birkenau were killed after mid-1943.

Auschwitz III-Monowitz, the largest of the three main camps, was constructed in October 1942. It originally housed slave labourers who worked at a nearby rubber factory. Up to 40,000 inmates lived at Monowitz in horrific conditions. Nazi physicians frequently attended Auschwitz III to conduct ‘selections’, or mass inspections of inmates for health, strength and mobility. Those fit were work were retained, others were transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau for extermination.

Transportation to Auschwitz

Prisoners were transported to Auschwitz from almost every country occupied by Nazi Germany. They came from all corners of Europe in cattle cars, with no toilet provisions and no access to food or water.

As these train wagons arrived at Birkenau and passed under the distinctive archway, prisoners were subjected to ‘selections’ by Nazi doctors. These medical examinations were not rigorous and were usually based on age, appearances and perceived strength and fitness.

The majority of first arrivals were sent away for extermination, a path the Nazis euphemistically dubbed ‘evacuation’ or ‘special treatment’. Children and elderly people were almost invariably exterminated on arrival because the SS considered them incapable of work. Only the fittest adults were retained for labour.

The process of murder

Arrivals and inmates selected for extermination were usually told to prepare for showering and de-lousing. They were ordered to remove all clothing and leave any belongings, including spectacles and shoes, for collection at a later time. Their heads were then quickly shaved, their hair retained for military uses.

After this, inmates were ushered into specially designed vaults, the walls lined with concrete, the doors and windows with airtight seals. There was a single vent for the distribution of poisonous gas and a small window for inspection.

The deadly gas used at Auschwitz was Zyklon B (German for ‘Cyclone B’), a cyanide-based pesticide manufactured by the German company IG Farben. When this was in short supply, prisoners were suffocated with carbon monoxide by filling the chambers with truck exhaust fumes.

Most gassings took between 20 and 30 minutes. Once the victims were observed to be dead, they were checked for and stripped of gold teeth. The bodies were hauled into nearby crematoria for burning. The work of moving, lifting and loading bodies into the crematoria was carried out by Kapos or trustee prisoners. The Kapos carried out this sinister work for a few extra food rations or to ensure their own survival.

Forced labour

Inmates selected for work at Auschwitz were tattooed with a prisoner number, usually on the inside of their forearm. They were no longer addressed by name but by this number.

Work details lasted twelve hours with no breaks. There were strict punishments for taking breaks, stalling or working slowly. Kapos were posted in toilet areas to ensure no prisoner spent too much time away from work.

Prisoners at Auschwitz wore light-blue striped clothing without underwear. On their feet, they wore poorly-fitting wooden clogs, without socks or stockings. Roll calls were conducted at least twice, before and after work details. If a prisoner was missing, other prisoners were forced to stand in formation until the person was found, regardless of weather conditions.

Upon returning to their barracks, the prisoners received rations of bread and water. After months spent as a labourer at Auschwitz, many inmates became what the German guards called Muselmann. Fatigued and starved, they moved silently like zombies, apparently barely conscious of their surroundings.

Prisoner uprisings

Prisoner uprisings were not common at Auschwitz. Reports suggest almost 800 individual prisoners made escape attempts, of which only 144 were successful. The SS executed those caught escaping – and to deter future attempts, they often punished family members or inmates sharing the same barracks.

Many Jews selected to work believed the best way to sabotage the German war effort was to avoid death and survive. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz and a prominent author, wrote of his Holocaust experience:

Because the camp was a great machine to reduce us to beasts; we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that, if we want to survive, then it’s important, that we strive to persevere at least the skeleton, the external shape of civilisation.

Liberation of Auschwitz

Towards the end of 1944, with the Soviet Red Army rapidly approaching, the SS officers at Auschwitz received orders to murder the remaining inmates and destroy all evidence of its activities. There was inadequate time for this, however, so it was decided to evacuate 60,000 prisoners to Bergen-Belsen, another camp further west and closer to the German border.

Of the inmates who left Auschwitz on January 17th 1945 on this forced march to Bergen-Belsen, only 20,000 made it. The rest died along the way from disease, malnutrition or occasional mass killings. Approximately 7,500 were too weak to march and were left behind at Auschwitz. Those that survived were freed by the Soviets on January 27th 1945.

The Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz found enormous stacks of personal artefacts confiscated from murdered prisoners. One storeroom contained almost 350,000 men’s suits. Another was filled to head height with shoes, spectacles and human hair. Other rooms were filled with stolen photographs, personal papers and jewellery.

More horrifically, there were dozens of piles of human corpses in various states of decomposition or cremation. The grounds and forest around Auschwitz were ankle-deep with ash, deposited like rain by the giant brick chimneys of the crematoria. Gullies, ditches and ponds, used as dumping grounds for crematoria waste, were clogged thick with ash and bone fragments.

Even the men of the Soviet Red Army, hardened by war and accustomed to death and suffering in their own country, were moved to tears by what they found at Auschwitz.

“Auschwitz does not lend itself easily to a historical perspective. For most, the camp will forever be what it became: the largest and most important of the Nazi concentration camps, the most destructive and sophisticated killing machine ever developed, the place where the greatest number of Jews – close to one million – were killed, the largest cemetery in the world.”
Jonathan Frankel, historian

1. Auschwitz, located near Krakow in southern Poland, was the largest and deadliest concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Europe.

2. Selected for its centrality in location to European rail networks, the Auschwitz compound received prisoners from almost every country.

3. Auschwitz was actually comprised of three main camps and 45 sub-camps. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, with its gas chambers and crematoria, was by far the deadliest of these.

4. Inmates arriving at Auschwitz were ‘selected’ for either work or immediate extermination, based on cursory assessments of their age, health and fitness.

5. Auschwitz was evacuated by the SS on January 17th 1945 and liberated by Soviet Russian soldiers 10 days later. Only a few thousand sickly inmates remained there.

Citation information
Title: “Auschwitz”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/auschwitz/
Date published: August 16, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Concentration camps

A horrific aspect of the Final Solution was the network of concentration camps operated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. These camps were constructed to house large populations of Jews and other minorities, for isolation, punishment or forced labour. By 1944, several of these camps had become dedicated extermination facilities.

Origins

The use of camps or compounds for detaining large numbers of civilians in one location was not a Nazi invention. The origins of concentration camps can, in fact, be found in the previous century.

Similar camps were used in the United States in the late 1800s to contain Native Americans. Spanish colonial rulers detained the local population of Cuba in concentration camps during the 1890s.

Concentration camps were notoriously used by the British army in South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902) as an attempt to prevent civilians from hiding and supplying Afrikaner guerrillas. The death toll from disease and malnutrition in these British camps was significant.

Dachau

The Nazis began using concentration camps just weeks after coming to power. The first of these camps, in Dachau, near Munich, became operational in 1933.

Dachau’s initial function was to contain political prisoners criminals, homosexuals and beggars. Prisoners at Dachau were housed in barracks on beds of straw and given meagre rations; they were forced to wear striped uniforms and a colour-coded system of badges that showed the reason for their internment.

Dachau contained relatively few Jews until Kristallnacht in November 1938, when around 10,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent there. Jews eventually constituted around one-third of the 200,000 inmates who passed through Dachau’s gates.

Dachau was deemed a great success by Hitler and other members of the Nazi hierarchy. As a consequence, its facilities, organisation, arduous daily routine and reliance on forced labour were copied and employed in other Nazi concentration camps.

The Totenkopfverbende

During the war, all concentration camps were operated by a special SS division called the Totenkopfverbende or ‘Death’s Head Brigade’. Responsibility for the camps, their construction and management rested with SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

Until 1942, all concentration camps operated as Arbeitslager (labour camps). Their main function at this time was to house civilian prisoners for forced labour, usually on industries crucial to the war effort.

As the Nazis swarmed over more and more of Europe, they erected new camps, both in Germany and occupied countries. The larger Arbeitslager were sizeable installations, requiring a considerable amount of space, men and resources. The more significant camps housed several thousand prisoners, required a company of troopers and were overseen by a kommandant, usually an SS officer of Stuhrmfuhrer rank (captain or first lieutenant).

Daily routines

The daily routine of an Arbeitslager was carefully planned and rigorously enforced. Inmates performed forced labour daily, either within the camp or by marching to and from work sites. The hours of work were long: 10-14 hours per day, six or seven days a week.

Food rations for inmates were meagre, often just a lump of bread and some watery soup once a day. The lack of adequate fresh food meant that malnutrition and diseases like scurvy and dysentery were rife. Prisoners unfit for work were either left to starve, shot within the camp or deported en masse to the ‘death camps’.

Some labour camps also operated a number of smaller satellite camps, or ‘sub-camps’. The sub-camps allowed a small group of prisoners to be accommodated closer to their workplace – not for their benefit but to reduce travel and increase production time. Sub-camps were often administered privately by factory owners or civilian managers, aided by a small garrison of SS guards.

‘Annihilation through work’

From mid-1942, the function and operation of labour camps began to alter. As huge shipments of new workers, mostly Jews, regularly arrived from occupied Europe, camp commanders became less concerned with sustaining existing inmates.

Government correspondence from this time reveals a new policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit, or ‘Annihilation through work’, mentioned by Hitler at an April 1942 meeting of camp commanders. With camp inmates now utterly expendable, camp commandants were given a free hand with regard to their treatment. Working hours were no longer mandated so prisoners were worked for unlimited periods of time; rest periods and food and drinks breaks were abolished.

Some camp commanders took the policy very seriously and introduced practices to intentionally kill off workers. At Mathausen-Gusen in Austria, prisoners were made to toil in a nearby quarry from dawn to dark, often in below-freezing temperatures. SS guards forced them to form queues and climb a 186-step staircase, each man carrying a heavy stone boulder. If one collapsed, the others below were struck by men and boulders like tumbling dominos.

Many prisoners were also compelled to work in industrial or chemical facilities with no protection against toxic fumes or dust. Others were forced to dig tunnels or underground bunkers in unstable ground. There was no regard whatsoever for the safety, wellbeing or survival of Jewish workers. As one former SS guard put it, “they were to be worked to death, sapped of every bit of their usefulness, then replaced”.

The death camps

The endorsement of the Final Solution in early 1942 also saw the construction of a new kind of concentration facility: the death camp. Like the Arbeitslagers, these camps supplied Jewish forced labour to nearby military or civilian plants – but their primary purpose was to exterminate large populations of ‘undesirables’ and dispose of their remains.

Six death camps were constructed in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Madjanek, Chelmno and Belzec. European Jews earmarked for liquidation were shipped to these camps by railroad. The rail journey itself – two or three days in crowded boxcars, with no heating, sewage, food or water – claimed thousands of lives.

Once arrived, new inmates were subject to ‘selection’, where those fit for work were separated from those destined for immediate extermination. Sometimes this process was based on the robustness, health or fitness of the new arrivals. At other times it was quite arbitrary, perhaps determined by the whims of camp officers or directives for Berlin.

Those fit enough to complete work in the camp or at nearby factories were spared, at least temporarily. They were sent off to be washed, deloused and housed in crowded barracks. Those not selected for work were sent to their doom. Children, the sick and the elderly had negligible values as workers so were almost always gassed immediately. Some were selected for a worse fate: medical experimentation at the hands of SS doctors.

Exterminations

Jews and other inmates marked for extermination were stripped of personal belongings and had their hair shaved. They were then herded naked into concrete rooms resembling a large shower cubicle. The chamber was sealed tight and cyanide gas was pumped into it, killing hundreds of human beings in just a few minutes.

After a half-hour or so, the bodies were dragged out and moved into nearby crematoria, operated by other camp inmates. Corpses were incinerated at high temperatures in the crematoria, their tall brick chimneys depositing human ashes in and around the camp. Ash and bone fragments left after the burnings were carted away and dumped outside the camp.

This industrialised killing allowed the Nazis to extinguish human lives at a rate never before seen in human history. Working at full capacity, the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp killed and incinerated more than 6,000 people a day. By the end of the war, the six death camps had disposed of more than 2.7 million people.

The Third Reich was dominated by camps. Camps were everywhere, in cities and the country-side, inside Germany and within newly conquered territory. Nazi leadership was irresistibly drawn to the camp as an instrument of discipline and control – and not just for opponents of the regime… They differed greatly in size, condition and function, but were united by a common aim to terrorise their inmates and intimidate the wider population. The extent of these camps is almost unfathomable: in the German state of Hessen alone, at least 606 camps have been counted; in the territory of occupied Poland, no fewer than 5,877.
Jane Caplan, historian

1. The concept of concentration camps was not developed by the Nazis. Large camps or compounds for concentrating civilians were used in the 19th century, such as in the Boer War.

2. The first Nazi concentration camps were built to contain and concentrate political prisoners. They were constructed and managed by a specialised division of the Schutzstaffel (SS).

3. After the Nazis occupied Europe, the Jews were herded into purpose-built labour camps (Arbeitslager). Later, Nazi commanders adopted a policy of ‘annihilation through work’.

4. Later in the war, the Nazis constructed and operated six special-purpose ‘death camps’, each within reach of Europe’s rail network. The best known of these was Auschwitz in southern Poland.

5. These death camps employed production-line methods for the murder and cremation of Jews, sometimes up to 6,000 people per day.

Citation information
Title: “The concentration camps”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/concentration-camps/
Date published: August 15, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

The Einsatzgruppen

An execution by einsatzgruppen using small arms.

Many think of the Holocaust taking place in extermination camps such as Auschwitz. The first killings of the Nazi Final Solution, however, were carried out by mobile Schutzstaffel (SS) groups tasked with eradicating Jewish populations in certain areas. These death squads were collectively referred to as Einsatzgruppen

Formation

The Einsatzgruppen (German for ‘action group’) were formed by Nazi commanders in 1941. They were comprised of paramilitary personnel from the Schutzstaffel (SS).

The ranks of the Einsatzgruppen were filled with both conscripts and volunteers. Many units were led by men with investigative or policing experience, seconded from the Gestapo or German civilian police units like the Kripo and Orpo.

The Einsatzgruppen were modelled on squads sent into Austria and Czechoslovakia after the Nazi annexations in 1938. Their mission there was to locate, detain or silence dissidents and troublemakers. Similar groups also followed the Nazi blitzkrieg into western Poland in 1939, again tasked with eliminating political threats, dissenters or potential resistance leaders.

Expansion

The Nazi conquest of Europe brought about the expansion of the SS Einsatzgruppen and changes to both its composition and its mission. By 1941, the Einsatzgruppen was comprised of four divisions, labelled A, B, C and D. Each division was comprised of several companies or platoons and contained between 700 and 1,000 men.

These Einsatzgruppen divisions were ordered to follow the Wehrmacht as it advanced into enemy territory. Once an area had been secured by the army, the task of the Einsatzgruppen was to identify, round up, assemble and exterminate “undesirables”, particularly Jews, Romany and communists.

The Einsatzgruppen operated under strict rules of engagement to minimise disruption and conceal their grisly duties. Executions had to take place well away from Aryan or non-Jewish populations. Bodies were carefully disposed of in remote locations, away from farmland or areas likely to be cultivated or developed. Graves could not be marked or otherwise identifiable.

Though they left little evidence on the ground, the Einsatzgruppen were instructed to keep thorough records. Statistics on liquidated targets were kept; reports were compiled, checked and sent to SS headquarters.

First significant deployment

The first significant deployment of the Einsatzgruppen as mobile death squads was during Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia (June 1941). Another Einsatzgruppen unit, unaccompanied by any substantial Wehrmacht divisions, was based further south in the Ukraine.

In both locations, the Einsatzgruppen moved from village to village executing any ‘undesirables’ it could locate. The vast majority of Einsatzgruppen killings were carried out by small arms fire: rifles, pistols and sub-machine guns. Victims were often forced to dig their own graves, before being lined up at the edge and shot.

Later, this progressed to the digging of large pits, mass executions and burying of bodies in piles of layers. Executioners sometimes forced horrified victims to enter the pits and stand on the bodies of those already murdered. The pits were then filled it, regardless of whether those inside were actually dead.

Changing methods

Since the Einsatzgruppen were chiefly tasked with killing, some officers were interested in developing and trialling more efficient methods. This was driven, in part, by the constant pressure to use fewer men and less ammunition. There was also concern about the physiological and psychological impact these mass shootings might on Einsatzgruppen members.

A significant advance followed a 1941 incident where German soldiers died after being trapped in the compartment of a truck with a faulty exhaust. Seizing on this idea, one einsatzgruppen company sealed the cargo sections of large trucks and began gassing victims by filling the truck with its own exhaust fumes.

These trucks became an early form of gas chamber. Not only were the trucks mobile, they could exterminate dozens of prisoners quickly without expending ammunition or requiring the direct involvement of Einsatzgruppen.

Evidence of activity

Many written ‘operational reports’ filed by Einsatzgruppen commanders survive and these documents provide stark evidence of their murderous efficiency. They detail where specific einsatzgruppen units operated each day, along with the numbers and racial origins of those they killed.

The following extract comes from a report, filed in December 1941, summarising the outcomes of einsatzgruppen operations in Lithuania that year:

July 4th – Kauen-Fort VII – 416 Jews, 47 Jewesses – 463 [total].
July 6th – Kauen-Fort VII – Jews 2,514.

Following the formation of a raiding squad under the command of SS-Obersturmfuhrer Hamman and 8-10 reliable men from the einsatzkommando, the following actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans:

July 7th – Mariampole – Jews 32.

July 8th – Mariampole – 14 Jews, 5 communist officials – 19 [total].
July 8th – Girkalinei – 6 communist officials.
July 9th – Wendziogala – 32 Jews, 2 Jewesses, 1 Lithuanian, 2 Lithuanian communists, 1 Russian communist – 38 [total].
July 9th – Kauen-Fort VII – 21 Jews, 3 Jewesses – 24 [total].
July 14th – Mariampole – 21 Jews, 1 Russian, 9 Lithuanian communists – 31 [total] …

Total carried forward: 3,384

Effects on morale and discipline

Causing or witnessing the deaths of scores of people, including women and children, was grisly work and took its toll on many members of the Einsatzgruppen. Not all posted to Einsatzgruppen units were capable of carrying out their work. There were several recorded cases of men breaking down, refusing orders or being hastily transferred.

Einsatzgruppen officers, aware of the difficulties faced by their men, tended to be more tolerant of occasional breaches of discipline. Many unit leaders dispensed extra rations of alcohol as an incentive or reward. In comparison to other SS and Wehrmacht divisions, the einsatzgruppen recorded much higher rates of alcoholism, desertion and suicide.

Yet despite this moral uncertainty and internal unrest, the Einsatzgruppen was able to continue its deadly campaign. It would last until the summer of 1943, by which time transportation to the death camps became the preferred method of mass killing.

Significance

Historians have attributed more than one million deaths to Einsatzgruppen divisions and their two-year campaign of death.

Their role in the Holocaust was so significant that the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal convened a separate ‘Einsatzgruppen trial’ in 1947-48. These trials considered the fate of 24 einsatzgruppen commanders, who were charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership of illegal organisations.

Of the two dozen Einsatzgruppen soldiers charged at Nuremberg, 21 were found guilty. Three died or committed suicide during the trial and 14 were sentenced to death. Only four of this number were executed and all surviving defendants were released from prison within 10 years.

“The merciless destruction carried out by the Einsatzgruppen was chronicled in great detail by a series of reports issued during the period June 1941 to May 1943. The mind-boggling statistics of mass murder contained in these reports at first seems beyond belief. One cannot grasp how such atrocities were performed on such a scale, day after day, let alone recounted with such cold precision. Yet as one wades deeper and deeper and adjusts slowly to a world permeated by an ideology contemptuous of normal human decency, one begins to realise that this did happen and that the events described are real. One is then left with the uniquely Nazi phenomenon as to require absolute secrecy on the one hand, and the strange desire to record the events on the other.”
Ronald Headland, historian

1. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing squads, charged with exterminating ‘undesirables’ in occupied Europe.

2. It contained four divisions of SS troopers, filled with volunteers and conscripts, some from police backgrounds.

3. From 1941 the Einsatzgruppen murdered more than one million people, mostly civilian Jews and other minorities.

4. The Einsatzgruppen usually operated behind the army, moving from village to village, killing and disposing of bodies.

5. This grisly task took its toll on Einsatzgruppen units, which were stricken with alcoholism and other problems.

Citation information
Title: “The Einsatzgruppen”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/schutzstaffel-ss/
Date published: August 12, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Forced labour

The ongoing war effort placed considerable strain on the Nazi war economy. As they occupied territory and launched offensives in the east, the Nazis relied more on confiscated resources, economic exploitation and the use of forced labour.

Types of labour

Though accurate figures cannot be known, in excess of 25 million Europeans were forced to labour for the Nazis at some point during World War II.

Civilians were forced to complete almost every conceivable kind of work: in mines and quarries, construction, road maintenance and demolition, in agricultural work, industrial factories and munitions manufacturing.

Forced labour was also used for dangerous war-related work like bomb disposal or the repair of bombed bridges and infrastructure. The more fortunate were deployed in less back-breaking jobs, like domestic service, small businesses, government offices, laundries, laboratories or other places where skilled labour was needed.

Victims of forced labour

Across Nazi-occupied Europe, forced labour was imposed on non-German civilians, Jews and prisoners-of-war, especially those of Slavic origin. While the majority of forced labour took place in Nazi-occupied countries, it was also used extensively within Germany.

Several million Poles and eastern Europeans were shipped into Germany against their will. Called zivilarbeiters, these workers were not technically prisoners – but as foreigners, they were still subject to harsh restrictions. Zivilarbeiters were housed in labour camps or tenements; they were subject to curfews and restrictions on movement, prohibited from mixing with Germans and given meagre food rations.

Outside Germany, civilians forced to labour by the Nazis usually lived in labour camps or ghettos. Their living conditions varied and depended on the type of work performed, the nature of Nazi occupation in their country, the availability of food supplies, the methods employed by the SS or camp authorities, and their political and racial status.

Wages and conditions

The real beneficiaries of forced labour were the Nazi regime and the owners and shareholders of German businesses that came to rely on it.

Wages for forced civilian labourers were set by local Nazi administrators. These wages were much lower than those of free civilian workers, usually between 30-50% less. The opportunity to employ a workforce at significantly lower cost enticed hundreds of German companies to request forced labour during the war.

The allocation of forced labour, however, was strictly controlled by the Nazi bureaucracy. Within Germany, it was managed by a government department called the Arbeitseinsatz (‘Labour Conscription Office’). In the occupied territories, the deployment of forced labour was overseen by Gauleiters and SS administrators.

As elsewhere in Nazi economics, the allocation and management of forced labour were riddled with bribery and corruption. Government officials and SS officers often received pay-offs or kickbacks for approving requests for forced labour.

Beneficiaries of forced labour

The list of German firms that employed forced labour is extensive. Some of the better-known companies included:

IG Farben. The fourth-largest company in the world and the largest outside the United States, IG Farben produced chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, dyes, photographic agents, pesticides and industrial chemicals. During the war it diversified its production, making synthetic fuels, oil and rubber. IG Farben also supplied the infamous Zyklon-B, the cyanide-based poison used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. IG Farben was the largest employer of forced labour in Nazi Germany. It was so heavily involved in the Nazi war economy that 23 of its directors and managers were later placed on trial at Nuremberg. All were either acquitted or treated lightly, and most returned to their previous positions.

Krupp. One of Germany’s oldest companies, Krupp was the nation’s largest steel and armaments manufacturer. Prior to and during the war, Krupp produced submarines, armour plate, artillery guns, tanks and munitions for the Nazi military. Krupp was an extensive employer of forced workers, who were often subject to brutal treatment in its factories. Twelve Krupp directors stood trial at Nuremberg, charged with forcing more than 100,000 people to labour in their factories, one-quarter of them prisoners-of-war. All bar one were found guilty and given prison sentences of up to 12 years.

Thyssen AG. A major steel manufacturer, Thyssen AG was Krupp’s largest competitor. Its manager, Fritz Thyssen, was a keen supporter and bankroller of the Nazis until he fell out with them in 1939. Thyssen AG nevertheless supplied the war effort, aided by large amounts of forced labour. The company built and operated 17 labour camps, and a member of the Thyssen family was present when 200 Hungarian Jews were massacred at Reichnitz Castle in Austria in March 1945, allegedly for the entertainment of high-ranking Nazi guests. Thyssen also had extensive business interests, steel holdings and bank deposits within the United States, including links with Prescott Bush, an ancestor of presidents George Bush Senior and George W. Bush.

Volkswagen. The prominent German automobile manufacturer was formed by the Nazis in 1937, who hoped to stimulate the economy by producing cheap ‘people’s wagons’. During the war, the company diversified into military vehicles, under the guidance of engineer Frederick Porsche. Volkswagen’s plant in northern Germany reportedly used between 15,000 and 20,000 forced labourers; around one-tenth of this number were Jewish. In 1998 the company began an $11.7 million compensation fund for Holocaust survivors. Porsche later began his own company designing tanks, though it is unclear if it utilised forced labour.

Hugo Boss. Today, Hugo Boss is renowned for its stylish men’s suits and flashy silk ties. During the 1930s and 1940s, however, it was one of the main uniform suppliers to the Nazis. Its namesake and founder, Hugo Boss, was an enthusiastic NSDAP member. Boss designed and supplied uniforms to the party’s paramilitary arms, such as the SA, SS and the Hitler Youth. Since Hugo Boss employed mainly on German seamstresses, and women could be hired for lower wages, he did not have the same need for forced labour. Nevertheless around 200 forced workers were used in Boss factories at various times.

Siemens. A manufacturer of electrical and electronic equipment, Siemens was both a supporter and a beneficiary of the Nazi regime. The company supplied engines, electrical generators and switches to the German military. At the peak of its production, Siemens employed 244,000 workers, around 50,000 of whom had been forced to labour. In the final years of the war, Siemens shifted much of its production out of major cities to avoid damage from Allied air raids. The company built and operated makeshift factories inside or near notorious concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Jewish labour

Forced labour was not just used to meet Germany’s war needs. It was also an ideological response to the so-called ‘Jewish question’, a way of relegating European Jews to what the Nazis considered was their rightful place in the economic order.

German and Austrian Jews were subjected to forced labour well before the outbreak of World War II. In December 1938, a Nazi edict ordered that all Jews without jobs and reliant on welfare had to perform unskilled work, such as road construction. By mid-1939, more than 20,000 of Germany’s 167,000 Jews were involved in forced labour. The conquest of Poland in September 1939 and western Europe in mid-1940 gave Berlin rein over several million more Jews, many of whom were conscripted to work for the Reich.

The treatment of Jewish forced labourers was significantly worse than other civilian workers. Jews were held as geschlossener arbeitseinsatz (‘locked-up labour’) in walled ghettos or labour camps. Jewish workers did not receive any payment: their ‘salary’, as little as a few Reichmarks a day, was paid by the employer to the Nazi government.

By mid-1942, more than 1.5 million Jews were detained in concentration camps and around half of this number was forced to work.

Jewish attitudes

The attitude of Jews to forced labour could be surprisingly positive. While engaged in important work like construction or munitions production, some Jewish forced labourers thought themselves a vital component of the Reich economy. The optimistic believed that nothing worse could happen while they remained essential to the Nazi war effort.

This was a false optimism. By 1942, Berlin’s Jewish policy had shifted and the Nazis had decided on the eventual extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. Some labour camps embraced an unofficial policy called Vernichtung durch Arbeit (‘Extermination through labour’). In other words, Jews would be literally worked to death then replaced with fresh arrivals.

Under Nazi rule, more than 800,000 Jews died from the effects of overwork, including injuries, infection, fatigue, malnutrition and disease.

“The corporations that made use of forced labour during the war met any and all accusations in later decades with the defence borrowed from the Nuremberg Trial defendants. They argued that the Nazi state forced companies to accept slaves, that businesses were left no choice and no influence in the matter. A long series of studies have exploded this myth. However many companies today still refuse to open their wartime archives, especially to potentially critical historians.”
Reinhold Billstein, historian

forced labour

1. The Nazis made extensive use of forced labour of civilians and prisoners, in order to support and supply their war effort.

2. Thousands of forced labourers were imported into Germany, where they lived and worked under strong restrictions.

3. The low pay rates for forced labour made it an attractive proposition for German and pro-German firms such as IG Farben, Krupp, Thyssen and Seimens.

4. Forced labourers were usually housed in tenements, labour camps or, in the case of Jews, ghettos and concentration camps.

5. Forced labour became an important component of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies. In some locations, Jews were intentionally worked to death as a means of elimination.

Citation information
Title: “Forced labour”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/forced-labour/
Date published: August 10, 2020
Date accessed: May 17, 2024
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Early life

Establishing the SS

Himmler’s racial views

Minister of death

Complicity in the Holocaust

Background

David Irving

Denialist claims

Seeds of denial

Nazi euphemisms

The weight of evidence

Oral and eyewitness histories

Outlawing denial

The Allies approach

Destroying evidence

Majdanek

Auschwitz

German camps

Foreign reporting

Motives

Commercial pressure

Demands for stronger action

‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish property

The ‘flight tax’

After Kristallnacht

Beneficiaries of property seizures

Avenues for flight

Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann’s flight and capture

Other notable fugitives

Josef Mengele

Operation Paperclip

Pfefferberg and Keneally

Schindler’s List

Schindler’s background

DEF in Krakow

A safe haven

Relocation to Brunnlitz

After the war

The ‘factory of death’

Construction

Growth

A network of camps

Transportation to Auschwitz

The process of murder

Forced labour

Prisoner uprisings

Liberation of Auschwitz

Origins

Dachau

The Totenkopfverbende

Daily routines

‘Annihilation through work’

The death camps

Exterminations

Formation

Expansion

First significant deployment

Changing methods

Evidence of activity

Effects on morale and discipline

Significance

Types of labour

Victims of forced labour

Wages and conditions

Beneficiaries of forced labour

Jewish labour

Jewish attitudes