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Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust Jan Courtney ASC 4170 - Dowling March 2011

Non jewish victims of the holocaust

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This is a presentation on Non Jewish Victims of the Holocaust. In addition to the Approximately 6 million Jews that were murdered, there were other groups that were Holocaust victims, including 3.3 million Soviet POW's; about 300,000 Gypsies or Roma; 2 million non Jewish Poles; 250,000 mentally and physically disabled; 15,000 homosexuals; 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and an untold number of Roman Catholics. (The Nazi authorities in the concentration camps usually did not record the religious affiliation of a prisoner, with the exception of the Jehovah Witnesses; therefore, it is difficult to reliably estimate the total number of Catholic victims who were persecuted or killed because of some action or position connected to their Catholic faith).

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Page 1: Non jewish victims of the holocaust

Non-Jewish Victimsof the Holocaust

Jan CourtneyASC 4170 - Dowling

March 2011

Page 2: Non jewish victims of the holocaust

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Female inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp, 1945

Soviet prisoners of war at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, January 1942

One of two main concentration camps, Mauthausen, was also one of the only two camps in all of Europe that were Grade III camps. They were the toughest camps for the “Incorrigible Political Enemies of the Reich.” Many other camps were intended for all categories of prisoners, but Mauthausen was mostly used for extermination through forced labor of educated people and members of the higher social classes in countries under the Nazi regime.

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Mauthausen New prisoners arrive after a

week-long trip in open railway cars with no food or water.

Six thousand Mauthausen prisoners wait in the camp courtyard for disinfection. After 24 hours, nearly 140 had died (July 1941).

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The Dead at Mauthausen, April 1945

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Roma (Gypsies)

The Nazis termed Roma work-shy, unproductive and socially unfit.

The Roma were deported to the Lodz ghetto and were among the first to be killed in mobile gas vans at Chelmno, an extermination camp in Poland

Example of a gas van used at Chelmno

Nazi “Racial Doctor” Robert Ritter questions a Gypsy woman. Ritter characterized Gypsies as a “primitive” people incapable of real social adaptation.

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Polish Victimsof the Holocaust

The Poles were considered ideologically dangerous. That included thousands of intellectuals and Catholic priests. While many prisoners were dying in starvation bunkers, Hitler feasted well with his field officers.

“All Poles will disappear from the world. . . . It is essential that the great German people should consider it as a major task to destroy all Poles.”- Heinrich Himmler

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Auschwitz-Berkenau Concentration Camp

The front gate at Auschwitz deceived inmates with the words “Work Will Set You Free.”

Other signs posted on the way to gas chambers instructed people to lay their clothes down in an orderly fashion to avoid problems in finding them again “after the shower.” The victims did not know that the “shower heads” emitted lethal gas.

The Nazi doctors at the death camps tortured men, women and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable horror during the Holocaust.

Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated and frozen to death. Children were exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance and reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations and removal of organs and limbs.

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Father Maximilian Kolbe

Father Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Roman Catholic priest who died as “Prisoner 16670” in Auschwitz on Aug. 14, 1941.

When a prisoner escaped from camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape.

One of the 10 prisoners selected to die cried, “My wife! My children! I will never see them again!” When he heard this, Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in the prisoner’s place. His request was granted.

As the 10 condemned men were led off to the death block, Father Kolbe supported a fellow prisoner who could hardly walk. No one would emerge alive. Father Kolbe was placed in a starvation bunker for two weeks and eventually given a lethal injection to end his life.

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Systematic Killing of the Handicapped

Five handicapped prisoners photographed at Buchenwald concentration campfor propaganda purposes. 1938 – 1940

Hartheim Castle was a euthanasia killing center where people with physical and mental disabilities were killed by gassing and lethal injection. Hartheim, Austria

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Anti-Nazi Resistance in the Netherlands

The Ten Boom family were Dutch Christians who resisted the Nazi regime in the Netherlands by helping hide Jews and underground resistance workers in their home, all of whom the Ten Booms called their “extended family.”

Corrie Ten Boom and sister Betsie were taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest female camp in the Nazi prison system. Many women were Jewish; others were political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies and criminals. The first two days they had to sleep out in the open. The rain poured and the ground became a sea of mud. They were packed into a huge barracks built to house 400 people, but there were now 1,400 prisoners in it. They slept on straw mattresses filled with dust and swarming with fleas. Even the guards did not like going into the barracks because of the fleas.

Corrie was honored as a “Righteous Gentile” and wrote a book entitled The Hiding Place about her experiences both in Holland and in the concentration camp.

Ten Boom Family

Corrie Ten Boom

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Evil Personified versus Righteous Among the Nations

In 1968, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) asked Corrie to plant a tree in the Garden of Righteousness, in honor of the many Jewish lives her family saved. Corrie’s tree stands there today along with a plaque in her memory.

Hitler was responsible for the death of more than 5.9 million Jews (close to two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population).

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Black Victims of the Holocaust

The Nazis did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention in the treatment of black prisoners.

Black prisoners of war faced illegal incarceration and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis.

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Jesse Owens debunks Aryan superiority

Hitler’s hatred of blacks extended to black athletes. When Jesse Owens, the American track star, won several honors at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Hitler refused to be present when the medals were awarded.

In a performance that would remain unmatched for 48 years, Owens won four track and field gold medals in the same Summer Olympiad, setting three world records and one Olympic record.

“Jesse Owens’ greatest opposition didn’t run the 100m. There’s more to the story than just the game.”July 2009 Sports Illustrated ad campaign (South Africa)

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Homosexual Targets of the Holocaust

One attempt by the Nazis to purify German society was their condemnation of male homosexuals as “socially aberrant.” Early in the Nazi regime, male homosexual organizations were banned.

In 1934, a special Gestapo division was established to create “pink lists” of homosexuals throughout Germany.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested, and of these, some 50,000 homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution. Few women are believed to have been arrested.

Those defined as homosexuals were designated by a pink triangle (Jews who were homosexuals were killed because they were Jews).

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Richard Grune

Artist Richard Grune was arrested in December 1934. He admitted to being homosexual and was held in “protective custody” for five months.

In September 1936, Grune was convicted and sentenced to prison for one year and three months. It’s estimated that some 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals.

Grune’s desire to bring attention to the terror of the concentration camps led to the 1947 publication of a limited–edition portfolio of his lithographs. His work generally reflects what he experienced at the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps; some images are based on information from other survivors.

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Roman Catholic Persecution

After Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933, he closed church-related schools and started a campaign to defame religious orders in Germany.

Father Rupert Mayer, pastor of St. Michael’s Church in downtown Munich, was outspoken against this persecution. He was one of the first to recognize that Nazism and Christianity were incompatible, and Hitler’s racist rejection of the Old Testament and of anything “Jewish” in the New Testament was “hysterical.”

The Nazis arrested him on June 5, 1937, and he was imprisoned the first of three times. He remained in Stadelheim Prison for six weeks. He was re-arrested and served his sentence for five months. At age 63, the Nazis arrested him on Nov. 3, 1939 and sent him to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp where his health deteriorated severely.

He was placed in solitary confinement in a Benedictine abbey in the Bavarian Alps, where he remained until American soldiers freed him in May 1945. He died while celebrating Mass on Nov. 1, 1945.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich was executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945 for his role in the resistance against Hitler.

Bonhoeffer’s letters and theological works still influence Christians throughout the world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Protestant theologian

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Jehovah’s Witnesses

Jehovah’s Witnesses were subjected to intense persecution under the Nazi regime.

The Nazis targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses because they were unwilling to accept the authority of the state, because of their international connections, and because they were strongly opposed to both war on behalf of a temporal authority and organized government in matters of conscience.

Helene Gotthold, a Jehovah’s Witness, was beheaded for her religious beliefs on Dec. 8, 1944 in Berlin. Here, she is pictured with her children in June 1936.

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American Prisoners of War (POWs)

Private First Class James Watkins, 20, of Oakland, CA, was found at the prison hospital in Fuchsmuehl, Germany by the U.S. Third Army after surviving the death march from the Berga concentration camp.

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American POWs

An American soldier stands over the grave of John Simcox, one of the POWs who died in the Berga concentration camp. A special area of the Berga cemetery was set aside for the bodies of 22 Americans, some of whom were buried in the same grave without coffins.

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American POWs

Thousands of Americans were captured in the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Stalag 9B. The Jewish GIs were segregated and sent to a special barracks. Later, those Jews and about 270 non-Jews were sent to a little-known concentration camp called Berga where they worked in mines with political prisoners from a Buchenwald sub-camp at Berga. This prison had the highest fatality rate of any camp where Americans were held – 20%.

Of the 350 men who were sent there in February 1945, fewer than 280 survived the forced labor and subsequent death march.

Lying on stretchers are some of the 63 emaciated American POWs liberated in Fuchsmuehl, Germany.

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American POWs

An American soldier sent to the Berga concentration camp, where he was worked to the verge of death. He barely survived the death march after the camp was evacuated in April 1945. He was found at the hospital in Fuchsmuehl, Germany

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“No one yet knows what awaits the Jews in the twenty-first century…

“…but we must make every effort to ensure that it is better than what befell them in the twentieth, the century of the Holocaust.” - Benjamin Netanyahu

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