The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Many of those who grew up in what the Nazis classed as Gypsy families during the 1930s felt that the problems they faced were caused not just by the new regime but also by centuries of prejudice. ‘The general public has always been contemptuous of the Sinti and the Roma,’ says Franz Rosenbach, who experienced life under Nazi rule in Austria. ‘They have always been mistreated, they were not recognized, they have always been regarded as second- or even third-class citizens. On the whole, we actually had very little contact with the majority of the population, firstly because they didn’t want to have anything to do with us, and secondly because our parents had told us not to approach them because they did not want us. The prejudice was based on the idea that the Sinti were people who stole children and did whatever else. But I have to say that this was simply not true.’19

  Hermann Höllenreiner, from a Sinti family in Munich, remembers how those who were perceived as Gypsies suffered in the 1930s. ‘My mother did send me to school,’ he says, ‘but I had a teacher who disliked me – I had to stand in the corner or go out and I got beatings from him … that’s why I stopped going to school. He also mistreated other Sinti.’ The prejudice against Sinti and Roma in the school was widespread. ‘In the second grade as soon as they heard that we were Gypsies the [rest of the] children weren’t allowed to talk to us any more – maybe because of their parents, I don’t know.’ Hermann believes that most Germans took the view that ‘if a dog shits somewhere they say: “Gypsy!” [that is, a Gypsy did it] – yeah, that’s the proverb of the Germans.’20

  Hitler, however, did not appear to be much concerned about the Sinti and Roma – they are not even mentioned in Mein Kampf. Only gradually did measures directed explicitly at the Sinti and Roma population come to be implemented by the Nazis. One reason for this lack of urgency was almost certainly that many Sinti and Roma were already often caught up in moves against ‘beggars’ or ‘antisocials’. Only as an afterthought were they included within the Nuremberg Laws. Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister, stated in a decree of 26 November 1935 that the Nuremberg Law prohibiting Jews from marrying ‘pure’ Germans also extended to a ban on Gypsies marrying them.21 Frick subsequently clarified this restriction on 3 January 1936 by saying that if an individual Gypsy had a ‘quarter or less of alien blood’ then he or she could marry an ‘Aryan’ German.

  By this legislation the Nazis created another immense definitional problem for themselves. It was all very well to talk theoretically of percentages of ‘Gypsy blood’, but in practice there was no way of implementing such an idea – for the simple reason that it was impossible to work out how much ‘Gypsy blood’ any individual possessed. We have seen how, since they couldn’t find a racial way of distinguishing between Jews and non-Jews, the Nazis fell back on a religious-based definition of ‘Jewishness’. But such a method could not be used in the case of the Sinti and Roma, since those that practised a religion were overwhelmingly Christian.

  In the wake of this extension of the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis urgently needed to find a way of determining the percentage of ‘Gypsyness’ in an individual, just as they had previously needed to assess the percentage of ‘Jewishness’. To this end a new research organization was created early in 1936 within the Reich Health Office under the leadership of Dr Robert Ritter. He and his team now set out to create a vast card index containing information on every potential Sinti and Roma in Germany – eventually around 30,000 people would be detailed. Ritter and his colleagues decided who was and who was not a Gypsy by inspecting birth and family records, and by investigating the lifestyle of each individual.

  Ritter’s conclusions about the nature of Gypsy life informed the first pronouncement from Himmler on the subject, a circular entitled Combating the Gypsy Plague, issued on 8 December 1938. The document stated that the ‘Gypsy problem’ should be treated as a question of ‘race’ and called for both ‘settled and non-settled Gypsies’ to be registered with the police. The life of Gypsies needed to be ‘regulated’, said Himmler, not least in order to prevent ‘further intermingling of blood’.22

  One of the many curious aspects of Himmler’s circular was the statement that ‘experience shows that part-Gypsies play the greatest role in Gypsy criminality’. This strange assertion was based on Dr Ritter’s belief that the small minority of ‘racially pure’ Gypsies who carried on the traditional wandering life, travelling from village to village in horse-drawn caravans, were less dangerous than Gypsies who had decided to settle in one place and marry into the ‘Aryan’ German population. Though there was no reliable empirical evidence to support this proposition, Ritter maintained that the distinction was important. The theory was that some ‘pure Gypsies’ might be considered as a type of ‘Aryan’, since they had originated in the Indian sub-continent. But because large numbers of Gypsies had intermarried with non-Gypsies, they had ‘polluted their blood’ and so were especially dangerous. This convoluted logic led to the bizarre situation – implied in the circular on Combating the Gypsy Plague – that ‘pure-blood’ Gypsies were less of a problem to the Nazi state than ‘mixed-blood’ Gypsies. This state of affairs was precisely the reverse of the one in which the Jews found themselves, where the more Jewish an individual was perceived to be the more he or she was at risk. In practice, once the war began and the persecution of the Sinti and Roma escalated, the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘non-pure’ Gypsies was to have little practical effect, but it nonetheless remains a valuable insight into the mentality of the perpetrators.

  The year 1938 was significant not only for the promulgation of the circular on Combating the Gypsy Plague, but also because the regime increased the level of threat against the Sinti and Roma in other ways. Many German Sinti and Roma were picked up during an attack on the ‘work-shy’ in June 1938 and transported to concentration camps – one manpower report at Sachsenhausen camp, for example, registered the arrival of 248 Gypsies.23 Austrian Sinti and Roma were also targeted and taken to the new concentration camp at Mauthausen near Linz, where they were forced to work in terrible conditions. Adolf Gussak, an Austrian classed as a Gypsy by the Nazis, recalled that ‘In the quarry we had to carry heavy stones. With them on our backs we had to climb the 180 steps up [towards the camp]. The SS beat us. As a result there often was some pushing: everybody wanted to escape the blows. If anyone fell down he was finished off by a bullet in the back of his neck.’24

  There appears to have been little concern among the general population about the persecution of the Sinti and Roma. In fact, one police report from Austria in January 1939 said that the local population wanted even more to be done to combat the ‘Gypsy plague’ because this ‘race does nothing but steal from and swindle the Germans.’25

  Members of the second group the Nazis targeted with increased severity in the late 1930s were unique among all of those persecuted in the Third Reich. That is because they suffered not because of an accident of birth, like the Jews or Sinti and Roma, but because of a spiritual choice. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses – persecuted for their religious faith. While, as we have already seen, the Nazis had an ambivalent attitude to most Christian sects, they found the Jehovah’s Witnesses utterly unacceptable: Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to give the Nazi salute, to let their children join the Hitler Youth, to vote in elections and to join the German Army.

  Immediately after Hitler came to power Jehovah’s Witnesses sought to clarify where they stood on a number of issues by publishing a ‘Declaration of Facts’. The Witnesses denied that they received any Jewish financial support and alleged that ‘the commercial Jews of the British-American empire’ had ‘built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations’.26

  Else Abt, a Jehovah’s Witness who was arrested during the war and suffered in Auschwitz, recalls her own attitude towards Jews prior to her imprisonment. ‘I never bought anything from a Jewish shop,’ she says, ‘because they always [charged] higher prices, and then they’d give a discount and the st
upid people thought that they were only paying half price. That was true, I saw it in Danzig. They would put the prices up and they know that people like to pay a lower price – they’d calculate prices in a certain way, that’s my opinion, but I don’t have anything against Jews … For me personally I can say that I never loved the Jews and I wouldn’t buy anything in a Jewish shop.’27

  However, the attempt by Jehovah’s Witnesses to show that they could coexist with the Nazi regime was fruitless. As Hitler and the Nazis saw it, the Jehovah’s Witnesses simply refused to conform to the norms expected in the new Germany. In particular, their pacifism was seen as appalling. In December 1933, Heydrich said that all Jehovah’s Witnesses who attempted to spread their beliefs were ‘unbelievable fanatics’28 and should be arrested. Theodor Eicke, commandant of Dachau in 1933, summed up his view of religion in general with the words: ‘Prayer books are things for women and for those who wear panties.’29

  The Witnesses were particularly vulnerable after an order issued in May 1937 declared that they could be sent to concentration camps on mere suspicion of wrongdoing. Once inside the camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were often singled out for terrible mistreatment. At the post-war trial of guards at Sachsenhausen, one builder working at the camp testified that ‘During the autumn of 1938 I was working as a mason on construction when Blockführer Sorge and Blockführer Bugdalle came on the job site and ordered a group of prisoners to dig a hole to the depth of a man, and they put in a Witness whose name was Bachuba and buried him up to his neck. Sorge and Bugdalle laughingly made sport of him. Then, when there was nothing left but his head above ground they urinated on his head. They left him for another hour in the grave. When he was dug up and pulled out on the ground he was still alive but he couldn’t stand on his legs.’30

  Rudolf Höss, who would later become commandant of Auschwitz, was posted to Sachsenhausen concentration camp as adjutant in 1938, and presided over the brutal way in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses were treated. He subsequently wrote that he had ‘met many religious fanatics in my time’ but the Witnesses in Sachsenhausen ‘surpassed anything that I had previously seen’.31 He remembered two in particular who ‘almost ran to the place of execution. They wished on no account to be bound, for they desired to be able to raise their hands to Jehovah. Transformed by ecstasy, they stood in front of the wooden wall of the rifle range, seemingly no longer of this world. Thus do I imagine that the first Christian martyrs must have appeared, as they waited in the circus for the wild beasts to tear them in pieces.’32

  According to Höss, his bosses Himmler and Eicke were fascinated by the zealous commitment the Witnesses showed to their religion: ‘On many occasions Himmler, as well as Eicke, used the fanatical faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example. SS men must have the same fanatical and unshakeable faith in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolf Hitler that the Witnesses had in Jehovah. Only when all SS men believed as fanatically in their own philosophy would Adolf Hitler’s State be permanently secure.’33

  Other prisoners observed that the Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed able to manage the suffering they endured in the camps better than many others. Bruno Bettelheim, the art historian and later psychologist, was imprisoned first in Dachau and then in Buchenwald just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and while he felt that the Jehovah’s Witnesses would – according to psychiatric theory – ‘be considered extremely neurotic and even delirious and therefore vulnerable to psychiatric disintegration in time of crisis’, that was not what he saw in the camps. ‘Not only did they display exceptional moral behavior,’ he wrote after the war, ‘they seemed protected against the influence of the camp environment that rapidly destroyed persons that our psychiatrist friends, and even I, would have judged well integrated.’34 That was certainly the case with Else Abt in Auschwitz. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she said, ‘because I thought my creator would help me. We believed that God would be able to help us in every difficult situation.’35

  The increasingly radical way in which the Nazis sought to deal with those they perceived as enemies within the Reich also affected another group of people – homosexuals. Heinrich Himmler made clear his attitude towards homosexuals in a speech he gave to SS leaders in 1937. He claimed that a homosexual was both a ‘coward’ and a ‘liar’. ‘Unfortunately it’s not as easy for us as it was for our ancestors,’ he said, because then the homosexual ‘was drowned in a swamp … This was not a punishment, but simply the erasure of an abnormal life. It had to be eliminated, just like we root up stinging nettles, throw them on a pile and burn them. It wasn’t out of revenge, just that the person concerned simply had to go.’

  One practical reason to tackle homosexuality now, Himmler argued, was that ‘the sexual balance’ of Germany had been ‘deranged’ because the 2 million homosexuals in Germany – added to the 2 million German war dead – meant there was a ‘lack of four million sexually capable men’ in Germany. ‘Among homosexuals,’ said Himmler, ‘there are those who take the view: what I am doing is nobody else’s business, it is my private matter. However, all things in the sexual field are not the private matter of every individual, but signify the life and death of the nation.’36

  The Nazis, as we have seen, often tried to claim a link between anything that they could not tolerate and the Jews. This was even the case with homosexuality. In 1930, before the Nazis came to power, Alfred Rosenberg wrote an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in which he promised that the Nazis would punish by ‘banishment or hanging’ the ‘malicious drive of the Jews to prevent the divine idea of Creation, through physical relations with animals, siblings and same-sex persons’.37 Thus, claimed Rosenberg absurdly, the Jews encouraged not just homosexuality, but incest and bestiality as well.

  Hitler’s own attitude to homosexuality, at least in the beginning, was not so straightforward. While he talked of the importance of the traditional family and of the duty of couples to propagate, he tolerated the homosexuality of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Stormtroopers. It was also common gossip among the leadership of the Stormtroopers that another senior figure in the organization, Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Heines, was so open about his sexual preference that he was nicknamed ‘Fräulein Schmidt’.38

  Hitler initially dismissed concerns about Röhm’s homosexuality when they were brought to his attention. That all changed, however, when Hitler turned on Röhm in June 1934 in a desire to suppress the power of the Stormtroopers. It was now politically expedient for him to condemn homosexuality. After Röhm had been arrested at the holiday resort of Bad Wiessee in June 1934 – and in the bedroom opposite, Obergruppenführer Heines was discovered in bed with a young Stormtrooper – Hitler railed against the moral corruption of the SA.39

  Homosexual acts between men had been illegal during the Weimar period, though the authorities had often turned a blind eye to the gay clubs in Berlin. But the Nazis now rejected any form of tolerance and in 1935 introduced tougher restrictions in Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, attacking what they called ‘lewd and lascivious acts’ between men. Previously, the courts had interpreted the law as outlawing sodomy – something which proved difficult to enforce unless two men were actually caught in the act. But the new definition of ‘lewd and lascivious acts’ allowed the courts to punish almost any form of physical contact between men. As for female homosexuality, while there was no law specifically outlawing sex between women, there was scope for the regime to target lesbians as ‘asocials’.

  Those convicted under Paragraph 175 were sent either to conventional prisons or to concentration camps where they risked being tortured in order to reveal the names of other homosexuals. They could even be castrated. The law stated that homosexuals had to consent to such a drastic operation, but once in the camps they could be subjected to unrelenting pressure to make them agree.40 Altogether around 10,000 homosexuals were sent to concentration camps during the Third Reich; no one knows exactly how many of these died, but one estimate suggests that it was
as many as 60 per cent.41

  It’s also significant, in the context of this expansion of Nazi terror, that the late 1930s saw the opening of the first concentration camp specifically for women at Lichtenburg in Saxony, with the first prisoners entering the camp in December 1937. Up to this point women had been imprisoned within the traditional prison system, or at a much smaller camp at Moringen administered by the Prussian state. Only a minority of prisoners within the concentration camp system were women, less than 12 per cent prior to the outbreak of the war.42 But the number of women targeted by the Nazi security forces increased as they looked further afield for potential enemies, a development also illustrated by the opening of the notorious female concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, in the spring of 1939. This – the largest of the camps for women – absorbed all of the female prisoners from Lichtenburg and then expanded still further.

  It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Hitler was preoccupied during this period with the expansion of domestic terror. The increasing persecution occurred against the background of another issue that occupied his attention to a much greater extent – the drive towards war.

  On 30 May 1938 Hitler signed an order declaring, ‘It is my unalterable decision to shatter Czechoslovakia by a military operation in the foreseeable future.’43 The excuse for this brazen statement was the alleged suffering of the German-speaking minority who lived in the border region of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. But in reality there was more at stake. On 8 July that year, in an address to industrialists, Hermann Göring revealed that Germany now risked war with ‘France and England, Russia [and] America’. Moreover, this was ‘the greatest hour of destiny ever since there has been a German history’.44