Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  See Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000).

  “Aryan”: The word “Aryan” derives from Sanskrit. Since ancient times, the peoples of modern-day Iran have used the term to describe their lineage, language, and culture. In linguistic terminology, “Aryan” refers to a subfamily of the Indo-European languages, and before the term’s adoption and perversion by National Socialist ideologues, it was the name employed to describe the parent language of the Indo-European language family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linguists and ethnologists began to argue that speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinct race, separated in the racial hierarchy from the Semitic peoples (i.e., Jews). Nazi ideology used the construct of an “Aryan” ideal type to denigrate “non-Aryans,” particularly Jews, in the attempt to create a racially homogenous Volksgemeinschaft. In German-occupied Europe, Jews described the municipal district beyond the ghetto walls, inhabited by non-Jews, as the “Aryan side.”

  See Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  “Aryanization”: Derived from the vocabulary of Nazi antisemitism, this term denotes the process of expropriating Jews and excluding them from German economic life. Beginning in early 1933, the process gathered pace over time. The events surrounding the Anschluss of Austria and the pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938 triggered a wave of exclusionary measures that culminated in the forced “Aryanization” of the remaining Jewish-owned businesses later that year. German allies and satellites, such as Hungary and Vichy France, often adopted such “Aryanization” policies.

  See Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943 (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1989).

  Auschwitz: The Auschwitz complex was the largest camp of its kind established by the Nazi regime. Located outside Oświęcim, Poland, near Kraków, the complex comprised three camps: Auschwitz I, established in May 1940; Birkenau (Auschwitz II), built in early 1942; and Monowitz, or Buna (Auschwitz III), established in October 1942. Auschwitz I, the main camp, resembled most German concentration camps in that its primary aim was to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the German Reich; like Monowitz, it also deployed a significant number of forced laborers both on-site and in SS-owned construction and war-related enterprises. Birkenau, with sections for men and women and temporary family camps for Roma (Gypsies) and for Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt, housed the largest prisoner population and accommodated the complex’s killing center. From 1942 through the late summer of 1944, trains carrying transports of Jews arrived at Birkenau from every corner of Axis-occupied Europe. It is estimated that the SS and police deported more than 1.3 million people to Auschwitz. Of these, camp authorities gassed about 1.1 million. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the complex, officials began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz complex on January 27, 1945, freeing some seven thousand ailing prisoners who had remained at the camp following its evacuation.

  See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz: 1940–1945, trans. William Brand, 5 vols. (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000); Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

  Bełżec: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka comprised the killing centers of Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard). Located directly on the Lublin-Zamo´s´c-Rava Russkaya railroad line, the spot was chosen by Reinhard planners in order to tap the municipalities of Lublin, Kraków, and Lvov, all cities with a large Jewish population. Christian Wirth served as Bełżec’s first commander, succeeded by former Operation T4 administrator Gottlieb Hering in June 1942. Operations began at Bełżec on March 17, 1942. Initial gassings still employed the pure bottled carbon monoxide utilized at “euthanasia” installations; later, carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel engine became the standard mode of killing here and at all Reinhard extermination centers. Between March and December 1942, approximately 434,500 Jews and an undetermined number of Poles and Roma were deported and murdered at Bełżec.

  See Bogdan Musial, ed., “Aktion Reinhardt”: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement, 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2004).

  Bergen-Belsen: A concentration camp established by German authorities near Celle in northwestern Germany in 1940, Bergen-Belsen first served as a POW camp, first for French and Belgian soldiers and then for Soviet POWs until 1943. Converted into a concentration camp in that year, Bergen-Belsen also served as a holding camp (Aufenthaltslager) for privileged Jews whom German authorities hoped to exchange for German civilians interned abroad. In the war’s last stages, Bergen-Belsen became a reservoir for thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from concentration camps in the East. Overcrowding, insufficient provisions, and poor sanitation led to deplorable conditions in the camp, and tens of thousands perished of disease and malnutrition in Bergen-Belsen’s last months. Between May 1943 and April 1945, some thirty-seven thousand prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. British forces liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, freeing some fifty-five thousand ailing and emaciated prisoners. More than thirteen thousand former prisoners, too ill to recover, perished in the weeks following liberation.

  See Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani, eds., Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).

  Biebow, Hans (1902–1947): Born in Bremen, German businessman and Nazi official Hans Biebow headed the German administration of the Łódź ghetto from October 1940 until August 1944. Biebow encouraged the establishment of ghetto factories and workshops and gleaned enormous profits both from these forced labor enterprises and from the stolen property of the incarcerated community. Eager to maintain this flow of proceeds, he helped to ensure the ghetto’s continued existence until the summer of 1944. Following the decision to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, Biebow helped to organize the final deportations of ghetto residents to the Chełmno and Auschwitz killing centers. He was tried and sentenced to death by a Polish court in Łódź in April 1947 and executed.

  Birkenau (Auschwitz II–Birkenau): Birkenau, with its sections for men and women and its temporary family camps for Roma and for Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt, housed the largest prisoner population within Auschwitz and accommodated its killing center. In all, some 1.1 million Jews were transported there. New arrivals underwent the process of selection. Young and able-bodied Jews were often chosen for labor and registered as prisoners at the camp. The sick, the weak, young children, and the aged were murdered upon arrival. Gassing operations continued at Birkenau until November 1944.]

  See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz: 1940–1945, trans. William Brand, 5 vols. (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000); Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

  Block, Elisabeth (1923–1942): Living with her parents and two siblings in rural Bavaria, Elisabeth Block began a diary in 1933 in which she made few direct references to the persecution of her fellow German Jews. In the spring of 1942, she was deported with her family via Munich-Milbertshofen to Piaski in the Lublin district. On an unknown date, Elisabeth and her family were transferred to a killing center, presumably Bełżec or Sobibór, and murdered there.

  See Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte (Rosenheim: Bayerische Staatskanzlei, 1993).

  Boder, David (1886–1961): Born in Latvia, David Boder was a professor of psychology at the Illinois Inst
itute of Technology. In 1946, he headed a pioneering project to interview Holocaust survivors. Boder recorded over 120 hours of oral testimony, a significant source of primary documentation concerning the Holocaust.

  See Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Boycott of April 1, 1933: When Adolf Hitler’s regime came to power in late January 1933, Nazi authorities proclaimed their intention to eliminate Jews from German economic life. On March 28, 1933, the Nazi Party leadership announced a boycott effort against Jewish-owned shops and businesses to begin on April 1. On the morning of the boycott, local party action committees stationed SA or SS men outside Jewish-owned stores and enterprises, encouraging passersby to buy their wares only in “German” stores. Despite the best efforts of central planners such as Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher, the boycott failed to win the public support the Nazis hoped for, and international condemnation of the measure ensured that the centralized boycott campaign would be confined to a one-day affair. However, depending on the degree of local antisemitic sentiment, so-called wild boycotts continued throughout the 1930s, forcing many Jewish-owned businesses into insolvency or liquidation.

  See Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1970).

  Brandt, Karl (1904–1948): Born in Alsace, Karl Brandt was from 1934 Adolf Hitler’s attending physician. Along with Philipp Bouhler, director of the Führer Chancellery, Brandt headed the planning and implementation of the “euthanasia” program, beginning in 1939. In July 1942, Hitler appointed him General Commissioner for Sanitation and Health (Generalkommissar für das Sanitäts- und Gesundheitswesen) and, later, Reich commissioner, which placed Brandt in control of all German military and civilian medical institutions. In 1946, Brandt served as chief defendant at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, in which an American military tribunal sentenced him to death. He was executed on June 2, 1948.

  See Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt, the Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).

  Buchenwald: Together with its over 130 satellite camps, Buchenwald, near Weimar in eastern Germany, was one of the largest concentration camps within the Reich proper. Established in July 1937, most of its early inmates were political prisoners, who played an important role in the camp’s prisoner infrastructure and its underground resistance. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, German SS and police sent about ten thousand Jews to Buchenwald. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the camp held some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe; recidivist criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and German military deserters numbered among its prisoner population. In the camp’s later stages, the SS also incarcerated prisoners of war, resistance fighters, prominent former government officials of German-occupied countries, and foreign forced laborers there. At least fifty-six thousand prisoners were murdered in the Buchenwald camp system, over eighteen thousand of them Jews. On April 11, 1945, as U.S. troops neared the camp, Buchenwald prisoners stormed the watchtowers, seizing control of the camp. Later that afternoon, U.S. forces arrived at Buchenwald, liberating more than twenty thousand prisoners, among them over nine hundred young children.

  See David A. Hackett, ed. and trans., The Buchenwald Report (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

  Buna (Auschwitz III–Monowitz): Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known also as the Buna labor camp, was the first and largest Auschwitz satellite camp for forced labor and later operated as the administrative headquarters for all Auschwitz satellite camps employing prison labor in factories. Construction of the camp began in April 1941. The great majority of forced laborers at Monowitz worked at the IG Farben Buna Werke, a large synthetic rubber plant located only 300 meters (984 feet) from the camp. Due to IG Farben’s continual need for forced labor, Buna held as many as eleven thousand prisoners in 1944. With the approach of the Soviet army, German authorities evacuated Buna on January 18, 1945. From Gleiwitz, a subcamp of Auschwitz, most of these prisoners were transferred to Buchenwald and Mittelbau. More than eight hundred ill and exhausted prisoners remained at the camp following evacuation and were liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.

  See Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, trans. William Brand (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000), 1:108–15.

  Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, or League of German Girls): In 1930, the Bund Deutscher Mädel in der Hitler-Jugend (League of German Girls within the Hitler Youth) was founded as the official female branch of the Hitler Youth organization. Before the Nazi rise to power in January 1933, the BDM did not attract a mass following, but membership expanded rapidly throughout the 1930s, until participation for eligible girls became compulsory in 1936. The BDM’s core constituency consisted of girls from fourteen to eighteen years of age, with a corresponding junior branch, the Jungmädel (Young Girls’ League), for girls aged ten to fourteen. In 1938, a third component, the BDM Union for Belief and Beauty (BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit), offered a voluntary association for young women aged seventeen to twenty-one.

  See Gisela Miller-Kipp, “Auch Du gehörst dem Führer”: Die Geschichte des Bundes Deutscher Mädel (BDM) in Quellen und Dokumenten (Weinheim/Munich: Juventa Verlag, 2001).

  CENTOS (Central Organization for Orphan Care): Founded in 1924 to unite voluntary child-care organizations throughout Poland under one agency, CENTOS operated aid organizations for children and youth, including orphanages, boarding and trade schools, day-care centers, food- and clothing-distribution centers, and children’s camps. It also provided funding to foster families. Prior to the German invasion of Poland, CENTOS functioned in more than two hundred Polish cities and cared for tens of thousands of children. CENTOS was very active in the Warsaw ghetto, operating over one hundred care institutions for forty-five thousand children, among them Janusz Korczak’s well-known Orphans’ Home. Dr. Adolf Berman and Józef Barski assumed the directorship of CENTOS in the Warsaw ghetto in January 1940.

  See Barbara Engelking and Lacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  Chełmno (Kulmhof): In late 1941, the National Socialist regime established the first stationary killing center to murder Jews within the context of the “Final Solution” at Chełmno. German authorities chose the site because of its location along a central road that linked it to the city of Łódź. An abandoned manorial estate and adjacent forest formed the nexus of the camp, which was planned as a killing site for the Jewish population of the Wartheland, including the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto. Mass-murder operations began at Chełmno on December 8, 1941. The killing center employed gas vans to murder its victims. Herbert Lange initially commanded the small number of SS and police functionaries at the site until his replacement by Hans Bothmann in the spring of 1942. From mid-January 1942 until March 1943, thousands of Łódź ghetto inhabitants, as well as Jews from the surrounding districts, were murdered at Chełmno. In the spring of 1943, these deportations actions ceased, and SS personnel dismantled the camp. In the spring of 1944, however, German authorities decided to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, and for a brief period, Chełmno was again the site of killing operations, until mid-July 1944 when the last Łódź ghetto inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz. In all, at least 152,000 persons, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at Chełmno.

  See Archives of the District Museum in Konin, Chełmno Witnesses Speak, ed. Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, trans. Juliet D. Golden (Konin: Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw/District Museum in Konin, 2004).

  Collection camp (Sammellager): These were holding locations where regional Jewish populations were detained before their deportation from Germany. Under the supervision of the Gestapo, collections camps served as assembly points whe
re deportees were ordered to appear and register themselves and their property before their transport to ghettos, concentration camps, or killing centers in the East.

  Compulsory sterilization: see Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.

  Crematorium (Krematorium, Auschwitz): Five crematoria complexes with adjoining gas chambers were the primary means of murdering European Jews in Auschwitz II–Birkenau. Crematorium I, housing three large furnaces, was first used in September 1940 to incinerate the bodies of prisoners who had died or been murdered in Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Concealed behind large hedges, Crematoria II through V and their connected gas chambers were operational in Birkenau by the summer of 1943. After selection, victims were assembled in the crematoria yards. Under the guise of delousing, the victims undressed in a room connected to the gassing chamber. The Zyklon B gas used generally killed its victims within thirty minutes. Sonderkommando units then sorted the victims’ clothing and valuables in the anterooms of the crematoria, while others of their number incinerated the corpses of the gassing victims. In the summer of 1944, the crematoria reached a burning capacity of twenty thousand corpses per day. Following the Sonderkommando revolt in October 7, 1944, in which Crematorium IV was severely damaged, Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the Auschwitz gassing apparatus.

  See Franciszek Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 157–182.

  Dachau: Established in March 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist government. Located near Munich, Germany, the early prisoner population consisted chiefly of political prisoners and other ideological opponents of the Nazi regime. In time, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, homosexuals, “asocials,” and recidivist criminals were also interned there; in the wake of Kristallnacht, more than eleven thousand Jewish men were briefly incarcerated at Dachau as well. The Dachau camp was a training center for SS concentration camp guards and became the model for all Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners at Dachau engaged in forced labor, both at the main camp and in over 160 subcamps. The total number of prisoners incarcerated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 188,000. Over forty thousand died at the camp between January 1940 and May 1945, as did an unknown number of unregistered prisoners. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945.