Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  See Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986); Paul Weindling, “Compulsory Sterilization in National Socialist Germany,” German History 5 (1987): 10–24.

  Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre, or Blutschutzgesetz): see Nuremberg Laws.

  Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service: (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums): The Civil Service Law decreed the enforced retirement of Jews and “politically unreliable elements” from the German civil service. Signed by Adolf Hitler on April 7, 1933, the measure marked the National Socialists’ first major piece of anti-Jewish legislation.

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

  Lebensborn (Fount of Life): This Nazi organization was established in 1935 in an effort to reverse Germany’s dwindling birthrate and to increase the number of “racially valuable” offspring. Instigated by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the effort provided financial assistance and maternity care to the wives of SS men and also to unmarried mothers, a group that concerned Nazi racial hygienists and population planners. Lebensborn administrators encouraged unwed mothers to give up their infants after birth, and the organization managed both orphanages and adoption services that placed Lebensborn children with “deserving” German families. Some seven thousand children were born in the organization’s homes in Germany between 1936 and 1945. Lebensborn officials played a more insidious role in placing children from eastern Europe chosen for Germanization with adoptive families in Germany.

  Lidice: On May 27, 1942, Czechoslovak parachutists Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík succeeded in fatally injuring Reinhard Heydrich, a key planner of the “Final Solution” and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Following the assassination attempt, Gestapo intelligence erroneously linked the Czech village of Lidice with the assassins. On June 10, 1942, German SS and police shot the village’s 173 men and boys on the outskirts of Lidice. The town itself was razed to the ground. With few exceptions, the female adult population of Lidice was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Forcibly separated from their mothers, the children of Lidice received a racial screening by SS personnel. Nine children who possessed sufficient “Germanic” background to make them candidates for Germanization were placed with adoptive German parents. The remaining children of Lidice were transported to Łódź and are believed to have been gassed at Chełmno in early July 1942.

  See Jolana Macková and Ivan Ulrych, eds., Fates of the Children of Lidice: Memories, Testimonies, Documents, trans. Elias Khelil (Nymburk: Lidice Memorial, 2004).

  Łódź ghetto (also Litzmannstadt ghetto): The Łódź ghetto was established in February 1940 and initially held 164,000 inhabitants. Appointed head of its Judenrat by German authorities, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski displayed energy and organizational skill in overseeing the ghetto’s workshops and social agencies, but he was viewed as a controversial and divisive figure. The ghetto boasted an impressive array of social services, including schools, hospitals, and a postal system. Living conditions there were deplorable, however, and some 20 percent of the ghetto’s population died as a result of starvation and disease. From January to September 1942, German authorities deported over seventy thousand Jews and five thousand Roma to Chełmno. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis decided to liquidate the Łódź ghetto, then the last remaining ghetto in Poland. In June and July 1944, the Germans deported thousands of Jews to Chełmno; in August 1944, the surviving population of the ghetto was deported to Auschwitz.

  See Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006).

  Majdanek (Lublin/Majdanek): This was a vast forced labor and concentration camp near Lublin. Constructed in October 1941, it incarcerated Jews temporarily spared from Operation Reinhard killing operations in order to serve as forced labor in the Lublin District. Tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers too weak to work were murdered in the Majdanek gas chambers and in shooting operations or died through mistreatment and starvation. After uprisings at Sobibór and Treblinka, Heinrich Himmler ordered SS and police forces to shoot over forty thousand Jewish prisoners in the Lublin District, including eight thousand from Majdanek, at the camp under the auspices of Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest) on November 3, 1943. Soviet forces liberated an intact Majdanek on July 24, 1944.

  Mauthausen: After the incorporation of Austria in the Anschluss in March 1938, German authorities established the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. The camp held recidivist criminals and asocials in the first years of its existence. After World War II began, the number of prisoners in Mauthausen increased greatly, including more than seven thousand Spanish republicans turned over by Vichy authorities in France. Of more than two hundred thousand prisoners who passed through the Mauthausen camp system between August 1938 and May 1945, over one hundred thousand died there, including fourteen thousand Jewish prisoners. U.S. forces liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945.

  See Hans Marsalek, The History of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, trans. Max Garcia (Vienna: Austrian Society of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 1995).

  Mengele, Josef (1911–1979): In 1937 Josef Mengele joined the Nazi Party; the following year, the same year in which he received his medical degree, he joined the SS. After service with the Waffen-SS, Mengele was transferred to Auschwitz, on May 30, 1943. He began as the medical officer responsible for Birkenau’s Gypsy camp; several weeks after the Gypsy camp’s liquidation, Mengele became chief camp physician of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) in November 1943. Associated more closely with selection duty than any other medical officer at Auschwitz, Mengele also became infamous for his deadly medical experimentation, particularly with twins. With the aid of his prosperous family, Mengele evaded postwar prosecution and fled to South America; in declining health, he drowned while swimming near Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, 1979.

  See Sven Keller, Günzburg und der Fall Josef Mengele: Die Heimatstadt und die Jagd nach dem NS-Verbrecher (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003); Office of Special Investigations, In the Matter of Josef Mengele: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of Special Investigations, 1992).

  Mischling (mixed-breed, hybrid; pl.: Mischlinge): This was a racial category formally introduced into the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish politics following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. This term also applied to children of other mixed “races.”

  See Jeremy Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’ 1933–1945,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 291–354.

  Monowitz (Auschwitz III): see Buna.

  Muselmann (pl.: Muselmänner): Concentration camp inmates used this term to describe ailing or exhausted fellow prisoners who had lost the will to live. Given their inability to work or stand for roll call (Appell) for significant lengths of time, Muselmänner might survive for only a short while. The origin of the term is uncertain but is believed to stem from the German word for “Muslim,” as many Europeans at the time believed Islam to have a fatalistic element.

  Mussfeld, Erich (also recorded as Mussfeldt) (1913–1948): A baker by profession, Erich Mussfeld joined the Nazi Party in 1939. He first served as a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp and was transferred to Auschwitz in May 1944. There he supervised the Sonderkommando at the Birkenau crematoria. In January 1947, an American military tribunal sentenced Mussfeld to a life term; shortly thereafter, he was extradited to Poland where he was sentenced to death and executed on January 24, 1948, in Kraków for crimes committed at Auschwitz.

  Nuremberg Laws: This phrase is frequently used to describe the two basic pillars of Nazi antisemit
ic legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz) and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre). This legislation was promulgated, together with the Reich Flag Law, on September 15, 1935, during the annual Nazi Party rally and at a specially convened session of the Reichstag in Nuremberg, Franconia. The first law restricted citizenship, and thus full protection under the law, to those of “German or related blood.” The Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor proscribed marriage and sexual contact between German “Aryans” and Jews. Subsequent regulations defined a “Jew” as someone with at least three Jewish grandparents (according to their religious affiliation) or as someone descended from two Jewish grandparents who him- or herself practiced the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew. Persons with two Jewish grandparents, but without Jewish religious affiliation or a Jewish spouse, came to be defined as “Mischlinge of the first degree” (Mischlinge ersten Grades). Persons with one Jewish grandfather or grandmother were labeled “Mischlinge of the second degree” (Mischlinge zweiten Grades). With later clauses added, the Nuremberg Laws formed one of the basic laws of the Third Reich that facilitated the deportation, murder, and expropriation of German Jews.

  See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 61–78; Karl A. Schleunes, ed., Legislating the Holocaust: The Bernhard Loesener Memoirs and Supporting Documents (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

  Nyiszli, Miklós (1901–1956): A Hungarian physician, Miklós Nyiszli was deported in June 1944 with his wife and young daughter to Auschwitz. Volunteering to work as a physician in the prisoner barracks, Nyiszli came to the attention of Birkenau camp physician Josef Mengele, who forced the doctor to aid in his medical experimentation upon Auschwitz prisoners. In 1946, Nyiszli published a harrowing account of his experiences as a prisoner-physician in Dr. Mengele boncoló orvosa voltam az Auschwitzi krematóriumban.

  See Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver (Hungarian ed., 1946; New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1960).

  Obshestvo Remeslenofo zemledelcheskofo Truda (ORT, or Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor): This was a Jewish self-help organization founded in 1880 in Russia to provide Jews with occupational training in agriculture and trade. The organization expanded in the interwar years to nearly every country of eastern and central Europe with a significant Jewish population, often in cooperation with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. During World War II, ORT continued vocational training in many ghettos in eastern Europe. With the Jewish displaced persons crisis after the war, ORT, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, trained forty to forty-five thousand individuals, providing Jewish displaced persons with skills often critical to securing an immigration visa.

  Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE, or Children’s Aid Society): Begun by physicians in Russia in 1912 as Obshchestvo Zdravookhraneniya Yevreyev (Society for the Protection of the Health of Jews), the organization expanded into many European countries with significant Jewish populations and focused increasingly on the welfare of children in its care. Relocating to Paris in 1933, the organization assumed the name Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. OSE ran a number of orphanages in France for Jewish refugee children and, when the deportations of Jews in France began in 1942, organized an underground effort to smuggle many of the children from OSE orphanages to the safety of neutral countries.

  Oneg Shabbat (In Celebration of the Sabbath; also Oneg Shabbas and Oneg Shabes): Established by Warsaw historian and social worker Emmanuel Ringelblum, Oneg Shabbat was a clandestine archive that documented the history of the Warsaw ghetto and its inhabitants. With the aid of his assistant, Rabbi Simon Huberband, archive secretary Hersh Wasser, and a core of other professionals and volunteers, Ringelblum collected diaries, letters, and testimonies of ghetto residents, compiled hundreds of documents concerning the German occupation, and commissioned studies of the ghetto by experts. The activities of Oneg Shabbat continued until the first large-scale deportation action, when Ringelblum directed that the underground archive’s material be buried in milk cans and metal boxes within the ghetto. After the war, Hersh Wasser helped to recover much of the archive’s materials, which are reposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

  See Joseph Kermish, To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

  Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt): In late 1941 and spring 1942, the planners of the “Final Solution” founded the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka killing centers, known collectively as the Operation Reinhard camps, to facilitate the murder of the Jews of the General Government. These killing centers claimed the lives of some 1.5 million Jews and thousands of Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war. In November 1943, after prisoner revolts at Sobibór and Treblinka, SS and police units shot the Jewish labor forces still incarcerated at Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek during Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest). Forty-two thousand prisoners were murdered through this shooting action on November 3 and 4, 1943, bringing Operation Reinhard to a close.

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

  Operation T4: see “euthanasia” program.

  Ostmark: This was the Nazi name for annexed Austria after the Anschluss; it derives from the medieval designation for what was then the Austrian March.

  Palestine (or Palestinian Mandate): This was a territory under British mandate beginning in 1920. Zionists had advocated a return to the Jewish “ancestral homeland” for Jews since the late nineteenth century, and Jewish immigration to Palestine began in earnest in 1882. Increased Jewish immigration and native Arab resistance to its manifestation induced the British government to place a strict quota on Jews immigrating to Palestine; the British White Paper of 1939 tightened these restrictions, limiting the ability of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution to find a safe haven there. After the war, the growing number of Holocaust survivors and refugees hoping to reach Palestine led to massive illegal immigration. The British government announced that it would vacate the Palestinian Mandate by August 1948; on May 14, 1948, the Jewish leadership under future prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared an independent state of Israel.

  Partisan: In the context of this volume, “partisan” refers to a unit or detachment of irregular troops waging guerilla warfare and sabotage against German forces and those who collaborated with them. Some twenty to thirty thousand Jewish fighters joined partisan bands that operated extensively throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, often cooperating with the broad-based Soviet partisan movement.

  Pimpf: This refers to a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk; see Hitler Youth.

  Pogrom (from Russian: “destruction”): A localized violent assault on a group of individuals and their property, often instigated by state or local authorities. The term is usually ascribed to antisemitic violence. The events of Kristallnacht are often characterized as a pogrom.

  Police Decree Concerning the Designation of Jews (Polizeiverordnung über die Kennzeichnung der Juden): This police decree of September 15, 1941, compelled German Jews to wear the Jewish badge, shortly before the first systematic deportations of Jews from the Reich began in October 1941. The measure required all Jews over the age of six to attach to the left side of their outermost garment a six-pointed yellow star, inscribed with the word Jude (Jew) in black lettering. The decree also applied to Jews in Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

  Ponary: The Ponary Woods, located eight miles from the city of Vilna (today Vilnius, Li
thuania), served as the primary killing site for the Jewish population in the Vilna ghetto. From July 4, 1941, to July 1944, German Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliary units systematically massacred around one hundred thousand Jews at Ponary.

  Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: During the Munich crisis of September 1938, Great Britain and France forced the Czechoslovak Republic to cede its German-speaking borderlands (e.g., the Sudetenland) to Nazi Germany. On March 15, 1939, the German army occupied the remainder of rump Czechoslovakia. German authorities annexed to the Reich the territory roughly encompassing the modern Czech Republic, creating the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With its incorporation by Nazi Germany, the new Protectorate adopted the bulk of Nazi antisemitic legislation. On September 27, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich assumed the effective government of the territory until his death following an assassination attempt in June 1942.

  Race and Settlement Main Office SS (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, or RuSHA): The Race and Resettlement Office was originally established in 1931 to maintain the “racial purity” of the SS organization. Initially tasked with vetting the ancestry of SS recruits and their existing or intended spouses, RuSHA officials eventually helped to implement Nazi race and settlement policies in the eastern occupied and annexed territories during World War II. Their racial “experts” helped to determine Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) fit for assimilation in the German Reich and chose “racially suitable” children in Slavic lands for inclusion in the Lebensborn program.

  See Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, Deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).