Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Racial hygiene: see eugenics.

  Rassenschande (“race defilement”): This term describes real or purported sexual contact between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” (especially Jews). The Nuremberg Laws provided the apparatus to make such relations punishable by law.

  Ravensbrück: This, following the women’s camp at Auschwitz, was the largest concentration camp for women in the German Reich. German authorities began construction of the camp in November 1938 at a site in northern Germany some eighty kilometers (fifty miles) north of Berlin. In April 1941, SS officials established a small men’s camp adjacent to the main camp. Beginning in the summer of 1942, SS physicians subjected many prisoners at Ravensbrück to grisly medical experimentation. In January 1945, Ravensbrück and its subcamps held more than fifty thousand, mostly female, prisoners; among the inmates were political prisoners, “asocials,” Roma and Sinti, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and “race defilers” (see Rassenschande). Soviet troops liberated Ravensbrück in April 1945.

  Razzia: This refers to a roundup, as for deportation to a concentration camp or killing center.

  Realschule: This refers to a type of secondary school in German-speaking lands, generally catering to pupils between the ages of eleven and seventeen.

  Reich Citizenship Law: see Nuremberg Laws.

  Reichsmark (RM): This was the currency used in Germany from 1924 until June 20, 1948. The Reichsmark was subdivided into one hundred (Reichs)pfennigs.

  Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Security Main Office): This agency combined with the Security Police and the Security Service under the authority of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and was directed by Reinhard Heydrich; after Heydrich’s death, Ernst Kaltenbrunner eventually undertook leadership of the organization. The RSHA was the central mechanism for extrajudicial terror and repression in Germany and the occupied territories and a key agency in the implementation of the “Final Solution.”

  Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany): This successor organization to the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland was formally installed in July 1939. In the hands of the Gestapo, the Reichsvereinigung became a tool for the administration and control of Jews remaining in Germany. Having served the purpose set by the regime, it was dissolved in 1943 and its staff deported.

  See Beate Meyer, “The Inevitable Dilemma: The Reich Association (Reichsvereinigung) of Jews in Germany, the Deportations, and the Jews Who Went Underground,” in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), 297–312.

  Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews, or RV); also Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany): The Reichsvertretung was founded in September 1933 by a coalition of leading German Jewish functionaries, most prominently Leo Baeck, who subsequently served as the organization’s president. Intended as a coordinating umbrella organization for the many German Jewish organizations in the Third Reich, the Reichsvertretung cooperated closely with the Jewish agencies and associations inside and outside Germany. The Nuremberg Laws had an immediate effect on the organization’s ability to protect Jews in Germany from persecution and resulted in the organization’s extended efforts to encourage emigration; the organization also changed its name to Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland at this time. By the spring of 1939, the hitherto largely autonomous Reichsvertretung had transformed into the Gestapo-controlled Reichsvereinigung.

  See Otto Dov Kulka and Esriel Hildesheimer, “The Central Organization of Jews in the Third Reich and Its Archives,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 187–201.

  Righteous Among the Nations: Yad Vashem bestows this title on non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In German-occupied eastern Europe, the punishment for sheltering or assisting Jews was often death. In 1962, Yad Vashem formed a thirty-five-member Commission for the Designation of the Righteous to award the title “Righteous Among the Nations.” As of January 2010, 23,226 people from forty-four countries have been recognized as “Righteous Gentiles.”

  See Israel Gutman and Sara Bender, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003).

  Ringelblum, Emmanuel (1900–1944): A historian by training, Emmanuel Ringelblum established Oneg Shabbat, a clandestine archive that documented the history of the Warsaw ghetto and its inhabitants. Ringelblum himself contributed to the documentation effort, with writings such as the monograph Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War. During the first great deportation action from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942, Ringelblum ordered that the archive be buried in a series of milk cans and metal boxes in order to preserve the work of the organization. In March 1943, Ringelblum and his family succeeded in escaping to the “Aryan side” of Warsaw, where they were discovered in their hideout in March 1944 and murdered.

  See Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, eds. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1974); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

  Roma and Sinti (Gypsies; also Romani): Among the groups the Nazi regime and its Axis partners singled out for persecution on racial grounds were the Roma and Sinti. Roma were affected in great numbers by several acts of Nazi legislation, including the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, whose ancillary legislation was extended to Roma and other “racially inferior” minorities. In the mid-1930s, German authorities established Gypsy camps (Zigeunerlager) throughout the Reich. Roma were deported to concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Chełmno, and Ravensbrück. In addition they were interned in the Lublin, Łódź, and Warsaw ghettos. Members of the Einsatzgruppen undertook killing actions that included Roma victims in the Soviet Union and Serbia. The Croatian Ustaša killed and interned thousands of Roma along with Serbs and Jews. In 1941, thousands of Romanian Roma and Jews were deported to Transnistria. Historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed 25 percent of all European Roma, or some 220,000 Roma individuals.

  See Michael Zimmermann, Verfolgt, Vertrieben, Vernichtet: Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik gegen Roma and Sinti (Essen: Klartext, 1989).

  Rudashevski, Yitskhok (1927–1943): On September 6, 1941, Yitskhok Rudashevski and his family received orders to move into the Vilna ghetto. Shortly thereafter, the fourteen-year-old began to write a diary, which he filled with vivid descriptions of the ghetto and the individuals who inhabited it. Rudashevski was also active in forging an intellectual life for the youth of the Vilna ghetto. He and his family went into hiding when deportations from Vilna began, but SS officials discovered them in early October 1943 and murdered them at Ponary. A cousin who had escaped deportation located the family’s hiding place immediately after the war and found Rudashevski’s diary, which was first published in Yiddish in 1953.

  See Isaac Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973).

  Rumkowski, Mordechai Chaim (1887–1944): Russian-born Chaim Rumkowski served as the director of the Helenowek Jewish orphanage in Łódź until October 1939. Following the German invasion of Poland, German authorities established the Łódź ghetto and appointed a Judenrat with Rumkowski at its head. Directly accountable to German administrator Hans Biebow, Rumkowski wielded extraordinary authority over the internal management of the ghetto. He displayed enormous organizational skill in overseeing the ghetto’s workshops and social agencies, but he governed in an autocratic fashion and was viewed by contemporaries, as by scholars today, as a controversial and divisive figure. Rumkowski beli
eved from the start that the ghetto’s best chance for survival lay in cooperating fully with the German officials. Thus, he acceded in December 1941 to German demands for deportations of ghetto residents to Treblinka. On September 4, 1942, faced with a further call for twenty thousand deportees, Rumkowski decided he would fill the required quota with the ghetto’s least productive members: the ailing, the aged, and children under ten. Rumkowski was deported with his family to Auschwitz during the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto and died there on August 28, 1944.

  See Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004).

  Schirach, Baldur von (1907–1974): The son of Berlin theater director Rittmeister Carl Baily Norris von Schirach and his American wife, Baldur von Schirach was an early leader of the National Socialist German Students’ League. Acting as the first Reich Youth Leader (Reichsjugendführer), he headed the Hitler Youth from 1933 until 1940. At this time, he became Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Vienna until the war’s end; in this capacity he helped to oversee the deportation of Viennese Jews to the camps and ghettos in the East. Von Schirach was a defendant before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, which found him guilty of crimes against humanity and gave him a twenty-year prison sentence.

  Schutzstaffel (SS, or Protective Squadron): Established in 1925 as a protective service for prominent Nazi Party functionaries, the SS grew under the stewardship of Heinrich Himmler into one of the most important tools for maintaining the regime’s grip on political power through suppression and terror directed against real or imagined internal “enemies of the Reich.” Many of these enemies were incarcerated in concentration camps run by the SS. Through its party branch, the SS increasingly overlapped with state agencies such as the Gestapo and other parts of the police subordinated to Himmler. In 1940 it added a military wing, the Waffen-SS. Himmler’s apparatus, which by the war’s end comprised more than 1 million men in a range of different agencies, played a key role in planning and implementing the genocide of European Jewry.

  See Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970).

  Scout Movement: Founded in England in 1907 by Robert Baden Powell, scouting is an international youth movement that offers youngsters practical training in outdoor activities, sports, and crafts. A German scouting movement began in 1910 and attracted thousands of members. The group was banned by the Nazis in the 1933 and 1934 in order to facilitate the integration of German youth into the Hitler Youth and its auxiliary organizations.

  Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo): This branch of the German police comprised the Gestapo (Secret State Police), the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), and the Border Police (Grenzpolizei). As chief of the Security Police as well as the Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich merged the two organizations by establishing the Reich Security Main Office in September 1939. The Security Police helped to supply the forces of the Einsatzgruppen, which served as both security police and mobile killing units in German-occupied territories.

  Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD): This intelligence and surveillance organization was established in 1931 under Reinhard Heydrich. Among its major tasks were monitoring real or imagined enemies of national socialism and reporting on the state of opinion among the German public. As chief of the Security Service as well as of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich merged the two organizations, establishing the Reich Security Main Office in September 1939.

  Selection: New arrivals to Auschwitz II–Birkenau underwent the process of “selection.” Amid the chaos of disembarkation, Auschwitz prisoner-workers and SS guards separated the deportees by gender and ordered them to form short ranks. SS medical staff performed selections of Jewish prisoners, determining who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Young and able-bodied Jews were often chosen for labor and registered as prisoners at the camp. Along with the sick, weak, and aged, children were generally murdered upon arrival. Selections took place on a regular basis at many other camps in the Nazi concentration camp system to cull children and ailing prisoners for gassing.

  Sobibór: Located in a wooded and thinly populated region, the village of Sobibór was chosen as a site for the second of three extermination camps operating under the auspices of the Operation Reinhard. Sobibór’s first commandant was Franz Stangl; in August 1942, Stangl was transferred to Treblinka and succeeded by his deputy, Franz Reichleitner. German SS and police officials conducted gassing operations at Sobibór from May 1942 until autumn 1943, when Jewish prisoner revolts there and at Treblinka spurred the liquidation of both killing centers. In all, at least 167,000 individuals perished at the Sobibór extermination camp.

  See Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, trans. Karin Dixon (Oxford: Berg Publishers in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007); Miriam Novitch, ed., Sobibór, Martyrdom and Revolt: Documents and Testimonies (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980).

  Sonderkommando (literally, “special detail or detachment”): The word Sonderkommando had two meanings in the context of the Holocaust. First, it applied to certain SS units, such as special units of the Einsatzgruppen and to unit commands like that of Sonderkommando Lange, which ran the Chełmno killing center. Second, it applied to details of Jewish prisoners compelled to dispose of victims’ bodies and belongings in National Socialist killing centers.

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

  Streicher, Julius (1885–1946): One of the Nazi Party’s earliest members, Streicher established his virulently antisemitic newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Storm Trooper), in 1923; in the same year, he took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch. Following Adolf Hitler’s release from prison, the Nazi leader named Streicher Gauleiter of Middle Franconia (later Franconia). In the first months of the Nazi regime, Streicher helped to organize the Boycott of April 1, 1933, of Jewish-owned businesses. In 1938, Streicher’s Stürmer reached its highpoint in terms of circulation; his successful publishing house of the same name produced, among other works, a host of antisemitic children’s literature, including the infamous Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). Despite his strong personal association with Hitler, Streicher was viewed as mercurial by leading officials and, in 1939, stripped of his party posts. Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity in a trial of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. He was hanged in Nuremberg, his former stronghold, on October 16, 1946.

  See Dennis Showalter, Little Man, What Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982).

  Sturmabteilung (Storm Division, or SA; also Storm Troopers): As the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the SA, formed in 1921, initially comprised mainly German World War I veterans, militia members, and others opposed to both the democratic Weimar Republic and to the Communist Party. Its terror tactics against opponents increased the public visibility of the Nazi movement, both before and after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Once the Nazi regime was established, it began to perceive the disruptive tactics of the SA as a threat. Hitler agreed to the murder of the SA’s top leadership in the Röhm Purge,” or “The Night of the Long Knives,” in June 1934, carried out primarily by the SS. The SS, previously a part of the SA, relegated that organization to a Nazi Party agency of secondary importance.

  See Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Stormtroopers in Eastern Germany, 1925–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

  Sudetenland: Adolf Hitler demanded this borderland of western Czechoslovakia because of its majority ethnic German population; it was annexed to the German Reich at the conclusion of the Munich Conference in September 1938. Like their coreligionists in Germany proper, Jews in the Sudetenland experienced Kristallnacht on November 9 to 10, 1938.

  Theresienstadt (Terezin): In autumn 1941, Reinhard
Heydrich, governor general of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, suggested that the former imperial fortress of Theresienstadt near Prague act as the holding station for Jews in the Czech lands on their way to the camps and ghettos in the East. Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Theresienstadt also became a “settlement area” for German Jews over the age of sixty-five and for Jewish war veterans who had been decorated or disabled in combat, those categories of German Jews initially exempted from deportation. Nazi propagandists portrayed Theresienstadt as a kind of model ghetto community for Jews, employing the “Jewish city” to deceive foreign governments and agencies, as when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited a highly sanitized Theresienstadt in June 1944. In reality, Theresienstadt amalgamated Nazi concentration camp and ghetto. Of the more than 140,000 Jews transferred to Terezin, 33,500 died there, victims of starvation, disease, and ill treatment. More significantly, Theresienstadt functioned as a way station for deported Czech Jews and eventually for Jews deported from the Reich to the Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka extermination camps. Between December 1941 and the end of the war in the spring of 1945, eighty-eight thousand individuals passed through Theresienstadt on the way to almost certain death in the East.

  See H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960); Vojtěch Blodig, Terezin in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” 1941–1945, trans. Jan Valěska and Lewis Paines (Prague: Památník Terezín/Oswald, 2003).

  Theresienstadt Family Camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau): In September 1943, five thousand Jews, among them over one thousand children, arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt. Spared the customary selection, they were brought directly to a separate barracks network in Birkenau, designated the Theresienstadt Family Camp. A second transport from Theresienstadt joined their ranks in December 1943. Its inmates were processed as special prisoners; their hair was not shorn, and they were allowed to retain their civilian clothing. Men and women were housed in separate blocks, but prisoners could move freely within the small camp, and children could remain with their parents. Historians believe that the family camp was allowed its short, privileged existence in order to deceive representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who had visited Theresienstadt and planned to make a similar visit to Auschwitz. In early July 1944, survivors of the camp’s December 1943 transports were put to a selection. The majority of these prisoners were gassed, while the camp itself was liquidated.