ST Columban's College Religionstcre.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/4/1/26417597/holocaust… · Web viewTeachings are rooted in biblical orientations and reflections on Christian tradition.

Grade 10 REInformation Booklet

Victims, Collaborators, Bystanders, Rescuers

Victims, collaborators, bystanders and rescuers are titles used to broadly understand the roles and positions of those who took part and were affected by the Holocaust. 'Victims' name those who suffered and lost life at the hands of the Nazi party and their supporters. 'Collaborators' name those who worked with and supported the Nazis in the goals of genocide and purification. 'Bystanders' are those who did nothing, standing-by while violence and evil acts were perpetuated. Rescuers are those that stood against the perpetrators and bystanders to assist victims and respond when power was used for evil. Many rescuers are recorded by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Catholic Social Teaching

Three major themes run through Scripture and Catholic social teaching. A core theme is that each human person is made in the image and likeness of God and thus has an inalienable human dignity and worth. Derived from this core theme are two further themes namely, the rights and duties that are proper to human persons and the freedom and responsibility that underpin these rights and duties. In more recent times there is growing awareness of the application of these three

themes to both human persons and the whole of God’s creation. Further themes are found in Catholic social teaching and are grounded in the three themes above.

Themes of Church Social TeachingThree major themes run through Scripture and Catholic social teaching. A core theme is that each human person is made in the image and likeness of God and thus has an inalienable human dignity and worth. Derived from this core theme are two further themes namely, the rights and duties that are proper to human persons and the freedom and responsibility that underpin these rights and duties. In more recent times there is growing awareness of the application of these three themes to both human persons and the whole of God’s creation. Further themes are found in Catholic social teaching and are grounded in the three themes above.

Themes of Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic Social Teaching is a collection of teachings on key themes that have evolved in response to the challenges of the day that are designed to reflect the Church's social mission. Teachings are rooted in biblical orientations and reflections on Christian tradition. It is a living tradition of thought and action. This tradition calls all members of the Church, rich and poor alike, to work to eliminate the occurrence and effect of poverty, to speak out against injustice and to shape a more caring society and a more peaceful world.

Dignity of the Human Person

Made in the image of God, women and men have a pre-eminent place in the social order. Human dignity can be recognised and protected only in community with others. The fundamental question to ask about social development is: What is happening to people? [Peace on Earth]

Option for the Poor

A preferential love should be shown to poor people, whose needs and rights are given special attention in God's eyes. Poor is understood to refer to the economically disadvantaged who, as a consequence of their status, suffer oppression and powerlessness. [Call to Action]

Political and Economic Rights

All human persons enjoy inalienable rights, which are political/legal [e.g. vote, free speech, migration] and social/economic [e.g. food, shelter, work, education]. These are realised in community. Essential for the promotion of justice and solidarity, these rights are to be respected and protected by all the institutions of society. [Peace on Earth]

Link of Love and Justice

Love of neighbour is an absolute demand for justice, because charity must manifest itself in actions and structures that respect human dignity, protect human rights and facilitate human development. To promote justice is to transform structures that block love. [Justice in the World]

Promotion of the Common Good

The common good is the sum total of all those conditions of social living - economic, political and cultural - which make it possible for women and men to readily and fully achieve the perfection of their humanity. Individual rights are always experienced within the context of promotion of the common good. There is also an international common good. [Christianity and Social Progress]

Subsidiarity

Responsibilities and decisions should be attended to as close as possible to the level of individual initiative in local communities and institutions. Mediating structures of families, neighbourhoods,

community groups, small businesses and local governments should be fostered. [The Reconstruction of the Social Order]

Political Participation

Democratic participation in decision-making is the best way to respect the dignity and liberty of people. The government is the instrument by which people cooperate together in order to achieve the common good. The international common good requires participation in international organisations. [Pius XII, Christmas Message, 1944]

Economic Justice

The economy is for the people and the resources of the earth are to be shared contemporary social questions. Labour takes precedence over both capital and technology in the production process. Just wages and the right of workers to organise are to be respected. [On Human Work]

Stewardship

All property has a social mortgage. People are to respect and share the resources of the earth, since we are all part of the community of creation. By our work we are co-creators in the continuing development of the earth. [On Human Work]

Global Solidarity

We belong to one human family and as such have mutual obligations to promote the rights and development of all people across the world, irrespective of national boundaries. In particular, the rich nations have responsibilities toward the poor nations and the structures of the international order must reflect justice. [The Development of Peoples and The Social Concerns of the Church]

Promotion of PeacePeace is the fruit of justice and is dependent upon right order among humans and among nations. The arms race must cease and progressive disarmament take place if the future is to be secure. In order to promote peace and the conditions of peace, an effective international authority is necessary.

See Judge Act

In Mater et Magistra, Pope John XXIII picked up Pius XII’s expression the

‘signs of the times’ and used the phase to call the church to renewal in its own life and in its involvement in the world by ‘reading the signs of the times’. In his writings he himself set about reading the hopeful and concerning signs of his time. In Mater et Magistra he affirms the process of 'See, Judge, Act' as a way of reading and responding to the signs of the time: "There are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice. First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgement on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: observe, judge act." Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 1961 (# 236) The strong implication is that students are involved in the world and have a responsibility to respond to injustice.

What was the Holocaust?

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program. Read more... (Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Jewish Population of Europe

In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's

Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million.

The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe. The largest Jewish communities in this area were in Poland, with about 3,000,000 Jews (9.5%); the European part of the Soviet Union, with 2,525,000 (3.4%); and Romania, with 756,000 (4.2%). The Jewish population in the three Baltic states totaled 255,000: 95,600 in Latvia, 155,000 in Lithuania, and 4,560 in Estonia. Here, Jews comprised 4.9%, 7.6%, and 0.4% of each country's population, respectively, and 5% of the region's total population.

In prewar central Europe, the largest Jewish community was in Germany, with about 500,000 members (0.75% of the total German population). This was followed by Hungary with 445,000 (5.1%), Czechoslovakia with 357,000 (2.4%), and Austria with 191,000, most of whom resided in the capital city of Vienna (2.8%).

In western Europe the largest Jewish communities were in Great Britain, with 300,000 Jews (0.65%); France, with 250,000 (0.6%); and the Netherlands, with 156,000 (1.8%). Additionally, 60,000 Jews (0.7%) lived in Belgium, 4,000 (0.02%) in Spain, and 1,200 (0.02%) in Portugal. Close to 16,000 Jews lived in Scandinavia, including 6,700 (0.11%) in Sweden, 5,700 (0.15%) in Denmark, 1,800 (0.05%) in Finland, and 1,400 (0.05%) in Norway. In southern Europe, Greece had the largest Jewish population, with about 73,000 Jews (1.2%).

There were also significant Jewish communities in Yugoslavia (68,000, or 0.49%), Italy (48,000, or 0.11%), and Bulgaria (48,500, or 0.8%). 200 Jews (0.02%) lived in Albania.

Before the Nazis seized power in 1933, Europe had a richly diverse set of Jewish cultures, many of which were dynamic and highly developed, that drew from hundreds and, in some areas, a thousand or more years of Jewish life on the continent. The diverse nature of individual Jewish communities in occupations, religious practices, involvement and integration in regional and national life, and other areas made for fruitful and multifarious Jewish life across Europe. In many countries, Jews stood as cultural and political luminaries, and had marched alongside non-Jews in World War I.

In little more than a decade, most of Europe would be conquered, occupied, or annexed by Nazi Germany and its Axis partners, and the majority of European Jews--two out of every three--would be dead.

WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE

View of the entrance to a marketplace reduced to rubble as a result of a German aerial attack. Warsaw, Poland, September 1939.— US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Julien Bryan

The Holocaust took place in the broader context of World War II. Still reeling from Germany's defeat in World War I, Hitler's government envisioned a vast, new empire of "living space" (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. The realization of German dominance in Europe, its leaders calculated, would require war.

1939After securing the neutrality of the Soviet Union (through the August 1939

German-Soviet Pact of nonaggression), Germany started World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. Within a month, Poland was defeated by a combination of German and Soviet forces and was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

1940The relative lull in fighting which followed the defeat of Poland ended on April 9, 1940, when German forces invaded Norway and Denmark. On May 10, 1940, Germany began its assault on western Europe by invading the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), which had taken neutral positions in the war, as well as France. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, which provided for the German occupation of the northern half of the country and permitted the establishment of a collaborationist regime in the south with its seat in the city of Vichy.

With German encouragement, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states in June 1940 and formally annexed them in August 1940. Italy, a member of the Axis (countries allied with Germany), joined the war on June 10, 1940. From July 10 to October 31, 1940, the Nazis waged, and ultimately lost, an air war over England, known as the Battle of Britain.

1941After securing the Balkan region by invading Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6, 1941, the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in direct violation of the German-Soviet Pact. In June and July 1941, the Germans also occupied the Baltic states. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin then became a major wartime Allied leader, in opposition to Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. During the summer and autumn of 1941, German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, but stiffening Red Army resistance prevented the Germans from capturing the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow. On December 6, 1941, Soviet troops launched a significant counteroffensive that drove German forces permanently from the outskirts of Moscow. One day later, on December 7, 1941, Japan (one of the Axis powers) bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States immediately declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States as the military conflict widened.

1942-1943In May 1942, the British Royal Air Force carried out a raid on the German city of Cologne with a thousand bombers, for the first time bringing war home to Germany. For the next three years, Allied air forces systematically bombed industrial plants and cities all over the Reich, reducing much of urban Germany to rubble by 1945. In late 1942 and early 1943, the Allied forces achieved a series of significant military triumphs in North Africa. The failure of French armed forces to prevent Allied occupation of Morocco and Algeria triggered a German occupation of collaborationist Vichy France on November 11, 1942. Axis military units in Africa, approximately 150,000 troops in all,

surrendered in May 1943.

On the eastern front, during the summer of 1942, the Germans and their Axis allies renewed their offensive in the Soviet Union, aiming to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River, as well as the city of Baku and the Caucasian oil fields. The German offensive stalled on both fronts in the late summer of 1942. In November, Soviet troops launched a counteroffensive at Stalingrad and on February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets. The Germans mounted one more offensive at Kursk in July 1943, the biggest tank battle in history, but Soviet troops blunted the attack and assumed a military predominance that they would not again relinquish during the course of the war.

In July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily and in September went ashore on the Italian mainland. After the Italian Fascist Party's Grand Council deposed Italian premier Benito Mussolini (an ally of Hitler), the Italian military took over and negotiated a surrender to Anglo-American forces on September 8. German troops stationed in Italy seized control of the northern half of the peninsula, and continued to resist. Mussolini, who had been arrested by Italian military authorities, was rescued by German SS commandos in September and established (under German supervision) a neo-Fascist puppet regime in northern Italy. German troops continued to hold northern Italy until surrendering on May 2, 1945.

1944On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), as part of a massive military operation, over 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France, which was liberated by the end of August. On September 11, 1944, the first US troops crossed into Germany, one month after Soviet troops crossed the eastern border. In mid-December the Germans launched an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied air forces attacked Nazi industrial plants, such as the one at the Auschwitz camp (though the gas chambers were never targeted).

1945The Soviets began an offensive on January 12, 1945, liberating western Poland and forcing Hungary (an Axis ally) to surrender. In mid-February 1945, the Allies bombed the German city of Dresden, killing approximately 35,000 civilians. American troops crossed the Rhine River on March 7, 1945. A final Soviet offensive on April 16, 1945, enabled Soviet forces to encircle the German capital, Berlin. As Soviet troops fought their way towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies at Reims and on May 9 to the Soviets in Berlin. In August, the war in the Pacific ended soon after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 120,000 civilians. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.

World War II resulted in an estimated 55 million deaths worldwide. It was the largest and most destructive conflict in history.

COLLABORATION

Members of the Hlinka Guard march in Slovakia, a Nazi satellite state. Date uncertain.— Czechoslovak News Agency

In Europe, antisemitism, nationalism, ethnic hatred, anti-communism, and opportunism induced citizens of nations Germany occupied to collaborate with the Nazi regime in the annihilation of the European Jews and with other Nazi racial policies. Such collaboration was a critical element in implementing the "Final Solution” and the mass murder of other groups whom the Nazi regime targeted. Collaborators committed some of the

worst atrocities of the Holocaust era.

Germany's European Axis partners cooperated with the Nazi regime by promulgating and enforcing anti-Jewish legislation and, in some cases, by deporting their Jewish citizens and/or residents into German custody en route to killing centers or labor camps. In some Axis states, fascist paramilitary organizations terrorized, robbed, and murdered indigenous Jews, either under German guidance or on their own initiative. The Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustasa in Croatia, and the Arrow Cross in Hungary were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews in their home territory. In these and other states, military personnel, police, and the gendarmerie played a key role in the expropriation, concentration, and deportation of Jewish residents in their countries. In Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Vichy France, police, military, and gendarmerie officials were vital to implementing the German-initiated policy of deporting Jews resident in territories under their influence or control to the killing centers in the East.

The Ustasa government of Croatia built its own concentration camps. By the end of 1942, the Croat authorities had killed more than two-thirds of Croatia's Jews (around 25,000), many of them in the Jasenovac camp system. Croat police and Ustasa militia also killed between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs, some of them in Jasenovac, but the majority in the villages in which they resided. Slovak officials deported nearly 80% of the Slovak Jewish population in cooperation with the Germans during 1942.

Though they collaborated with Germany in many ways, including the promulgation of antisemitic legislation, neither Italy nor Hungary deported Jews until Germany directly occupied those countries. Bulgaria cooperated willingly with the Germans in deporting Jews from territories the Bulgarians occupied as a result of the Axis dismemberment of Yugoslavia and occupation of Greece. Bulgarian authorities, responding to popular opposition and even reservations within their own government ruling party, refused to deport Jews from Bulgaria proper. They did, however, expropriate many in the Jewish community and deployed male Jews at compulsory labor during 1943 and 1944. Romanian gendarmerie and military units directly murdered and deported Romanian and Ukrainian Jews in the re-annexed provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia as well as in Romanian-administered Transnistria in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Romanian government refused to deport Jews from the core provinces of Romania (Moldavia, Wallachia, southern Transylvania, and the Banat).

Many people in German-occupied countries and regions collaborated with the German occupation authorities. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and ethnic German collaborators played a significant role in killing Jews throughout eastern and

southeastern Europe. Many served as perimeter guards in killing centers and were involved in the murder by poison gas of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Others, particularly ethnic Germans from southeastern Europe, served in the Nazi concentration camp system, particularly after 1942.

Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians spontaneously formed groups which the German SS and police then purged and reorganized. From the beginning, members of these “partisan” or “self-defense” groups killed hundreds of Jews as well as real and perceived Communists. The German-reorganized units became ruthless and reliable police auxiliaries that assisted the German authorities-civilian, military, SS and German police--in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jews and millions of non-Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Throughout the period of the occupation, the Germans continued to recruit auxiliaries for their police forces, military units, and civilian administrations from among the native peoples of the Soviet Union.

The government of Vichy France cooperated with the Germans by enacting the Statut des Juifs (Jewish Law), which defined Jews by race and restricted their rights. Vichy authorities also actively collaborated and even took initiatives by establishing internment camps in southern France, arresting foreign Jews and French Jews, and aiding in the deportation of Jews (mostly foreign Jews residing in France) to killing centers in German-occupied Poland. The Vichy government also turned over to the Germans Spanish and international fighters in defense of the Spanish Republic against the Franco rebels. After Franco's victory and the establishment of a conservative, authoritarian regime in 1939, these so-called Spanish Republicans or “Red Spaniards” had sought refuge in France from certain persecution and possible death if they remained in Spain. After the Vichy French turned over several thousand of the refugees to the Germans, the Germans incarcerated them in concentration camps, where thousands of them died.

After the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian fascist, proclaimed himself prime minister. The Germans quickly became disillusioned with him and established their own administration, but intermittently used Quisling as a figurehead--Quisling's name entered the English dictionary as a term defining a person who betrayed his country through collaboration with an occupying enemy. Norwegian police and paramilitary formations assisted SS and German police units in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Likewise, local civilian and police authorities collaborated closely with the Germans in Belgium and the Netherlands in rounding up and deporting Jews residing in those two countries.

In both German-occupied territories and on the territory of Germany's European Axis

partners, indigenous propagandists collaborated with the German occupation authorities or with their governments in the attempt to legitimize Axis expansion through aggression and Axis-initiated race and settlement policies, including and especially the annihilation of the European Jews and the mass murder of other groups targeted by Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Such propaganda assisted in removing local inhibitions against participation in mass expropriation, deportation, and killing. The Axis, Germany and Italy in particular, also deployed foreign propagandists and collaborators who were citizens or residents of Allied countries or their possessions in Africa and Asia to legitimize violence via radio broadcast against the Jews of Europe and elsewhere and against the Allied governments leading the fight against Nazi Germany.

The German authorities required the assistance of the Axis nations and of indigenous collaborators in the regions they occupied to implement the "Final Solution." Axis governments, police, and military authorities aided in the roundup and deportation of Jews to killing centers, actively participated in the murder of Jews, and in several cases committed atrocities against their Jewish fellow citizens within their own national borders. In territories they occupied (particularly in the East) the Germans depended on indigenous auxiliaries (civilian, military, and police) to carry out the annihilation of the Jewish population.

Both Axis government authorities and indigenous auxiliaries in regions occupied by the Germans were instrumental in implementing policies of expropriation, deportation for forced labor, and mass murder of non-Jewish populations, particularly in German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Soviet Union, and German-occupied Serbia.

"FINAL SOLUTION": OVERVIEW

Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945.— US Holocaust Memorial Museum

•

The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. They used the term “Final Solution” to refer to their plan to annihilate the

Jewish people. It is not known when the leaders of Nazi Germany definitively decided to implement the "Final Solution." The genocide, or mass destruction, of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory measures.

Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism led to anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms, all of which aimed to systematically isolate Jews from society and drive them out of the country.

ANTI-JEWISH POLICY ESCALATES After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (the beginning of World War II), anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos (enclosed areas designed to isolate and control the Jews) in the Generalgouvernement (a territory in central and eastern Poland overseen by a German civilian government) and the Warthegau (an area of western Poland annexed to Germany). Polish and western European Jews were deported to these ghettos where they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food.

MASSIVE KILLING OPERATIONS BEGIN After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS and police units (acting as mobile killing units) began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. By autumn 1941, the SS and police introduced mobile gas vans. These paneled trucks had exhaust pipes reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed spaces, killing those locked within. They were designed to complement ongoing shooting operations.

On July 17, 1941, four weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler tasked SS chief Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Hitler gave Himmler broad authority to physically eliminate any perceived threats to permanent German rule. Two weeks later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Goering authorized SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a "complete solution of the Jewish question."

KILLING CENTERS In the autumn of 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler assigned German General Odilo Globocnik (SS and police leader for the Lublin District) with the implementation of a plan to systematically murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement. The code name Operation Reinhard was eventually given to this plan, named after Heydrich (who was assassinated by Czech partisans in May 1942). As part of Operation Reinhard, Nazi leaders established three killing centers in Poland --

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka -- with the sole purpose of the mass murder of Jews.

The Majdanek camp served from time to time as a killing site for Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement. In its gas chambers, the SS killed tens of thousands of Jews, primarily forced laborers too weak to work. The SS and police killed at least 152,000 people, mostly Jews, but also a few thousand Roma (Gypsies), in gas vans at the Chelmno killing center about thirty miles northwest of Lodz. In the spring of 1942, Himmler designated Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) as a killing facility. SS authorities murdered approximately one million Jews from various European countries at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. In its entirety, the "Final Solution" called for the murder of all European Jews by gassing, shooting, and other means. Approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed during the Holocaust -- two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.

EUTHANASIA PROGRAM

Buses used to transport patients to Hadamar euthanasia center. The windows were painted to prevent people from seeing those inside. Germany, between May and September 1941.— Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbade

The term "euthanasia" (literally, "good death") usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual who would otherwise suffer. In the Nazi context, however, "euthanasia" represented a euphemistic term for a clandestine murder program which targeted for systematic killing mentally and physically disabled patients living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories.

The so-called "Euthanasia" program was National Socialist Germany's first program of mass murder, predating the genocide of European Jewry, which we call the Holocaust, by approximately two years. The effort represented one of many radical eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial "integrity" of the German nation. It endeavored to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered "life unworthy of life": those individuals who--they believed--because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented at once a genetic and a financial burden upon German society and the state.

CHILD "EUTHANASIA" PROGRAMIn the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners--led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's attending physician--began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree compelling all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability. Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. The clinics were in reality children's killing wards where specially recruited medical staff

murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.

At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators incorporated only infants and toddlers in the operation, but as the scope of the measure widened, they included juveniles up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years.

EXTENDING THE "EUTHANASIA" PROGRAMEuthanasia planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled patients living in institutional settings. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution; this authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures. Because the Führer Chancellery was insular, compact, and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses, Hitler chose this, his private chancellery, to serve as the engine for the "euthanasia" campaign. Its functionaries called their secret enterprise "T4." The operation took its code-name from the street address of the program's coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4. According to Hitler's directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt undertook leadership of the killing operation. Under their auspices, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the "euthanasia" action: Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin; Grafeneck in southwestern Germany; Bernburg and Sonnenstein, both in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria, and Hadamar in Hessen.

Utilizing a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, T4 planners began in the autumn of 1939 to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to convey the impression that the survey was intended to gather statistical data.

The form's sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis which the questionnaire placed upon the patient's capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify: those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders; those not of German or "related" blood; the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds; and those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years. Secretly recruited "medical experts," physicians--many of them of significant reputation--worked in teams of three to

evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions and to transport them by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing.

Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in especially designed gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, utilizing pure carbon monoxide gas. Thereafter, T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims. The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing both a fictive cause and date of death.

Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though in every case, physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly become an open secret. In view of widespread public knowledge of the measure and in the wake of private and public protests concerning the killings, especially from members of the German clergy, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941. According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.

SECOND PHASEHitler's call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia" killing operation. The child "euthanasia" program continued as before. Moreover, in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, albeit in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing.

Employing drug overdose and lethal injection--already successfully used in child euthanasia--in this second phase as a more covert means of killing, the "euthanasia" campaign resumed at a broad range of custodial institutions throughout the Reich. Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims. The "Euthanasia" Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the "Euthanasia" Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 200,000 individuals.

GERMAN-OCCUPIED EASTPersons with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied East. Although the Germans confined the "Euthanasia" Program, which began as a racial hygiene measure, to the Reich proper--that is, to Germany and to the annexed territories of Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Warthegau in former Poland, the Nazi ideological conviction which designated these persons "life unworthy of life" made institutionalized patients targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union. Here the killings of disabled patients were the work of SS and police forces, not of physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the "Euthanasia" Program itself. In areas of Pomerania, West Prussia, and occupied Poland, SS and police units murdered some 30,000 patients by the autumn of 1941 in order to accommodate ethnic German settlers (Volksdeutsche) transferred there from the Baltic countries and other areas.

SS and police units also murdered disabled patients in mass shootings and gas vans in occupied Soviet territories. Thousands more died, murdered in their beds and wards by SS and auxiliary police units in Poland and the Soviet Union. These murders lacked the ideological component attributed to the centralized "Euthanasia" Program, for by and large, the SS was apparently motivated primarily by economic and material concerns in killing institutionalized patients in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. The SS and the Wehrmacht quickly made use of the hospitals emptied in these killing operations as barracks, reserve hospitals, munitions storage depots. In rare cases, the SS used the empty facilities as a formal T4 killing site; an example is the "euthanasia" facility Tiegenhof, near Gnesen (today Gniezno, in west-central Poland).

The "euthanasia" program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany's subsequent genocidal policies. The Nazi leadership extended the ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the "unfit" to other categories of perceived biological enemies, most notably to Jews and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies). Planners of the so-called Final Solution later borrowed the gas chamber and accompanying crematoria, specifically designed for the T4 campaign, to murder Jews in German-occupied Europe. T4 personnel who had shown themselves reliable in this first mass murder program, figured prominently among the German staff stationed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Like those who planned the physical annihilation of the European Jews, the planners of the "euthanasia" program imagined a racially pure and productive society and embraced radical strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within it their vision.

Historical Overview: Jews, Germans and World War II

To say that the Holocaust of European Jewry (1933-1945) is an unprecedented episode in the history of the Jewish nation is not merely an understatement. It is an inaccuracy of the greatest magnitude, for such an event is unmatched in any recorded history. Millions of Jewish people suffered for twelve years under the terror of Nazi rule, where anti-Jewish propaganda, segregation, and then murder were the norm.Though there are other cases in history of Genocide, the Holocaust was characterized by its methodical, systematic, efficient, almost scientific murder of any person with Jewish roots. Assimilation or conversion offered no protection in this situation. At the core of the Holocaust we find modern anti-Semitism, the current version of Jew Hatred - that same phenomenon which appeared throughout the centuries, perhaps finding its most blatant manifestation with the medieval Church. The modern German anti-Semitism was based on racial ideology which stated that the Jews were sub-human (untermensch) while the Aryan race was ultimately superior. The Jew was systematically portrayed as a low-life, as untouchable rot (faulniserscheinung) and as the main cause of Germany's problems. Germany had major problems resulting from World War I. The Weimar Republic, which was established on the ruins of the defeated Germany, had relinquished land on almost all fronts, had succumbed to military jurisdiction under the Allies, and was forced to pay reparations beyond the prevalent economic capabilities. The rocketing inflation and economic insecurity became even worse with the advent of the Great Depression of 1929. By 1932, unemployment in Germany peaked, and it was in this economic and political climate that Adolf Hitler established the Nationalist-Socialist Party (with Mein Kampf as its manifesto). With Hitler's rise to power in 1933 began the national policy of organized persecution of the Jews. Read more... (Source: Kenneset Briefing Pap