Extermination Practice: The Jews
After being gassed in the vans (which were used before the permanent camps) the bodies were driven to mass burial grounds where they were unloaded and stripped of valuables (inc. jewellery and golden teeth) by gangs of Jews, fellow victims.(p637, Michael Burleigh): “Michael Podchlebink, a saddler from Kolo, worked in the woods, and discovered that among the bodies pulled from the third van to arrive on a Tuesday morning were his wife, seven-year-old son and five year old daughter. He lay down next to his wife and asked to be shot, but was beaten to his feet to shouts of ‘The fellow can still work well.’”
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 7:23 PM
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Extermination Practice: The Jews
Based on notes from ‘Anatomy of the SS State’ by Helmut Krausnick, among others and ‘Genocide and Rescue: The holocaust in Hungry 1944’ edited by David Cesarani.
Social Darwinism, a movement that spread rapidly around 1890 (particularly in America it must be said) would go on to greatly influence National Socialism. Following the logic of the argument ‘The modern state instead of protecting the weak and helping the sick – should turn its attention to encouraging the healthy, strong and biologically valuable elements in society.”
The emergence of the concentration camps:
On the 28th February 1933 in response to the Reichstag fire a decree was issued which granted police powers to detain people in ‘protective custody’ whenever they thought it was necessary and for an extended period of time then was previously allowed. It was designed to target the enemies of the state, mainly those Communist groups that were causing so much agitation… (p403)
The first moves to construct detention camps followed on from this decree. The numbers arrested under the law increased dramatically since the same law also gave the party police institutions (the SS and SA) jurisdiction throughout the country. The sheer scale of the operation placed far to high a burden on the existing prison system so moves were made to establish temporary holding camps. The first step towards the concentration camps. (p405)
Now that most of the Communist opposition leaders had been arrested the Reichstag was pretty bare when Hitler obtained his two thirds majority and passed the enabling act on March 23rd. With his new powers he dissolved the unions and seized the assets of the remaining socialist political opposition. The bourgeois parties were then under immense pressure and they all folded. A new wave of arrests followed sending leaders of the centrist parties to prison along with numerous Jewish writers, industrialists and intellectuals.
How was killing organized?
The Main Office for Economy and Administration was far more in tune with the needs of the war economy that was the Reich Security Office which was, in 1941, busy deporting and exterminating as many Jews as it could get its hands on. Instead the Economy and Administration Office looked to introduce extermination through labour. Establishing satellites to the main concentration camp in which skilled Jews could be worked to death.
Many Ghettos had formed Jewish Councils to which the Nazis would cruelly consult when organising the transportation of Jews. They would be told that the following day 6,000 Jews would be transported eastwards for labour (actually to their death) and that the Council had overnight to select and prepare these 6,000 or else the Germans would do it themselves. Such behaviour dragged the Jews into the planning of their own destruction.
After being gassed in the vans (which were used before the permanent camps) the bodies were driven to mass burial grounds where they were unloaded and stripped of valuables (inc. jewellery and golden teeth) by gangs of Jews, fellow victims.
(p637, Michael Burleigh): “Michael Podchlebink, a saddler from Kolo, worked in the woods, and discovered that among the bodies pulled from the third van to arrive on a Tuesday morning were his wife, seven-year-old son and five year old daughter. He lay down next to his wife and asked to be shot, but was beaten to his feet to shouts of ‘The fellow can still work well.’”
What is infrastructure?
Agencies involved?
Reich Security Office
German Foreign Office
Others:
The WVHA was the economics and administrative department of the SS-Allgemeine, the political wing of the SS. It had five departments, one of which oversaw the exploitation of prisoners in concentration camps for economic ends.
The RSHA was the Reich Security Main Office which was created in 1939 by Heinrich Himmler. It was a merger of the three main security branches in the Reich, the SD (The SS’s security agency), The Gestapo (The secret police of the SS) and the normal civilian criminal police. It was divided into seven offices, one of which was dedicated to the removal and extermination of Jews in all territories under control of the Reich. It often came into conflict with the WVHA as the RSHA sought to exterminate Jews while the WVHA wished to employ them.
This bureaucratic conflict resulted in the introduction of the selection process that greeted Jews on arrival at their concentration camps between those deemed fit to work and those deemed fit for immediate extermination.
In 1942 a shift in emphasis took place in the concentration camp scheme. The office of the ‘Inspector of Concentration Camps’ was moved from SS-Führungshauptamt (the administrative arm of the Waffen SS) to the WVHA. It signalled a shift towards the increasing economic exploitation of the Jews as the German war economy began to suffer from a shortage of manpower.
How Auschwitz was organized internally?
Aushwitz was split into three camps. The first one housed mostly Poles and Soviet POW’s. The Second was designed specifically to exterminate Jews and Gypsies and during its lifetime it saw the murder of at least 1.1 million Jews. And the Third camp was a labour camp.
How did Germans relate to allies?
How governments respond - why do more Jews survive in France than in Holland for example?
France lost ¼ of its Jewish population in the Holocaust, Holland lost ¾’s. A large reason for this was that France was politically more sovereign during the war than Holland was. Holland was under direct German control right from the start while France had Vichy to fall back on at least until 1942.
Why does Italy have a reasonably honourable record?
Hungary -
Why did it take place with such speed and efficiency?
Attila Pók comes up with a crap conclusion in which simply notes the presence of anti-Semitism in Hungarian politics before the war and then blames its dominance during the war on the German influence. Undoubtedly correct but he states it so bluntly and without much development.
“It was German pressure, then direct intervention that laid down the planks between anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, that fused elements of anti-Semitism into a most dangerous mixture, bringing about the greatest tragedy of modern Hungarian history”.
Up until the German occupation of 1944 Hungry successfully harboured and protect its 825,000 Jews from Nazi pressures for their inclusion in the ‘Final Solution’. Hungry had introduced a series of ‘anti-Jewish’ measures before the war yet it did so in a bid to appease both the rightist elements in its own domestic politics that threatened to bring about instability and also placate the Nazi regime sufficiently enough to keep in favour with Germany. This way Hungry hoped to benefit from Nazi friendship without actually losing their sense of self rule. The aristocratic rulers of Hungry had strong ties to the Jewish community and therefore did not wish to see them punished but would happily pass token laws against them if they believed it would take the sting out of their right wing political rivals.
During the war, but especially after the defeat at Stalingrad of Hungary’s main military contribution, their Prime Minister Miklos Kallay entered into secret negotiations with the Allies in a bid to bring Hungry out of the war much like Italy had done. Kallay was hoping he could tempt the Allies to land their troops in the Balkans, simultaneously engaging with the Nazi enemy and acting to prevent the Soviet spread into western and central Europe. The presence of Allied troops would of course also secure Hungry from Nazi retribution should it opt out of the war. This of course did not happen, and getting wind of his intentions – and fearing above all the loss of their routes to the Romanian Oil fields the Nazis invaded their former Ally in 1944.
Upon arrival in Hungry the Nazis found strong support amongst the right wing political parties that had for so long been kept in check by the aristocratic government. Together these Hungarian right wing parties and the Nazis would bring about the destruction of ‘Hungarian Jewry’ yet they each depended on each other in this process. The right wing factions would not have had the opportunity to attack he Jews were it not for the German occupation and the Nazis would not have had access to the logistical apparatus to conduct a mass extermination were it not for the Hungarian collaborators.
The powers of the Hungarian state were placed firmly and with much cooperation in the hands of the invading Nazi’s whose numbers were very small (only 200 men led the initial invasion). The aristocratic elements agreed hastily to the deportation of thousands of Jews to Germany for ‘work’ on the basis that they preferred to assist the Nazis than to see them falter and for the Soviets to occupy Hungry instead.
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