HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Concentration and Labor Camps (1940-1945)

The death camps were built by the Nazis outside Germany in occupied territory, such as in occupied Poland and Belarus (Maly Trostenets). The camps in Poland were Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. There was also Jasenova in Croatia, run by the Croatian Ustashe collaborators. Camps such as Dachau and Belsen that were in Germany were concentration camps, not death camps. 

After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis created ghettos to which Jews (and some Roma) were confined until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people, and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000, but ghettos were instituted in many cities.

The ghettos were established throughout 1940 and 1941 and were immediately turned into immensely crowded prisons. The Warsaw Ghetto contained 30 percent of the population of Warsaw; it occupied only about 2.4 percent of the city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room. From 1940 through 1942, disease (especially typhoid fever) and starvation killed hundreds of thousands of Jews confined in the ghettos.

On July 19, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the death camps. On July 22, 1942, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days (until September 12, 1942), about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp from Warsaw alone.

Many other ghettos were completely depopulated. There were armed resistance attempts in the ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as break-away attempts. One successful breakaway was from Sobibor; 11 SS men and a number of Ukrainian guards were killed, and roughly 300 of the 600 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war.

Empty poison gas canisters and piles of hair shaved from the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Upon arrival in these camps, prisoners were divided into two groups: those too weak for work were immediately executed in gas chambers (which were sometimes disguised as showers), and their bodies burned. Meanwhile, others were first used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located in the camp or nearby.

The Nazis also forced some prisoners to work in the collection and disposal of corpses and to mutilate them when required. Gold teeth were extracted from the corpses, and live men's and women's hair was shaved to prevent the spreading of typhus, along with shoes, stockings, and anything else of value was recycled for use in products to support the war effort, regardless of whether or not a prisoner was sentenced to death.

Many victims died in the packed railway transports before reaching the camps. Those from Poland knew exactly what awaited them. Others, from Holland and elsewhere, did not and often wore their finest clothes as they journeyed to their deaths.

Death Marches and Liberation (1944-1945)

As the armies of the Allies closed in on the Reich at the end of 1944, the Germans decided to abandon the extermination camps, moving or destroying evidence of the atrocities they had committed there.

The Nazis marched prisoners, already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Prisoners who lagged behind or fell were shot.

The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at the death camp at Auschwitz, the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 mi) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. In total, around 100,000 Jews died during these death marches. [3]

In July 1944, the first major Nazi camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets, who eventually liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, the prisoners had already been transported by death marches, leaving only a few thousand prisoners alive. Concentration camps were also liberated by American and British forces, including Bergen-Belsen, on April 15. Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at the camp, but 10,000 died from disease or malnutrition within a few weeks of liberation.

Rescuers

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

In three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population. King Christian X of Denmark of Denmark and his subjects saved the lives of most of the 7,500 Danish Jews by spiriting them to safety in Sweden via fishing boats in October 1943. Moreover, the Danish government continued to work to protect the few Danish Jews captured by the Nazis. When the Jews returned home at the war's end, they found their houses and possessions waiting for them, exactly as they had left them.

In the second case, the Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Dobri Bozhilov, refused to deport its 50,000 Jewish citizens, saving them as well. Bulgaria did deport Jews to concentration camps from areas in conquered Greece and Macedonia.

The government of Finland refused repeated requests from Germany to deport its Finnish Jews to Germany. German requirements for the deportation of Jewish refugees from Norway and Baltic states were largely refused.

In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation. Many of these were hidden in safe houses and evacuated from Italy by a resistance group that was organized by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty of the Holy Office. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O'Flaherty used his political connections to great effect in helping to secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.

Another example of someone who assisted Jews during the Holocaust is Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes. It was in clear disrespect of the Portuguese State hierarchy that Sousa Mendes issued about 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities from Europe. He saved an enormous number of lives but risked his career for it. In 1941, Portuguese dictator Salazar lost political trust in Sousa Mendes and forced the diplomat to quit his career. He died in poverty in 1954.

Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from the Holocaust, such as the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which sheltered several thousand Jews.

Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous case of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers.

In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese diplomat Ho Feng Shan, and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes. Chiune Sugihara saved several thousands of Jews by issuing them with Japanese visas against the will of his Nazi-aligned government.

There were also groups, like members of the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue Jews and other potential victims from the Nazis. Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa (the Polish Home Army), organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread the word about the Holocaust.

Since 1963, a commission headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice has been charged with the duty of awarding such people the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations.