From the beginning of the Third Reich concentration camps were founded, initially as places of incarceration. Although the death rate in the concentration camps was high, with a mortality rate of 50%, they were not designed to be killing centers. (By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland, which were built solely for mass killings.) After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or made to work as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.[105] It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps and subcamps in the occupied countries, mostly in eastern Europe.[106][107] New camps were founded in areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. Extermination through labor was a policy of systematic extermination – camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or worked to physical exhaustion, when they would be gassed or shot.[108] Slave labour was used in war production, for example producing V-2 rockets at Mittelbau-Dora, and various armaments around the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex. Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.[109] Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14-hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.[110] Ghettos (1940–1945) Main articles: Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944 and List of Nazi-era ghettos Main ghettos: Białystok, Budapest, Kraków, Kovno, Łódź, Lvov, Riga, Vilna, Warsaw A child dying in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government in which Jews were confined. These were initially seen as temporary, until the Jews were deported out of Europe; as it turned out, such deportation never took place, with the ghettos inhabitants instead being sent to extermination camps. The Germans ordered that each ghetto be run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) consisting of Jewish community leaders, with the first order for the establishment of such councils contained in a letter dated 29 September 1939 from Heydrich to the heads of the Einsatzgruppen.[111] The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons.[112] The councils were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the distribution of food, water, heat, medical care, and shelter. The Germans also mandated them to undertake confiscations, organize forced labor, and, finally, facilitate deportations to extermination camps.[113] The councils basic strategy was one of trying to minimise losses, largely by cooperating with Nazi authorities (or their surrogates), accepting the increasingly terrible treatment, bribery, and petitioning for better conditions and clemency.[114] Overall, to try and mitigate still worse cruelty and death, the councils offered words, money, labor, and finally lives.[115] The ultimate test of each Judenrat was the demand to compile lists of names of deportees to be murdered. Though the predominant pattern was compliance with even this final task,[116] some council leaders insisted that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. Leaders such as Joseph Parnas in Lviv, who refused to compile a list, were shot. On 14 October 1942, the entire council of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[117] Adam Czerniaków in Warsaw killed himself on 23 July 1942 when he could take no more as the final liquidation of the ghetto got under way.[118] Others, like Chaim Rumkowski, who became the dedicated autocrat of Łódź,[119] argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed. The importance of the councils in facilitating the persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was not lost on the Germans: one official was emphatic that the authority of the Jewish council be upheld and strengthened under all circumstances,[120] another that Jews who disobey instructions of the Jewish council are to be treated as saboteurs.[121] When such cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the councils authority, the Germans lost control.[122] The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people; the Łódź Ghetto was second, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of slow, passive murder.[123] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of the population of the Polish capital, it occupied only 2.4% of the citys area, averaging 9.2 people per room.[124] Between 1940 and 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,[124] more than one in ten; in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[123] The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus. ... [O]ne baby started to cry ... The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet ... [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead ... from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 20:45:51 +0000
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