| Victims | Murdered | Refs. |
|---|---|---|
| Jews | 6 million | [1] |
| Soviet civilians | 4.5 million | [2] |
| Soviet POWs | 3.3 million | [3][1] |
| Poles | 1.8 million | [4][5][1] |
| Serbs | More than 310,000 | [6][7] |
| Disabled people | 270,000 | [8] |
| Romani | 250,000–500,000 | [1][9] |
| Freemasons | 80,000 | [10][11] |
| Slovenes | 20,000–25,000 | [12] |
| Homosexuals | Hundreds, perhaps thousands | [13] |
| Spanish Republicans | 3,500 | [14] |
| Jehovah's Witnesses | 1,700 | [1][15] |
| Total | 17 million |
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People targeted by thegovernment of Nazi Germany based on theirethnicity,religion,political beliefs,disability orsexual orientation. The institutionalized practice bythe Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted inthe Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization,euthanasia, andforced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews,Sinti-Roma peoples, andSlavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated duringWorld War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property,forced labor,sexual slavery,death through overwork,human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews,genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
According to theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Holocaust was "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators".[1]
Whilethe termHolocaust generally refers to thesystematic mass-murder ofthe Jewish people inGerman-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for extermination, e.g. anassimilated Jew who was a member of acommunist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as aJehovah's Witness.
Non-Jewishvictims of Nazism includedSlavs (e.g.Russians,Belarusians,[16]Poles,Ukrainians andSerbs),the Romani (gypsies),LGBT people;[a][17]mentally orphysically disabled people;[b]SovietPOWs,Roman Catholics,Jehovah's Witnesses,Spanish Republicans,Freemasons,[c]people of color (especially theAfro-GermanMischlinge, called "Rhineland bastards" by Hitler and the Nazi regime), and other minorities not consideredAryan (Herrenvolk, or part of the "master race");[d]leftists,communists,trade unionists,social democrats,socialists,anarchists, and otherdissidents.[18][19][20][21][22]
Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people duringthe war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a total of 17 million victims.[23]
Despite widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide while others were not), some died inconcentration camps such asDachau and others from various forms of Nazi brutality. According to extensive documentation (written and photographic) left by the Nazis, eyewitness testimony by survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and records of the occupied countries, most perished in death camps such asAuschwitz-Birkenau.
_1942_(Ko%25C5%2582o).jpg)
The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews fromGermany and otherGerman-held territories duringWorld War II, often with extreme brutality, is known asthe Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urbanghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December,Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946.[24][25] The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.[26]
In January 1942, during theWannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage) and GermanState SecretaryJosef Bühler urged conference chairmanReinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in theGeneral Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated asVernichtungslager (extermination camps):
In 1978,Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal—to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal—was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews.[27] As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.
In Poland – home of Europe's largest Jewish community before the war – the Nazis murdered 3 million Jews, about 90 percent of its Jewish population.[28] Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references inThe New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.
Greece,Yugoslavia,Hungary,Lithuania,Bohemia, theNetherlands,Slovakia andLatvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; inBelgium,Romania,Luxembourg,Norway, andEstonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of theSoviet Union's Jews were murdered;France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population,Italy between 15% and 20%.[29] Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearbyneutralSweden; theDanish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden,[30] in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by theNazis.[30]Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust inItalian Libya,Algeria,Tunisia,Morocco,Iraq,Japan, andChina.
Although Jews are anethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. TheNazi Party viewed theJewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance withantisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.[31]
TheYad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with the names and biographical details of close to 4.8 of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.[32]
TheSlavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with manyPoles,Belarusians,Russians,Ukrainians,Slovenes,Serbs and others killed by the Nazis.The Nazis' genocide and brutality was their way of ensuringLebensraum ("living space") for those who met Hitler's narrow racial requirements; this necessitated the elimination ofBolsheviks and Slavs:
The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs fromCentral andEastern Europe and to create aLebensraum forAryans ... As Bartov (The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race.[33]
The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 millionethnic Poles and about 3 millionPolish Jews.[34] The six million Jewish, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles represented nearly 17 percent of the country's population.[35] Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939speech toWehrmacht commanders before theinvasion.Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killeden masse. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of theEinsatzgruppen death squads.[36] The anti-Polish campaign culminated inthe near-complete destruction ofWarsaw, ordered by Hitler andHimmler in 1944. The original assumptions ofGeneralplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used asslaves.[37]
Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three millionUkrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part ofNazi extermination policies in present-dayUkraine.[38][39] More Ukrainians were killed fighting theWehrmacht in theRed Army than American, British and French soldiers combined.[40] Original Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians,[41][42] with the survivors treated as slaves.[43] Over two million Ukrainians were deported to Germany as slave labor.[44] The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized orenslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.
DuringOperation Barbarossa (theAxis invasion of the Soviet Union), millions ofRed Army prisoners of war weresummarily executed in the field by German armies (theWaffen SS in particular), died under inhumane conditions in Germanprisoner of war camps, ondeath marches, or had been shipped to concentration camps for execution. The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs bystarvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941–42.[45] According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the winter of 1941 "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". 140,000-500,000 Soviet citizens and POWs were murdered in the concentration camps.[46]
Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were severely persecuted and endured the treacherous conditions of theEastern Front, which spawned atrocities such as thesiege of Leningrad, when 1.2 million civilians died. Thousands of peasant villages across Russia,Belarus andUkraine were annihilated by German troops. During the occupation, theLeningrad,Pskov andNovgorod regions lost about a quarter of their populations. An estimated one-quarter of Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies (five million Russians, three million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians) were racially motivated.[2] In 1995, theRussian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totaled 13.7 million dead (20% of the population of 68 million). The figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease deaths. An estimated three million people also died of starvation in unoccupied territory. The losses occurred within the 1946–1991 borders of the USSR, and include territories annexed in 1939–40.[47] The deaths of 8.2 million Soviet civilians, including Jews, were documented by the SovietExtraordinary State Commission.[48]
The Nazi genocide of theRomani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s, and opinions continue to differ on its details. According to historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, the genocide of the Romani began later than that of the Jews and a smaller percentage was murdered.[49] Hitler's genocidal campaign against Europe's Romani population involved the application of Nazi "racial hygiene" (selective breeding applied to humans). Despitediscriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany'sSinti andLalleri) were spared deportation and death, with the remaining Romani groups suffering a fate similar to that of the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, were shot by SSEinsatzgruppen in their villages, or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
Estimates of the number of Romani victims range from 250,000 to 500,000.[1] The Romani genocide was formally recognized byWest Germany in 1982 and byPoland in 2011.[50]
Thousands of Spanish Republican refugees were living in France at the time of its occupation byNazi Germany in 1940; 15,000 were detained in concentration camps, including 7,000 inMauthausen-Gusen. Around 3,500 were murdered in the camp.[14]
The Nazis promotedxenophobia andracism against all "non-Aryan" races.African (black) residents of Germany andblack prisoners of war, such asFrench colonial troops andAfrican Americans, were also victims of Nazi racial policy.[51] When the Nazis came to power, hundreds of African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived in theRhineland.[52] InMein Kampf, Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation troops as a contamination of the white race "byNegro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe"[53] who were "bastardising the European continent at its core".[52] According to Hitler, "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate".[54]
Japan signed theTripartite Pact with Germany andItaly on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. NoJapanese people were deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were considered "honorary Aryans". The same applied to Turks and all other "Ural-Altaic" peoples.[55]In his political testament Hitler wrote:
I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. [...] and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong.[56][unreliable source?]
According to theireugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed care and were considered an affront to their notion of a society composed of a perfect race. About 375,000 people weresterilized against their will due to their disabilities.[57]
Those with disabilities were among the first to be murdered by the Nazis; according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, theT-4 Program (established in 1939) was the model for future Nazi exterminations and it set a precedent for the genocide of what they described as the Jewish race.[58] The program attempted to maintain the "purity" of the Aryan race by systematically murdering children and adults with physical deformities or suffering frommental illness, usinggas chambers for the first time. Although Hitler formally halted the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the end of the war and an estimated 275,000 people with congenital disabilities were murdered.[59]
Homosexual men were also targets of Nazi Germany, since malehomosexuality was deemed incompatible withNazism. The Nazis believed that gay men were weak, effeminate and unable to fight for the German nation; homosexuals were unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. According to the Nazis, "inferior races" produced more children than Aryans, so anything which diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger.[60] Homosexuality was also thought to be contagious by the Nazis.[61] By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was leading efforts to persecute gay men under existing and new anti-homosexual laws. More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned.[62] An unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation werechemically castrated by court order.[62] While an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps,[62] it is thought that hundreds (or perhaps thousands) were killed.[13][63] According to Austrian survivorHeinz Heger, gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners".[64] Gay men in Nazi concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle on their shirts, along with men convicted ofsexually assaulting children andbestiality.[65] According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's website, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and socialconformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more."[62]
Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution underParagraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This contrasted with the treatment of other groups persecuted by Nazi Germany, who were compensated for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.[66]
Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilianactivists from across the political spectrum who opposed the Nazi regime, capturedresistance fighters (many of whom were executed during—or immediately after—theirinterrogation, particularly in occupiedPoland andFrance) and, sometimes, their families. Germanpolitical prisoners were a substantial proportion of the first inmates atDachau (the prototypical Nazi concentration camp). The politicalPeople's Court was notorious for the number of itsdeath sentences.[67][68]
Germancommunists were among the first to be imprisoned in concentration camps.[69][70] Their ties to theUSSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify theEnabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler his first dictatorial powers.Hermann Göring testified atNuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Hitler referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir upclass tension and mobilizetrade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler'sCommissar Order, in which he demanded the summary execution of all Soviet troops who were political commissars who offered resistance or were captured in battle.[71]
Thousands of people, primarily diplomats, of nationalities associated with theAllies (China andMexico, for example) andSpanish Civil Warrefugees in occupied France were interned or executed. AfterItaly's 1943 surrender, manyItalian nationals (includingpartisans andItalian soldiers disarmed by the Germans) were sent to concentration camps.
The Nazis also targeted religious groups for political and ideological reasons.
Historian Detlef Garbe, director of theNeuengamme Memorial in Hamburg, wrote aboutJehovah's Witnesses: "No other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism [Nazism] with comparable unanimity and steadfastness".[72] Between 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were murdered in the concentration camps;[15] unwilling to fight for any cause, they refused to serve in the army.[73]
The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church,[74] with the Nazi leadership hoping to gradually de-Christianize Germany. According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion."[75] Hitler vehemently despised Christianity, calling it the enemy of National Socialism. According to historian William Shirer, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroyChristianity inGermany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists".[76] He also wrote that Hitler "inveighed against politicalCatholicism inMein Kampf and attacked both of the Christian Churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...". As reported in the New York Times, Hitler's forces wished to de-Christianize Germany after "the final victory" and destroy Christianity.[77] According to historian Alan Bullock, "Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect."[78][79]Political Catholicism was a target of Hitler's 1934Night of the Long Knives.[80][81][82] German clergy, nuns and lay leaders were also targeted after the Nazi takeover, leading to thousands of arrests over the following years.[83] Priests who were part of theCatholic resistance were killed. Hitler's invasion of Catholic Poland in 1939 began World War II, and the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their campaign to destroy Polish culture.
In 1940, thePriest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp was established.[84] Of 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority (94.88 percent) were Catholic.[85] According to Ian Kershaw, about 400 German priests were sent to the camp.[86] Although theHoly See concluded a 1933concordat with Germany to protect Catholicism during Nazi rule, the Nazis frequently violated the pact in theirKirchenkampf ("struggle with the churches").[87] They shut down the Catholic press, schools, political parties and youth groups in Germany amid murder and mass arrests.[88][89][90] In March 1937,Pope Pius XI issued hisMit brennender Sorge encyclical accusing the Nazi government of violating the 1933 concordat and sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church".[83]
The church was especially harshly treated in annexed regions, such as Austria.VienneseGauleiterOdilo Globocnik confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations and sent many priests to Dachau. In theCzech lands, religious orders were suppressed, schools closed, religious instruction forbidden and priests sent to concentration camps.[91] Catholicbishops, clergy, nuns and laypeople protested and attacked Nazi policies in occupied territories; in 1942, the Dutch bishops protested the mistreatment of Jews.[92] When ArchbishopJohannes de Jong refused to yield to Nazi threats, the Gestapo rounded up Catholic "Jews" and sent 92 to Auschwitz.[93] One Catholic abducted in this manner was nunEdith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz along with Poland'sMaximilian Kolbe. Other Catholic victims of Nazi Germany have beenbeatified, including Poland's108 Martyrs of World War II, theMartyrs of Nowogródek, Dutch theologianTitus Brandsma and Germany'sLübeck martyrs andBernhard Lichtenberg.
According toNorman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe."[94] The Nazis murdered millions of Polish Catholics. Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles—the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland—as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders).[95] The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking thePolish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany).[96] About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."[97]
InPolish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, severe persecution began. The Nazis systematically dismantled the church, arresting its leaders, exiling its clergy and closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Germanization of the annexed regions began in December 1939, with deportations of men, women and children.[98] According toRichard J. Evans, in theReichsgau Wartheland "numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment."[99] Among the clergy who were murdered at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II.[100]
Hans Frank said in 1940, "Poles may have only one master—a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed."[95] Thomas J. Craughwell wrote that from 1939 to 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 were murdered in concentration camps.[101] According to theEncyclopædia Britannica, 1,811 Polish priests were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.[102] Among the persecuted resisters wasIrena Sendlerowa, head of the children's section ofŻegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.[103]
The Nazis attempted to deal with Protestant dissent with their ideology by creating the Reich Church, a union of 28 existing Protestant groups espousingPositive Christianity (a doctrine compatible withNazism). Non-Aryan ministers were suspended and church members called themselvesGerman Christians, with "theswastika on their chest and thecross in their heart."[73][104] TheProtestant opposition to the Nazis established theConfessing Church, a rivalumbrella organization of independent German regional churches which was persecuted.[104]
The Nazis claimed that high-degreeMasons were willing members of "the Jewish conspiracy" and Freemasonry was a cause of Germany's defeat inWorld War I.[105]Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) records indicate the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust.[106] RSHA Amt VII (written records), overseen byFranz Six, was responsible for "ideological" tasks: the creation of antisemitic and anti-Masonic propaganda. Although the exact number is unknown, an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 Freemasons were murdered as a result of Hitler's December 1941Nacht und Nebel directive.[11]
Small blueforget-me-nots were first used by the Zur Sonne Grand Lodge in 1926 as a Masonic emblem at its annual convention inBremen. In 1938, a forget-me-not badge made by the factory which produced the Masonic badge was chosen for the annual NaziWinterhilfswerk, the charity drive of theNational Socialist People's Welfare (the party's welfare branch). The coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear the forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of Masonic membership.[107][108][109]
After the war, the forget-me-not was again used as a Masonic emblem at the first annualUnited Grand Lodges of Germany convention in 1948.[110] The badge is worn on thelapels of Masons worldwide in remembrance of those who have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, particularly during the Nazi era.[110]
The SS and police conducted mass actions against civilians with alleged links to resistance movements, their families, and villages or city districts. Notorious killings occurred inLidice,Khatyn,Kragujevac,Sant'Anna andOradour-sur-Glane, and a district of Warsaw wasobliterated. In occupied Poland, Nazi Germany imposed the death penalty on those found sheltering (or aiding) Jews. "Social deviants"—prostitutes,vagrants,alcoholics,drug addicts, open dissidents,pacifists,draft resisters and commoncriminals—were also imprisoned in concentration camps. The common criminals frequently becameKapos, inmate guards of fellow prisoners.
Some Germans and Austrians who had lived abroad for much of their lives were considered to have had too much exposure to foreign ideas, and were sent to concentration camps. These prisoners, known as "emigrants", each wore a blue triangle.[111][better source needed]
On rare occasions, POWs from Western Allied armies were sent to concentration camps, including 350 Americans – some chosen for being Jewish, but mostly for looking Jewish or for being troublemakers or otherwise 'undesirable'. Some captured in theBattle of the Bulge were forced into slave labor at theBerga concentration camp, a subcamp ofBuchenwald; over 70 were killed by the conditions there.[112][113] The "KLB Club" was a group of 168 Allied airmen – mainly American, British, and Canadian – consideredTerrorfliegers ("terror fliers"), denied POW status, and held at Buchenwald for two months until a German officer arranged their transfer to a standard POW camp, a week before their scheduled execution.
Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) were victims of German Occupation policies and the war. This approximate total includes Poles killed in executions or who died in prisons, forced labor, and concentration camps. It also includes an estimated 225,000 civilian victims of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, more than 50,000 civilians who died during the 1939 invasion and siege of Warsaw, and a relatively small but unknown number of civilians killed during the Allies' military campaign of 1944–45 to liberate Poland.
15,000 Spanish Republicans ended up in Nazi concentration camps after 1940.
Almost 7,000 Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were killed, primarily in the first months of the revolt.
Nazi authorities conscripted Spanish Republicans for forced labor and deported more than 30,000 to Germany, where about half of them ended up in concentration camps. Some 7,000 of these became prisoners in Mauthausen; more than half of them died in the camp.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)Estimates of the numbers of victims of this operation range from at least 140,000 up to 500,000.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)Black soldiers of the American, French, and British armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps.
Horst Biesold estimates that approximately 16,000 deaf people were among the 375,000 forcibly sterilized people with disabilities.
At the beginning of World War II, individuals who were mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or mentally ill were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the "T-4," or "euthanasia," program.
The T-4 program became the model for the mass murder of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and others
Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and murder.
Approximately 15,000 homosexuals were imprisoned in camps and thousands perished.
The Munich Chief of Police, Himmler, has issued the following press announcement: On Wednesday the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. 'All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.'
The Commissar Order read: "The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. ... Therefore, when captured either in battle or offering resistance, they are to be shot on principle."
By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant, this goal had to be a long-term rather than a short-term Nazi objective.
"under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroyChristianity inGermany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists".
Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect
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