Adolf Hitler Timeline Essay
Holocaust Timeline 1933-1946
The beginning- 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany. A Chancellor is a leader or head official of a country
1933: Nazis open Dachau concentration camp near the city of Munich.
1934: German President Von Hindenburg dies. Hitler becomes Fuhrer (leader). As he was next in line…
1935: Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews decreed (went into effect) German Jews deprived of citizenship. Jews were not allowed to marry Aryan Germans.
1936: Olympic Games begin in Berlin. Jesse Owens won; Hitler wouldn’t even shake his hand because he was black!
1937: Hitler declares an end to the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty said they would not arm the military after WW1 Germany Re-arms its military and disregards what …show more content…
the treaty says
1938: At Evian, France, the U.S. convenes a League of Nations conference with delegates from 32 countries to consider helping the Jews fleeing Hitler, but nothing is done as no country will accept them. http://worldatwar.net/timeline/other/league18-46.html
Nazis arrest 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality living in Germany, then expel them back to Poland which refuses them entry, leaving them in “no-man’s land” near the Polish border for several months.
Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass
Nazis fine Jews one billion marks for damages related to Kristallnacht.
Jewish students are expelled from non-Jewish German schools http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/NR1938.htm 1939: Nazis invade Poland (Jewish population in Poland 3.35 million, largest in Europe)
England and France declare war on Germany.
Heydrich issues instructions to SS (special action squads) in Poland regarding treatment of Jews, stating they are to be gathered in ghettos near railroads for the future “final solution.”
Nazis begin euthanasia on sick and disabled in Germany. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=10005070&MediaId=1231 http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/heydrich-biography.htm http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/disabled.html 1940: Nazis choose the town of Auschwitz in Poland as the site of a new concentration camp.
First deportation of German Jews into occupied Poland.
Nazis invade Denmark and Norway.
Nazis invade France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Romania.
The Warsaw Ghetto, containing over 400,000 Jews is sealed off.
1941: Nazis invade Yugoslavia
Nazis invade Soviet Union (Jewish population 3 million)
First test use of Zyklon-B gas at Auschwitz
German Jews ordered to wear yellow stars
SS murder 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev (Soviet Union)
35,000 Jews from Odessa shot
In occupied Poland, Chelmno extermination camp becomes operational. Jews taken there are placed in mobile gas vans and driven to a burial place while carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust is fed into the sealed rear compartment, killing them. The first victims include 5,000 Gypsies deported from Germany.
1942: Wannsee Conference to coordinate the “Final Solution” Jews transported from all over Europe to death camps. Open pit burning of bodies begins at Auschwitz in place of burial. Decision is made to dig up and burn 107,000 corpses to prevent contamination of ground water. “The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder.” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005477
1943: Warsaw Ghetto uprising http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX103.html 1944: D-Day landing in Normandy
May 8, 1945: V-Day-the war is over the Nazis had been defeated
Nov. 20, 1945: Opening of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal
Links-Notes
1938:
January 21
Statement by the Swiss Federal Council concerning the neutrality of the Swiss Confederation.
January 28
The Council decides in favour of the League 's participation in the 1939 New York World 's Fair.
January 29
Adoption of a new Statute for the Communications and Transit Organization.
February 7-10
Conclusion by Diplomatic Conference (President: Mr. Loudon, The Netherlands) of a Convention concerning the Status of Refugees coming from Germany. Convention is signed by the representatives of seven States.
March 18
The German Government communicates to the Secretary-General the text of a Law, dated 13 March, providing for the inclusion of Austria in Germany.
March 19
Departure of a mission of the League of Nations Secretariat for Latin America.
March 21
Declaration by the Federal Council concerning the neutrality and independence of Switzerland.
April 9
The United Kingdom Government requests that the question of the consequesnces arising from the existing situation in Ethiopia be placed on the agenda of the next meeting of the Council.
April 29
Memorandum by the Federal Council on Swiss neutrality.
May …show more content…
14
The Council takes note of the intention of the Swiss Government not to take part in the application of sanctions in future, and declares that Switzerland will not be invited to do so.
The Council refers to the Assembly a request by the Chilean Government that the reform of the Covenant should be treated as urgent.
May 25
The withdrawal of Guatemala takes effect.
June 2
Chile gives notice of withdrawal from the League.
June 4
Mr. J. G. Winant (United States of America) is appointed Director of the International Labour Office.
June 29
The Electoral Commission, having stopped the registration of electors, leaves the Sanjak of Alexandretta and informs the Council that circumstances have prevented it from performing its work.
July 10
The withdrawal of Honduras takes effect.
July 12
Venezuela gives notice of withdrawal from the League.
September 21
The Dominican Republic, Greece and Yugoslavia are elected non-permanent Members of the Council.
September 22
The Assembly expresses its appreciation of the action of the mediating States in the restoration of peace in the Chaco and of the part played by Mr. Saavadra Lamas and Mr. Cantilo.
September 30
The Council postpones the meeting of the Bureaux of the Disarmament Conference.
October 14
Meeting at Perpignan of the Commission instructed to verify "on the spot" the measures taken by the Spanish Government for the withdrawal of non-Spanish combatants.
October 27-29
Meeting of the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters (Chairman: Mr. Paul Valery, France), Nice.
November 2
Japan discontinues her cooperation with the technical organs of the League.
November 17
Award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Nansen International Office for Refugees.
December 3
Signature of an International Act giving to the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation the character of an organization founded on collective agreements, Paris.
December 9-12
The Budgetary Economics Committee decides that the League budget for 1920 must be 20 per cent less than that for 1939, Brussels.
Kristallnacht-
On the night of November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans ' anger over the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager. In fact, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis carefully organized the pogroms. In two days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by. The pogroms became known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," for the shattered glass from the store windows that littered the streets.
The morning after the pogroms 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the "crime" of being Jewish and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them perished. Some Jewish women were also arrested and sent to local jails. Businesses owned by Jews were not allowed to reopen unless they were managed by non-Jews. Curfews were placed on Jews, limiting the hours of the day they could leave their homes.
After the "Night of Broken Glass,"life was even more difficult for German and Austrian Jewish children and teenagers.
Already barred from entering museums, public playgrounds, and swimming pools, now they were expelled from the public schools. Jewish youngsters, like their parents, were totally segregated in Germany. In despair, many Jewish adults committed suicide. Most families tried desperately to leave.
A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
German children watch as a synagogue in Kuppenheim, Baden Germany, burns during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
Germans pass by the broken shop window of a Jewish-owned business that was destroyed during Kristallnacht in Berlin, Germany. The "night of broken glass" was a planned series of acts of violence against Jews throughout Germany. November 10, 1938. On June 27, 1941, the Nazis burned alive about 1,000 Jews in this temple.
The temple was blown up by the SS and Police General, Jürgen Stroop, on April 16, 1943, as a sign of the completion of the "Great Operation" against the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
1939:
1) Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, William 's family was ordered into a ghetto and his brother went to a work camp. William bribed officials to discharge his brother from a hospital destined for evacuation to Auschwitz. Later, after escaping from a prison camp to tend to his brother, William was jailed. He was sent to Blechhammer, Gleiwitz (where he met his future wife), and other camps. William collapsed during a death march near the Austrian border, but was then liberated. His parents and brother perished.
2) Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) was second in importance to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization. Nicknamed "The Blond Beast" by the Nazis, and "Hangman Heydrich" by others, Heydrich had insatiable greed for power and was a cold, calculating manipulator without human compassion who was the leading planner of Hitler 's Final Solution in which the Nazis attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.
3) FORCED STERILIZATIONS
The "sterilization Law" explained the importance of weeding out so-called genetic defects from the total German gene pool: Since the National Revolution public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birthrate. However, it is not only the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people. Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community. Some scientists and physicians opposed the involuntary aspect of the law while others pointed to possible flaws. But the designation of specific conditions as inherited, and the desire to eliminate such illnesses or handicaps from the population, generally reflected the scientific and medical thinking of the day in Germany and elsewhere. Nazi Germany was not the first or only country to sterilize people considered "abnormal." Before Hitler, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations. Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill. Nearly half the operations were carried out in California. Advocates of sterilization policies in both Germany and the United States were influenced by eugenics. This sociobiological theory took Charles Darwin 's principle of natural selection and applied it to society. Eugenicists believed the human race could be improved by controlled breeding. Still, no nation carried sterilization as far as Hitler 's Germany. The forced sterilizations began in January 1934, and altogether an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people were sterilized under the law. A diagnosis of "feeblemindedness" provided the grounds in the majority of cases, followed by schizophrenia and epilepsy. The usual method of sterilization was vasectomy and ligation of ovarian tubes of women. Irradiation (x-rays or radium) was used in a small number of cases. Several thousand people died as a result of the operations, women disproportionately because of the greater risks of tubal ligation. Most of the persons targeted by the law were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. The majority of those sterilized were between the ages of twenty and forty, about equally divided between men and women. Most were "Aryan" Germans. The "Sterilization Law" did not target socalled racial groups, such as Jews and Gypsies, although Gypsies were sterilized as deviant "asocials," as were some homosexuals. Also, about 500 teenagers of mixed African and German parentage (the offspring of French colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland in the early 1920s) were sterilized because of their race, by secret order, outside the provisions of the law. Although the "Sterilization Law" sometimes functioned arbitrarily, the semblance of legality underpinning it was important to the Nazi regime. More than 200 Hereditary Health Courts were set up across Germany and later, annexed territories. Each was made up of two physicians and one district judge. Doctors were required to register with these courts every known case of hereditary illness. Appeals courts were also established, but few decisions were ever reversed. Exemptions were sometimes given artists or other talented persons afflicted with mental illnesses. The "Sterilization Law" was followed by the Marriage Law of 1935, which required for all marriages proof that any offspring from the union would not be afflicted with a disabling hereditary disease. Only the Roman Catholic Church, for doctrinal reasons, opposed the sterilization program consistently; most German Protestant churches accepted and often cooperated with the policy. Popular films such as Das Erbe ("Inheritance") helped build public support for government policies by stigmatizing the mentally ill and the handicapped and highlighting the costs of care. School mathematics books posed such questions as: "The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?"
"EUTHANASIA" KILLINGS
Forced sterilization in Germany was the forerunner of the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler himself initiated a decree which empowered physicians to grant a "mercy death" to "patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health." The intent of the socalled "euthanasia" program, however, was not to relieve the suffering of the chronically ill. The Nazi regime used the term as a euphemism: its aim was to exterminate the mentally ill and the handicapped, thus "cleansing" the "Aryan" race of persons considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society. The idea of killing the incurably ill was posed well before 1939. In the 1920s, debate on this issue centered on a book coauthored by Alfred Hoche, a noted psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a prominent scholar of criminal law. They argued that economic savings justified the killing of "useless lives" ("idiots" and "congenitally crippled"). Economic deprivation during World War I provided the context for this idea. During the war, patients in asylums had ranked low on the list for rationing of food and medical supplies, and as a result, many died from starvation or disease. More generally, the war undermined the value attached to individual life and, combined with Germany 's humiliating defeat, led many nationalists to consider ways to regenerate the nation as a whole at the expense of individual rights. In 1935 Hitler stated privately that "in the event of war, [he] would take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it" because "such a problem would be more easily solved" during wartime. War would provide both a cover for killing and a pretext--hospital beds and medical personnel would be freed up for the war effort. The upheaval of war and the diminished value of human life during wartime would also, Hitler believed, mute expected opposition. To make the connection to the war explicit, Hitler 's decree was backdated to September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. Fearful of public reaction, the Nazi regime never proposed a formal "euthanasia" law. Unlike the forced sterilizations, the killing of patients in mental asylums and other institutions was carried out in secrecy. The code name was "Operation T4," a reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Berlin Chancellery offices where the program was headquartered. Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation. One of Hitler 's personal physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, headed the program, along with Hitler 's Chancellery chief, Philip Bouhler. T-4 targeted adult patients in all government or church-run sanatoria and nursing homes. These institutions were instructed by the Interior Ministry to collect questionnaires about the state of health and capacity for work of all their patients, ostensibly as part of a statistical survey. The completed forms were, in turn, sent to expert assessors physicians, usually psychiatrists, who made up "review commissions." They marked each name with a "+," in red pencil, meaning death, or a "" in blue pencil, meaning life, or "?" for cases needing additional assessment. These medical experts rarely examined any of the patients and made their decisions from the questionnaires alone. At every step, the medical authorities involved were usually expected to quickly process large numbers of forms. The doomed were bused to killing centers in Germany and Austria walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection. But by 1940, Hitler, on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested that carbon monoxide gas be used as the preferred method of killing. Experimental gassings had first been carried out at Brandenburg Prison in 1939. There, gas chambers were disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles in order to deceive victims — prototypes of the killing centers ' facilities built in occupied Poland later in the war. Again, following procedures that would later be instituted in the extermination camps, workers removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold teeth, then burned large numbers of bodies together in crematoria. Urns filled with ashes were prepared in the event the family of the deceased requested the remains. Physicians using fake names prepared death certificates falsifying the cause of death, and sent letters of condolences to relatives. Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941. (This total included up to 5,000 Jews; all Jewish mental patients were killed regardless of their ability to work or the seriousness of their illness.) A detailed report also recorded the estimated savings from the killing of institutionalized patients. The secrecy surrounding the T-4 program broke down quickly. Some staff members were indiscreet while drinking in local pubs after work. Despite precautions, errors were made: hairpins turned up in urns sent to relatives of male victims; the cause of death was listed as appendicitis when the patient had the appendix removed years before. The town of Hadamar school pupils called the gray transport buses "killing crates" and threatened each other with the taunt, "You 'll end up in the Hadamar ovens!" The thick smoke from the incinerator was said to be visible every day over Hadamar (where, in midsummer 1941, the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient with beer and wine served in the crematorium). A handful of church leaders, notably the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen, local judges, and parents of victims protested the killings. One judge, Lothar Kreyssig, instituted criminal proceedings against Bouhler for murder; Kreyssig was prematurely retired. A few physicians protested. Karl Bonhöffer, a leading psychiatrist, and his son Dietrich, a Protestant minister who actively opposed the regime, urged church groups to pressure church-run institutions not to release their patients to T-4 authorities. In response to such pressures, Hitler ordered a halt to Operation T-4 on August 24, 1941. Gas chambers from some of the "euthanasia" killing centers were dismantled and shipped to extermination camps in occupied Poland. In late 1941 and 1942, they were rebuilt and used for the "final solution to the Jewish question." Similarly redeployed from T-4 were future extermination camp commandants Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, Franz Reichleitner, the doctor Irmfried Eberl, as well as about 100 others - doctors, male nurses, and clerks, who applied their skills in Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. The "euthanasia" killings continued, however, under a different, decentralized form. Hitler 's regime continued to send to physicians and the general public the message that mental patients were "useless eaters" and life unworthy of life." In 1941, the film Ich klage an ("I accuse") in which a professor kills his incurably ill wife, was viewed by 18 million people. Doctors were encouraged to decide on their own who should live or die, Killing became part of hospital routine as infants, children, and adults were put to death by starvation, poisoning, and injections. Killings even continued in some of Germany 's mental asylums, such as Kaufbeuren, weeks after Allied troops had occupied surrounding areas. Between the middle of 1941 and the winter of 1944-45, in a program known under code "14f13," experienced psychiatrists from the T-4 operation were sent to concentration camps to weed out prisoners too ill to work. After superficial medical screenings, designated inmates Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Germans, and others were sent to those "euthanasia" centers where gas chambers still had not been dismantled, at Bernburg and Hartheim, where they were gassed. At least 20,000 people are believed to have died under the 14f13 program. Outside of Germany, thousands of mental patients in the occupied territories of Poland, Russia, and East Prussia were also killed by the Einsatzgruppen squads (SS and special police units) that followed in the wake of the invading German army. Between September 29 and November 1, 1939, these units shot about 3,700 mental patients in asylums in the region of Bromberg, Poland. In December 1939 and January 1940, SS units gassed 1,558 patients from Polish asylums in specially adapted gas vans, in order to make room for military and SS barracks. Although regular army units did not officially participate in such "cleansing" actions as general policy, some instances of their involvement have been documented. In all, between 200,000 and 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons were murdered from 1939 to 1945 under the T-4 and other "euthanasia" programs. The magnitude of these crimes and the extent to which they prefigured the "Final Solution" continue to be studied. Further, in an age of genetic engineering and renewed controversy over mercy killings of the incurably ill, ethical and moral issues of concern to physicians, scientists, and lay persons alike remain vital.
1942:
On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Representing the SS at the meeting were: SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) and one of Reichsführer-SS (SS chief) Heinrich Himmler 's top deputies; SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (Gestapo); SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs); SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland; SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941; and SS Major General Otto Hofmann, the chief of SS Race and Settlement Main Office. Representing the agencies of the State were: State Secretary Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); Ministerial Director Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet); State Secretary Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR); Ministerial Director Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Undersecretary of State Martin Luther (Foreign Office); State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); State Secretary Erich Naumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan); State Secretary Josef Bühler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland); and Ministerial Director Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery). The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference (1) to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the “Final Solution,” and (2) to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime. At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final Solution policy that Heydrich announced. Not present at the meeting were representatives of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and the Reich Railroads (Reichsbahn) in the German Ministry of Transportation. The SS and police had already negotiated agreements with the German Army High Command on the murder of civilians, including Soviet Jews, in the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them. Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew. Heydrich announced that “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.” The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany 's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.” Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.
1943:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19 - May 16, 1943)
Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the world in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto. The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In mid-November of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, "we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race." Jews weren 't allowed out. In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little information was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages. Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls. Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto, and the Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation. The Nazi occupation authorities had instructions to provide Jews with half the weekly maximum food allowance needed by a "population which does no work worth mentioning." Within months, the hunger, overcrowding, lack of medical supplies and fuel shortages had a devastating effect. In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto. Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street. By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population. In the spring of 1941, German industries set up workshops in the ghetto, which operated with the use of forced Jewish labor. For the most part, these small factory operations were created to support the German war effort. For that reason, Jews employed in them were saved from the first deportations to the death centers. The Nazis began transporting Jews in the summer of 1942. On July 20th, they issued an order for "non-productive" elements to prepare for a "resettlement" program that would begin two days later. The order provoked widespread panic throughout the ghetto. Jews who didn 't have work cards frantically tried to get them. Ordered to organize the deportations, the head of the Jewish council committed suicide. The very same day, a group of Jewish leaders met to discuss whether or not to resist the orders. The majority decided not to. It was thought the Germans would take no more than 60,000 people and it was agreed that resistance would simply hasten the end of the ghetto. Between that meeting and mid-September, the Nazis actually deported more than 300,000 Jews from the ghetto. Most of them were taken to the Treblinka death camp. In the fall of 1942, almost all the factions in the ghetto decided to resist future deportations. Each political group formed its own "battle group" which came under the central command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. The armed resistance prepared for the conflict by building bunkers and shelters. In January 1943 the Nazis surprised the Jewish fighters, by suddenly deporting 6500 Jews. A struggle ensued in which a German police officer was badly injured and the planned mass deportation came to a halt. Enraged by the incident, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghetto. The emptied district was then to be razed to the ground. At 3am on the morning of April 19, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto and the battle began. Between 2000 Germans armed with a tank, two armored cars, three light-anti-aircraft guns, one medium howitzer, heavy and light machine guns, flame throwers, rifles, pistols and grenades faced off against 700-750 Jewish resistance fighters. The Jews had managed to stockpile a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols. But they possessed only two or three light machine guns. The Germans planned to clear the ghetto of 60,000 Jews in three days. The Jews hoped to hold out as long as possible. By April 22, fire was devouring several sections of the ghetto, forcing many Jews to leap from burning buildings. In the next few days, the Germans began capturing and killing more and more of the ghetto inhabitants some of whom reported that the resistance fighters in the bunkers had become "insane from the heat, the smoke, and the explosions." Some Jews tried to escape through the sewers. The Germans responded by blowing up the manholes and using poison gas. On May 8, Anielewicz was killed. By May 15th, the shooting had become so intermittent that it was clear the ghetto fighters had been defeated. As a sign of the German victory, the Nazi commander blew up the great Tlomacki Synagogue. All in all, several thousand Jews had been buried in the debris, and more than 56,000 had been captured. About 30,000 of them were either immediately shot or transported to death camps. The remainder were sent to labor camps. Though the Nazis did raze the ghetto as Himmler had ordered, the resistance fighters had achieved at least one of their goals. Their commander Anielewicz articulated what this was in a letter to a friend shortly before his death. "My life 's dream has been realized," he said. "I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory." By the end of the year, with very little left of Jewish life in Poland, the task for the Jewish resistance had become, in the words of one member of the underground, to "keep alive the remnants who have survived...so there will be some reserve for the future and witnesses to this crime."
The beginning- 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany. A Chancellor is a leader or head official of a country
1933: Nazis open Dachau concentration camp near the city of Munich.
1934: German President Von Hindenburg dies. Hitler becomes Fuhrer (leader). As he was next in line…
1935: Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews decreed (went into effect) German Jews deprived of citizenship. Jews were not allowed to marry Aryan Germans.
1936: Olympic Games begin in Berlin. Jesse Owens won; Hitler wouldn’t even shake his hand because he was black!
1937: Hitler declares an end to the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty said they would not arm the military after WW1 Germany Re-arms its military and disregards what …show more content…
the treaty says
1938: At Evian, France, the U.S. convenes a League of Nations conference with delegates from 32 countries to consider helping the Jews fleeing Hitler, but nothing is done as no country will accept them. http://worldatwar.net/timeline/other/league18-46.html
Nazis arrest 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality living in Germany, then expel them back to Poland which refuses them entry, leaving them in “no-man’s land” near the Polish border for several months.
Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass
Nazis fine Jews one billion marks for damages related to Kristallnacht.
Jewish students are expelled from non-Jewish German schools http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/NR1938.htm 1939: Nazis invade Poland (Jewish population in Poland 3.35 million, largest in Europe)
England and France declare war on Germany.
Heydrich issues instructions to SS (special action squads) in Poland regarding treatment of Jews, stating they are to be gathered in ghettos near railroads for the future “final solution.”
Nazis begin euthanasia on sick and disabled in Germany. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=10005070&MediaId=1231 http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/heydrich-biography.htm http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/disabled.html 1940: Nazis choose the town of Auschwitz in Poland as the site of a new concentration camp.
First deportation of German Jews into occupied Poland.
Nazis invade Denmark and Norway.
Nazis invade France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Romania.
The Warsaw Ghetto, containing over 400,000 Jews is sealed off.
1941: Nazis invade Yugoslavia
Nazis invade Soviet Union (Jewish population 3 million)
First test use of Zyklon-B gas at Auschwitz
German Jews ordered to wear yellow stars
SS murder 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev (Soviet Union)
35,000 Jews from Odessa shot
In occupied Poland, Chelmno extermination camp becomes operational. Jews taken there are placed in mobile gas vans and driven to a burial place while carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust is fed into the sealed rear compartment, killing them. The first victims include 5,000 Gypsies deported from Germany.
1942: Wannsee Conference to coordinate the “Final Solution” Jews transported from all over Europe to death camps. Open pit burning of bodies begins at Auschwitz in place of burial. Decision is made to dig up and burn 107,000 corpses to prevent contamination of ground water. “The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder.” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005477
1943: Warsaw Ghetto uprising http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX103.html 1944: D-Day landing in Normandy
May 8, 1945: V-Day-the war is over the Nazis had been defeated
Nov. 20, 1945: Opening of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal
Links-Notes
1938:
January 21
Statement by the Swiss Federal Council concerning the neutrality of the Swiss Confederation.
January 28
The Council decides in favour of the League 's participation in the 1939 New York World 's Fair.
January 29
Adoption of a new Statute for the Communications and Transit Organization.
February 7-10
Conclusion by Diplomatic Conference (President: Mr. Loudon, The Netherlands) of a Convention concerning the Status of Refugees coming from Germany. Convention is signed by the representatives of seven States.
March 18
The German Government communicates to the Secretary-General the text of a Law, dated 13 March, providing for the inclusion of Austria in Germany.
March 19
Departure of a mission of the League of Nations Secretariat for Latin America.
March 21
Declaration by the Federal Council concerning the neutrality and independence of Switzerland.
April 9
The United Kingdom Government requests that the question of the consequesnces arising from the existing situation in Ethiopia be placed on the agenda of the next meeting of the Council.
April 29
Memorandum by the Federal Council on Swiss neutrality.
May …show more content…
14
The Council takes note of the intention of the Swiss Government not to take part in the application of sanctions in future, and declares that Switzerland will not be invited to do so.
The Council refers to the Assembly a request by the Chilean Government that the reform of the Covenant should be treated as urgent.
May 25
The withdrawal of Guatemala takes effect.
June 2
Chile gives notice of withdrawal from the League.
June 4
Mr. J. G. Winant (United States of America) is appointed Director of the International Labour Office.
June 29
The Electoral Commission, having stopped the registration of electors, leaves the Sanjak of Alexandretta and informs the Council that circumstances have prevented it from performing its work.
July 10
The withdrawal of Honduras takes effect.
July 12
Venezuela gives notice of withdrawal from the League.
September 21
The Dominican Republic, Greece and Yugoslavia are elected non-permanent Members of the Council.
September 22
The Assembly expresses its appreciation of the action of the mediating States in the restoration of peace in the Chaco and of the part played by Mr. Saavadra Lamas and Mr. Cantilo.
September 30
The Council postpones the meeting of the Bureaux of the Disarmament Conference.
October 14
Meeting at Perpignan of the Commission instructed to verify "on the spot" the measures taken by the Spanish Government for the withdrawal of non-Spanish combatants.
October 27-29
Meeting of the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters (Chairman: Mr. Paul Valery, France), Nice.
November 2
Japan discontinues her cooperation with the technical organs of the League.
November 17
Award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Nansen International Office for Refugees.
December 3
Signature of an International Act giving to the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation the character of an organization founded on collective agreements, Paris.
December 9-12
The Budgetary Economics Committee decides that the League budget for 1920 must be 20 per cent less than that for 1939, Brussels.
Kristallnacht-
On the night of November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans ' anger over the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager. In fact, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis carefully organized the pogroms. In two days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by. The pogroms became known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," for the shattered glass from the store windows that littered the streets.
The morning after the pogroms 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the "crime" of being Jewish and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them perished. Some Jewish women were also arrested and sent to local jails. Businesses owned by Jews were not allowed to reopen unless they were managed by non-Jews. Curfews were placed on Jews, limiting the hours of the day they could leave their homes.
After the "Night of Broken Glass,"life was even more difficult for German and Austrian Jewish children and teenagers.
Already barred from entering museums, public playgrounds, and swimming pools, now they were expelled from the public schools. Jewish youngsters, like their parents, were totally segregated in Germany. In despair, many Jewish adults committed suicide. Most families tried desperately to leave.
A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
A synagogue burns in Siegen, Germany, during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
German children watch as a synagogue in Kuppenheim, Baden Germany, burns during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. November 10, 1938.
Germans pass by the broken shop window of a Jewish-owned business that was destroyed during Kristallnacht in Berlin, Germany. The "night of broken glass" was a planned series of acts of violence against Jews throughout Germany. November 10, 1938. On June 27, 1941, the Nazis burned alive about 1,000 Jews in this temple.
The temple was blown up by the SS and Police General, Jürgen Stroop, on April 16, 1943, as a sign of the completion of the "Great Operation" against the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
1939:
1) Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, William 's family was ordered into a ghetto and his brother went to a work camp. William bribed officials to discharge his brother from a hospital destined for evacuation to Auschwitz. Later, after escaping from a prison camp to tend to his brother, William was jailed. He was sent to Blechhammer, Gleiwitz (where he met his future wife), and other camps. William collapsed during a death march near the Austrian border, but was then liberated. His parents and brother perished.
2) Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) was second in importance to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization. Nicknamed "The Blond Beast" by the Nazis, and "Hangman Heydrich" by others, Heydrich had insatiable greed for power and was a cold, calculating manipulator without human compassion who was the leading planner of Hitler 's Final Solution in which the Nazis attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.
3) FORCED STERILIZATIONS
The "sterilization Law" explained the importance of weeding out so-called genetic defects from the total German gene pool: Since the National Revolution public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birthrate. However, it is not only the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people. Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community. Some scientists and physicians opposed the involuntary aspect of the law while others pointed to possible flaws. But the designation of specific conditions as inherited, and the desire to eliminate such illnesses or handicaps from the population, generally reflected the scientific and medical thinking of the day in Germany and elsewhere. Nazi Germany was not the first or only country to sterilize people considered "abnormal." Before Hitler, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations. Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill. Nearly half the operations were carried out in California. Advocates of sterilization policies in both Germany and the United States were influenced by eugenics. This sociobiological theory took Charles Darwin 's principle of natural selection and applied it to society. Eugenicists believed the human race could be improved by controlled breeding. Still, no nation carried sterilization as far as Hitler 's Germany. The forced sterilizations began in January 1934, and altogether an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people were sterilized under the law. A diagnosis of "feeblemindedness" provided the grounds in the majority of cases, followed by schizophrenia and epilepsy. The usual method of sterilization was vasectomy and ligation of ovarian tubes of women. Irradiation (x-rays or radium) was used in a small number of cases. Several thousand people died as a result of the operations, women disproportionately because of the greater risks of tubal ligation. Most of the persons targeted by the law were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. The majority of those sterilized were between the ages of twenty and forty, about equally divided between men and women. Most were "Aryan" Germans. The "Sterilization Law" did not target socalled racial groups, such as Jews and Gypsies, although Gypsies were sterilized as deviant "asocials," as were some homosexuals. Also, about 500 teenagers of mixed African and German parentage (the offspring of French colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland in the early 1920s) were sterilized because of their race, by secret order, outside the provisions of the law. Although the "Sterilization Law" sometimes functioned arbitrarily, the semblance of legality underpinning it was important to the Nazi regime. More than 200 Hereditary Health Courts were set up across Germany and later, annexed territories. Each was made up of two physicians and one district judge. Doctors were required to register with these courts every known case of hereditary illness. Appeals courts were also established, but few decisions were ever reversed. Exemptions were sometimes given artists or other talented persons afflicted with mental illnesses. The "Sterilization Law" was followed by the Marriage Law of 1935, which required for all marriages proof that any offspring from the union would not be afflicted with a disabling hereditary disease. Only the Roman Catholic Church, for doctrinal reasons, opposed the sterilization program consistently; most German Protestant churches accepted and often cooperated with the policy. Popular films such as Das Erbe ("Inheritance") helped build public support for government policies by stigmatizing the mentally ill and the handicapped and highlighting the costs of care. School mathematics books posed such questions as: "The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?"
"EUTHANASIA" KILLINGS
Forced sterilization in Germany was the forerunner of the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler himself initiated a decree which empowered physicians to grant a "mercy death" to "patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health." The intent of the socalled "euthanasia" program, however, was not to relieve the suffering of the chronically ill. The Nazi regime used the term as a euphemism: its aim was to exterminate the mentally ill and the handicapped, thus "cleansing" the "Aryan" race of persons considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society. The idea of killing the incurably ill was posed well before 1939. In the 1920s, debate on this issue centered on a book coauthored by Alfred Hoche, a noted psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a prominent scholar of criminal law. They argued that economic savings justified the killing of "useless lives" ("idiots" and "congenitally crippled"). Economic deprivation during World War I provided the context for this idea. During the war, patients in asylums had ranked low on the list for rationing of food and medical supplies, and as a result, many died from starvation or disease. More generally, the war undermined the value attached to individual life and, combined with Germany 's humiliating defeat, led many nationalists to consider ways to regenerate the nation as a whole at the expense of individual rights. In 1935 Hitler stated privately that "in the event of war, [he] would take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it" because "such a problem would be more easily solved" during wartime. War would provide both a cover for killing and a pretext--hospital beds and medical personnel would be freed up for the war effort. The upheaval of war and the diminished value of human life during wartime would also, Hitler believed, mute expected opposition. To make the connection to the war explicit, Hitler 's decree was backdated to September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. Fearful of public reaction, the Nazi regime never proposed a formal "euthanasia" law. Unlike the forced sterilizations, the killing of patients in mental asylums and other institutions was carried out in secrecy. The code name was "Operation T4," a reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Berlin Chancellery offices where the program was headquartered. Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation. One of Hitler 's personal physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, headed the program, along with Hitler 's Chancellery chief, Philip Bouhler. T-4 targeted adult patients in all government or church-run sanatoria and nursing homes. These institutions were instructed by the Interior Ministry to collect questionnaires about the state of health and capacity for work of all their patients, ostensibly as part of a statistical survey. The completed forms were, in turn, sent to expert assessors physicians, usually psychiatrists, who made up "review commissions." They marked each name with a "+," in red pencil, meaning death, or a "" in blue pencil, meaning life, or "?" for cases needing additional assessment. These medical experts rarely examined any of the patients and made their decisions from the questionnaires alone. At every step, the medical authorities involved were usually expected to quickly process large numbers of forms. The doomed were bused to killing centers in Germany and Austria walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection. But by 1940, Hitler, on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested that carbon monoxide gas be used as the preferred method of killing. Experimental gassings had first been carried out at Brandenburg Prison in 1939. There, gas chambers were disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles in order to deceive victims — prototypes of the killing centers ' facilities built in occupied Poland later in the war. Again, following procedures that would later be instituted in the extermination camps, workers removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold teeth, then burned large numbers of bodies together in crematoria. Urns filled with ashes were prepared in the event the family of the deceased requested the remains. Physicians using fake names prepared death certificates falsifying the cause of death, and sent letters of condolences to relatives. Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941. (This total included up to 5,000 Jews; all Jewish mental patients were killed regardless of their ability to work or the seriousness of their illness.) A detailed report also recorded the estimated savings from the killing of institutionalized patients. The secrecy surrounding the T-4 program broke down quickly. Some staff members were indiscreet while drinking in local pubs after work. Despite precautions, errors were made: hairpins turned up in urns sent to relatives of male victims; the cause of death was listed as appendicitis when the patient had the appendix removed years before. The town of Hadamar school pupils called the gray transport buses "killing crates" and threatened each other with the taunt, "You 'll end up in the Hadamar ovens!" The thick smoke from the incinerator was said to be visible every day over Hadamar (where, in midsummer 1941, the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient with beer and wine served in the crematorium). A handful of church leaders, notably the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen, local judges, and parents of victims protested the killings. One judge, Lothar Kreyssig, instituted criminal proceedings against Bouhler for murder; Kreyssig was prematurely retired. A few physicians protested. Karl Bonhöffer, a leading psychiatrist, and his son Dietrich, a Protestant minister who actively opposed the regime, urged church groups to pressure church-run institutions not to release their patients to T-4 authorities. In response to such pressures, Hitler ordered a halt to Operation T-4 on August 24, 1941. Gas chambers from some of the "euthanasia" killing centers were dismantled and shipped to extermination camps in occupied Poland. In late 1941 and 1942, they were rebuilt and used for the "final solution to the Jewish question." Similarly redeployed from T-4 were future extermination camp commandants Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, Franz Reichleitner, the doctor Irmfried Eberl, as well as about 100 others - doctors, male nurses, and clerks, who applied their skills in Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. The "euthanasia" killings continued, however, under a different, decentralized form. Hitler 's regime continued to send to physicians and the general public the message that mental patients were "useless eaters" and life unworthy of life." In 1941, the film Ich klage an ("I accuse") in which a professor kills his incurably ill wife, was viewed by 18 million people. Doctors were encouraged to decide on their own who should live or die, Killing became part of hospital routine as infants, children, and adults were put to death by starvation, poisoning, and injections. Killings even continued in some of Germany 's mental asylums, such as Kaufbeuren, weeks after Allied troops had occupied surrounding areas. Between the middle of 1941 and the winter of 1944-45, in a program known under code "14f13," experienced psychiatrists from the T-4 operation were sent to concentration camps to weed out prisoners too ill to work. After superficial medical screenings, designated inmates Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Germans, and others were sent to those "euthanasia" centers where gas chambers still had not been dismantled, at Bernburg and Hartheim, where they were gassed. At least 20,000 people are believed to have died under the 14f13 program. Outside of Germany, thousands of mental patients in the occupied territories of Poland, Russia, and East Prussia were also killed by the Einsatzgruppen squads (SS and special police units) that followed in the wake of the invading German army. Between September 29 and November 1, 1939, these units shot about 3,700 mental patients in asylums in the region of Bromberg, Poland. In December 1939 and January 1940, SS units gassed 1,558 patients from Polish asylums in specially adapted gas vans, in order to make room for military and SS barracks. Although regular army units did not officially participate in such "cleansing" actions as general policy, some instances of their involvement have been documented. In all, between 200,000 and 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons were murdered from 1939 to 1945 under the T-4 and other "euthanasia" programs. The magnitude of these crimes and the extent to which they prefigured the "Final Solution" continue to be studied. Further, in an age of genetic engineering and renewed controversy over mercy killings of the incurably ill, ethical and moral issues of concern to physicians, scientists, and lay persons alike remain vital.
1942:
On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Representing the SS at the meeting were: SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) and one of Reichsführer-SS (SS chief) Heinrich Himmler 's top deputies; SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (Gestapo); SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs); SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland; SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941; and SS Major General Otto Hofmann, the chief of SS Race and Settlement Main Office. Representing the agencies of the State were: State Secretary Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); Ministerial Director Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet); State Secretary Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR); Ministerial Director Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Undersecretary of State Martin Luther (Foreign Office); State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); State Secretary Erich Naumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan); State Secretary Josef Bühler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland); and Ministerial Director Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery). The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference (1) to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the “Final Solution,” and (2) to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime. At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final Solution policy that Heydrich announced. Not present at the meeting were representatives of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and the Reich Railroads (Reichsbahn) in the German Ministry of Transportation. The SS and police had already negotiated agreements with the German Army High Command on the murder of civilians, including Soviet Jews, in the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them. Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew. Heydrich announced that “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.” The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany 's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.” Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.
1943:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19 - May 16, 1943)
Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the world in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto. The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In mid-November of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, "we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race." Jews weren 't allowed out. In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little information was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages. Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls. Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto, and the Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation. The Nazi occupation authorities had instructions to provide Jews with half the weekly maximum food allowance needed by a "population which does no work worth mentioning." Within months, the hunger, overcrowding, lack of medical supplies and fuel shortages had a devastating effect. In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto. Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street. By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population. In the spring of 1941, German industries set up workshops in the ghetto, which operated with the use of forced Jewish labor. For the most part, these small factory operations were created to support the German war effort. For that reason, Jews employed in them were saved from the first deportations to the death centers. The Nazis began transporting Jews in the summer of 1942. On July 20th, they issued an order for "non-productive" elements to prepare for a "resettlement" program that would begin two days later. The order provoked widespread panic throughout the ghetto. Jews who didn 't have work cards frantically tried to get them. Ordered to organize the deportations, the head of the Jewish council committed suicide. The very same day, a group of Jewish leaders met to discuss whether or not to resist the orders. The majority decided not to. It was thought the Germans would take no more than 60,000 people and it was agreed that resistance would simply hasten the end of the ghetto. Between that meeting and mid-September, the Nazis actually deported more than 300,000 Jews from the ghetto. Most of them were taken to the Treblinka death camp. In the fall of 1942, almost all the factions in the ghetto decided to resist future deportations. Each political group formed its own "battle group" which came under the central command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. The armed resistance prepared for the conflict by building bunkers and shelters. In January 1943 the Nazis surprised the Jewish fighters, by suddenly deporting 6500 Jews. A struggle ensued in which a German police officer was badly injured and the planned mass deportation came to a halt. Enraged by the incident, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the ghetto. The emptied district was then to be razed to the ground. At 3am on the morning of April 19, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto and the battle began. Between 2000 Germans armed with a tank, two armored cars, three light-anti-aircraft guns, one medium howitzer, heavy and light machine guns, flame throwers, rifles, pistols and grenades faced off against 700-750 Jewish resistance fighters. The Jews had managed to stockpile a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols. But they possessed only two or three light machine guns. The Germans planned to clear the ghetto of 60,000 Jews in three days. The Jews hoped to hold out as long as possible. By April 22, fire was devouring several sections of the ghetto, forcing many Jews to leap from burning buildings. In the next few days, the Germans began capturing and killing more and more of the ghetto inhabitants some of whom reported that the resistance fighters in the bunkers had become "insane from the heat, the smoke, and the explosions." Some Jews tried to escape through the sewers. The Germans responded by blowing up the manholes and using poison gas. On May 8, Anielewicz was killed. By May 15th, the shooting had become so intermittent that it was clear the ghetto fighters had been defeated. As a sign of the German victory, the Nazi commander blew up the great Tlomacki Synagogue. All in all, several thousand Jews had been buried in the debris, and more than 56,000 had been captured. About 30,000 of them were either immediately shot or transported to death camps. The remainder were sent to labor camps. Though the Nazis did raze the ghetto as Himmler had ordered, the resistance fighters had achieved at least one of their goals. Their commander Anielewicz articulated what this was in a letter to a friend shortly before his death. "My life 's dream has been realized," he said. "I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory." By the end of the year, with very little left of Jewish life in Poland, the task for the Jewish resistance had become, in the words of one member of the underground, to "keep alive the remnants who have survived...so there will be some reserve for the future and witnesses to this crime."