Kaima,
You are correct that the „
Endlösung“ did not stood for mass execution of jews in Europe, but
a plan for mass murder of
Jews in German and Austrian
Nazi concentrationcamps in various countries in Europe. In staid of executions which mostly took place before
the Wannsee Conference (German:
Wannseekonferenz) on
20 January 1942. Ofcourse you had concentrationcamps and Nazi terror and opression since the near beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933.
Concentration camps before the Wanssee Conference
Prisoners of Dachau concentrationcamp during forced labour, May 24 1933Dachau concentration camp (German:
Konzentrationslager (KZ)
Dachau) was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany, intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (9.9 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. Opened in
1933 by
Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, and eventually foreign nationals from countries which Germany occupied or invaded. It was finally liberated in 1945.
Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, floggings, the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented.
After the takeover of
Bavaria on
9 March 1933,
Heinrich Himmler, then
Chief of Police in
Munich, began to speak with the administration of an unused gunpowder and munitions factory. He toured the site to see if it could be used for quartering protective-custody prisoners. The Concentration Camp at Dachau was opened
22 March 1933, with the arrival of about 200 prisoners from Stadelheim Prison in Munich and the Landsberg fortress (where Hitler had written Mein Kampf during his imprisonment).
Himmler announced in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten newspaper that the camp could hold up to 5,000 people, and described it as "
the first concentration camp for political prisoners" to be used to restore calm to Germany. It became the first regular concentration camp established by the coalition government of the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) and the German Nationalist People's Party (dissolved on 6 July 1933).
Jehovah’s Witnesses,
homosexuals, and
emigrants were sent to
KZ Dachau after the
1935 passage of
the Nuremberg Laws which institutionalized racial discrimination. In
early 1937, the
SS, using prisoner labor, initiated construction of a large complex capable of holding 6,000 prisoners. The construction was officially completed in
mid-August 1938. More
political opponents (Communists and Social-democrats), and over
11,000 German and
Austrian Jews were sent to the camp after
the annexation of Austria and the
Sudetenland in
1938.
Sinti and
Roma in the hundreds are sent to the camp in
1939, and over
13,000 prisoners were sent to the camp from Poland in 1940.
Inspection by the Nazi party and Himmler at Dachau on 8 May 1936.
The gate at the Jourhaus building through which the prisoner's camp was entered contains the slogan, Arbeit macht frei, or 'Work will make you free.'
The prisoners of
Dachau concentration camp originally were to serve as forced labor for a munition factory, and to expand the camp. It was used as a training center for
SS guards and was a model for other concentration camps. The camp was about 990 feet wide and 1,980 feet long (300 × 600 m) in rectangular shape. The prisoner's entrance was secured by an iron gate with the motto “
Arbeit macht frei” (“
Work will make you free”). This reflected Nazi propaganda which trivialized concentration camps as labor and re-education camps, when in fact forced labor was used as a method of torture.
As of 1938, the procedure for new arrivals occurred at the Schubraum, where prisoners were to hand over their clothing and possessions "
There we were stripped of all our clothes. Everything had to be handed over: money, rings, watches. One was now stark naked."
In
1937, the Nazis constructed
Buchenwald concentration camp, near
Weimar,
Germany. Embedded in the camp's main entrance gate is the slogan
Jedem das Seine (literally "
to each his own", but figuratively "
everyone gets what he deserves”). The camp was operational until its liberation in
1945.
Polish prisoners from Buchenwald awaiting execution in the forest near the camp, April 26, 1942Buchenwald’s second commandant was
Karl Otto Koch, who ran the camp from
1937 to
1941. His second wife,
Ilse Koch, became notorious as
Die Hexe von Buchenwald ("
the witch of Buchenwald") for her
cruelty and
brutality.
Koch had a zoo built by the prisoners in the camp, with a bear pit (
Bärenzwinger) facing the
Appellplatz, the assembly square where prisoner "
roll-calls" were conducted.
Ilse Koch, dancing with her husband Karl-Otto Koch, hanged herself aged 60EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen (German for "
task forces", "
deployment groups"; singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name
Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were
Schutzstaffel (
SS)
paramilitary death squads of
Nazi Germany that were responsible for
mass killings, primarily by
shooting, during
World War II. The
Einsatzgruppen had a leading role in the implementation of
the Final Solution of the Jewish question (
Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories conquered by
Nazi Germany. Almost all of the people they killed were civilians, beginning with
the Polish intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to
Soviet political commissars,
Jews, and
Gypsies throughout
central- and Eastern Europe.
Under the direction of
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and the supervision of
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the
Einsatzgruppen operated in territories occupied by the German armed forces following
the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and
Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union) in June 1941. The Einsatzgruppen carried out operations ranging from the murder of a few people to operations which lasted over two or more days, such as the massacre at
Babi Yar (33,771 killed in two days) and
the Rumbula massacre (25,000 killed in two days). As ordered by Nazi leader
Adolf Hitler,
the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen and provided logistical support for their operations. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945
the Einsatzgruppen and related
auxiliary troops killed more than two million people, including
1.3 million Jews. The total number of Jews murdered during
the Holocaust is estimated at 5.5 to six million people.
Babi Yar, 29 september 1941Numbering some
2,700 men at this point,
the Einsatzgruppen's mission was the forceful
de-politicisation of the Polish people and
the elimination of groups most clearly identified with Polish national identity:
the intelligentsia , members of
the clergy 9Polish Roman-catholic priests),
teachers (Pieters Polish grandfather; who was on the run for
the Gestapo during the war - 1939-1945 -), and members of
the nobility. As stated by
Hitler: "
... there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds".[12] The Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen—lists of people to be killed—had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939.
The Einsatzgruppen performed these murders with the support of
the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a paramilitary group consisting of
ethnic Germans living in Poland. Members of
the SS, the
Wehrmacht, and the
Ordnungspolizei (
Order Police;
Orpo) also
shot civilians during the Polish campaign. Approximately
65,000 civilians were killed by
the end of 1939. In addition to
leaders of Polish society, they killed
Jews,
prostitutes,
Romani people, and
the mentally ill.
Psychiatric patients in Poland were initially killed by shooting, but by spring 1941 gas vans were widely used.
Mayor of Bydgoszcz - Werner Kampe, Josef Meier and Ludolf von Alvensleben - leader of Selbstschutz in Pomerania durning inspection of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz in 1939.Systematic murder of Jews and other undesirables after 1942Since
1942 most murders of jews and other undesirables took place by methods of
starvation in the camps,
gas chambers and
brutal treatment (beatings and torture by
*Kapo's). The purpose of the
the Wannsee Conference was an
Industrial and
systematic organised killing of the jews, and the administrative organisation of that plan. About
4.7 million jews were killed in the Nazi concentrationcamps and Ghetto's in gas chambers, by maltreatment and starvation and forced labour without proper food and water. Close to 1.3 million Jews were killed outside the concentrationcamps in the villages, towns where they were caught and in the woods were they were transported or driven too and executed next to mass graves.
* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo_(concentration_camp) Director of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (
Reich Main Security Office;
RSHA [
das Reichssicherheitshauptamt])
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, wanted to ensure
the cooperation of administrative leaders of various
government departments in
the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be
deported to Poland and exterminated. Conference attendees included
representatives from several government ministries, including
state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the
justice,
interior, and
state ministries, and
representatives from the Schutzstaffel (
SS). In the course of the meeting,
Heydrich outlined how
European Jews would be
rounded up from west to east and
sent to extermination camps in
the General Government (the
occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.
The ideology of
Nazism brought together elements of
antisemitism,
racial hygiene, and
eugenics, and combined them with
pan-Germanism and
territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining
more Lebensraum (
living space) for
the Germanic people. Nazi Germany attempted to obtain this new territory by attacking Poland and the Soviet Union, intending to deport or kill the Jews and Slavs living there, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race.
On
31 July 1941 Hermann Göring gave written authorization to SS-Obergruppenführer (Senior Group Leader)
Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for a "
total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. The resulting
Generalplan Ost (
General Plan for the East) called for
deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to
Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered. The minutes of
the Wannsee Conference estimated
the Jewish population of
the Soviet Union to be
five million, with another
three million in Ukraine.
Heydrich invited representatives from several
government ministries, including
state secretaries from
the Foreign Office,
the justice,
interior, and
state ministries, and
representatives from the SS. The process of disseminating information about the fate of the Jews was already well underway by the time the meeting was held.
In preparation for the conference,
Eichmann drafted a list of the numbers of
Jews in
the various European countries. Countries were listed in two groups, "
A" and "
B". "
A" countries were those
under direct Reich control or
occupation (or partially occupied and quiescent, in the case of
Vichy France); "
B" countries were allied or client states, neutral, or at war with Germany. The numbers reflect
actions already
completed by Nazi forces; for example,
Estonia is listed as Judenfrei (
free of Jews), since the
4,500 Jews who remained in
Estonia after
the German occupation had been exterminated by the end of
1941.
Heydrich opened the conference with
an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in
Germany since
the Nazi seizure of power in
1933. He said that
between 1933 and October 1941,
537,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had emigrated. This information was taken from a briefing paper prepared for him the previous week by
Eichmann.
Heydrich reported that there were approximately
eleven million Jews in
the whole of Europe, of whom
half were in countries not under German control. He explained that since further
Jewish emigration had been prohibited by
Himmler, a new solution would take its place: "
evacuating"
Jews to the east. This would be a temporary solution, a step towards
the final solution of the Jewish question ("
die Endlösung der Judenfrage").
Under proper guidance, in the course of "die Endlösung der Judenfrage" are to be allocated for appropriate labor in
the East.
Able-bodied Jews, separated according to
sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless
a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.
Ofcourse the disguised language, the civil servant, bureaucratic terms, were a cover op of murderous plans of systematic mass murder en thus genocide. The Nazi's were very disciplined, organised, pragmatic and unfortunately realistic in their mass murder plans. It was an organised state murder, due to the fact that the German authorities and political organs of the Nazi part movement and military organisations (The SS) took part in it. Indeed the systematic mass murder, which killed most jews, the mass murder by gass chambers in various concentration camps started after the Wannsee Conference. Before the Wannsee Conference Conference people had been killed by the gas of truck engines. But that were murder experiments and researches of the Nazi's.
Cheers,
Pieter
