Holocaust victims

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the

According to the United 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]

Scope of usage

While the term Holocaust generally refers to the systematic mass-murder of the Jewish people in German-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. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as a Jehovah's Witness.

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the 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 in

Jews

The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from

• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Belzec
• Chelmno
• Majdanek
• Maly Trostenets
• Sobibór
• Treblinka

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 3.3 million Jews, or 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 in The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.^[31]

The Yad 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]

Slavs

The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis. According to British historian

The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans ... 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]

Poles

The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 million

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine.^[38][39] More Ukrainians were killed fighting the Wehrmacht in the Red 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 or enslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.

Soviet Slavs and POWs

During

The Nazi genocide of the Romani 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). Despite discriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany's Sinti and Lalleri) 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 SS Einsatzgruppen 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 by West Germany in 1982 and by Poland in 2011.^[50]

Spanish Republicans

Thousands of Spanish Republican refugees were living in France at the time of its occupation by

The Nazis promoted

Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. No Japanese 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?]}

People with disabilities

According to their eugenics 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 were sterilized 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, the

Homosexual men were also targets of the Holocaust, since male

Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution under Paragraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This contrasted with the treatment of other Holocaust victims, who were compensated for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.^[66]

Political victims

Political prisoners

Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilian

German

The Nazis also targeted religious groups for political and ideological reasons.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Historian Detlef Garbe, director of the Neuengamme Memorial in Hamburg, wrote about Jehovah'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]

Roman Catholics

The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church,

In 1940, the Priest 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 the Holy See concluded a 1933 concordat with Germany to protect Catholicism during Nazi rule, the Nazis frequently violated the pact in their Kirchenkampf ("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 his Mit 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. Viennese Gauleiter Odilo Globocnik confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations and sent many priests to Dachau. In the Czech lands, religious orders were suppressed, schools closed, religious instruction forbidden and priests sent to concentration camps.^[91] Catholic bishops, clergy, nuns and laypeople protested and attacked Nazi policies in occupied territories; in 1942, the Dutch bishops protested the mistreatment of Jews.^[92] When Archbishop Johannes 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 nun Edith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz along with Poland's Maximilian Kolbe. Other Catholic victims of the Holocaust have been beatified, including Poland's 108 Martyrs of World War II, the Martyrs of Nowogródek, Dutch theologian Titus Brandsma and Germany's Lübeck martyrs and Bernhard Lichtenberg.

Poland

In Polish 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 to Richard J. Evans, in the Reichsgau 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."

The Nazis claimed that high-degree Masons were willing members of "the Jewish conspiracy" and Freemasonry was a cause of Germany's defeat in World War I. Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) records indicate the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust.^[105] RSHA Amt VII (written records), overseen by Franz 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 1941 Nacht und Nebel directive.^[11] Masonic concentration camp inmates, considered political prisoners, wore an inverted red triangle.^[106]

Small blue

After the war, the forget-me-not was again used as a Masonic emblem at the first annual United Grand Lodges of Germany convention in 1948.^[110] The badge is worn on the lapels of Masons worldwide in remembrance of those who have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, particularly during the Nazi era.^[110]

Others

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 in

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.

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 the

See also

• List of genocides
• List of victims of Nazism

Notes