Persecutions and war crimes of Nazi Germany refers to the full range of war crimes, civil rights violations, and atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.
The concept of human rights did not truly exist and was not applied in any meaningful way or valid form in Nazi Germany; Nazi laws deemed some minorities to be inferior, and therefore devoid of any human rights; this was applied to numerous groups considered different from so-called "Aryan" identity, meaning the ethnic identity which the Nazis claimed as their own ethnic identity. These other groups could include groups both within Germany, as well as groups in other countries or occupied territories; including other ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, and multiple other groups deemed by Nazi ideology to "inferior," and therefore considered to be devoid of human rights.
Many of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany can be defined as war crimes, owing to the large role of World War II in the overall history of Nazi Germany. However, the atrocities by the Nazi regimes include numerous practices that occurred prior to the start of World War II, as part of the totalitarian policies enacted as government policy in NAzi Germany itself.
The Nazi ideology specifically decreed that Aryans were superior to other ethnic groups. The question of whether Nazi Germany was intrinsically the most abusive and egregious violator amongst all repressive regimes throughout history is subject to historical interpretation. During modern history, there have been occurrences of genocide against specific ethnic groups.
However, arguably no other nation in modern history has committed atrocities on the same scale as Nazi Germany, whether in terms of sheer number of individuals, groups, and nationalities affected, sheer breadth of geographic regions and nations affected, sheer scope and quantity of societal measures and repressive practices, and the vast scale of the industrial-scale operations of genocidal activities, exploitation of slave labor, mistreatment and persecution of numerous occupied nations and peoples, and numerous practices of exploitation, abuse and persecution, whether targeted at groups based on affiliation, religious and ethnic identity, or national identity.
Atrocities against groups
editAtrocities against groups of individuals
editAtrocities against groups encompasses types of persecutions of minorities and various types of individuals within Germany itself. and also in countries outside of Germany.
Jews
editThe Holocaust was a systematic campaign of persecution, deportation, and genocide of Jews and many other minorities and nationalities.
Atrocities against specific national populations
editAtrocities against specific national populations refers to atrocities that occurred in the context of occupation and exploitation of specific occupied countries under Nazi control.
Poland
editWar crimes in Poland by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland,[1] along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II,[2] consisted of the murder of millions of ethnic Poles and the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. The Germans justified these genocides on the basis of Nazi racial theory, which regarded Poles and other Slavic peoples as racially inferior Untermenschen and depicted Jews as a constant threat. By 1942, the Nazi Germans were implementing their plan to kill every Jew in German-occupied Europe, and had also developed plans to eliminate the Polish people through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and extermination through labor, and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed "racially valuable". During World War II, the Germans not only murdered millions of Poles (Jewish and otherwise), but ethnically cleansed millions more through forced deportation to make room for “racially superior” German settlers (see Generalplan Ost and Lebensraum). The genocides claimed the lives of 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and 1.8 to 2.77 million non-Jewish ethnic Poles, according to various sources such as Poland's Institute of National Remembrance [a][3][4]
These extremely large death tolls, and the absence of substantial non-Jewish civilian deaths in "racially superior" occupied European countries such as Denmark and France, attest to Germany's genocidal policies directed against the Poles.[5]
The genocidal policies of the German government's colonization plan, Generalplan Ost, were the blueprint for German war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Polish nation from 1939 to 1945.[6] The Nazi master plan entailed the expulsion and mass extermination of some 85 percent (over 20 million) of Poland's ethnically-Polish citizens, the remaining 15 percent to be turned into slave labor.[7] In 2000, by an act of the Polish Parliament, dissemination of knowledge on World War II Nazi German and Stalinist Soviet crimes in Poland was entrusted to the Institute of National Remembrance, which had been established in Warsaw in 1998.[8][9]
From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize Adolf Hitler's plan, set out in his book Mein Kampf, to acquire "living space" (Lebensraum) in the east for massive settlement of German colonists.[2][10] Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial ideology.[11] On 22 August 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language."[12][13]
Ethnic cleansing was to be conducted systematically against the Polish people. On 7 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be killed.[14] On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland's intelligentsia to the list. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: "All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task."[15] At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate "all leading elements in Poland".[14]
Russians and the Soviet Union
editPlanning for Operation Barbarossa began in June 1940. In December 1940 Hitler began sending out vague preliminary directives to senior generals on how the war was to be conducted, giving him the opportunity to gauge their reaction to such matters as collaboration with the SS in the "rendering harmless" of Bolsheviks. The Wehrmacht was already to some extent politicised, having participated in the extra-legal killings of Ernst Rohm and his associates in 1934, communists in the Sudetenland in 1938, and Czech and German political exiles in France in 1940.[16] On March 3, 1941 Hitler explained to his closest military advisers how the war of annihilation was to be waged. On that same day, instructions incorporating Hitler's demands went to Section L of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) (under Deputy Chief Walter Warlimont); these provided the basis for the "Guidelines in Special Areas to Instructions No. 21 (Case Barbarossa)" discussing, among other matters, the interaction of the army and SS in the theatre of operations, deriving from the 'need to neutralise at once leading bolsheviks and commissars.'[17]
Discussions proceeded on March 17 during a situation conference, where Chief of the OKH General Staff Franz Halder, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner and Chief of Operational Department of the OKH Adolf Heusinger were present. Hitler declared: "The intelligentsia established by Stalin must be exterminated. The most brutal violence is to be used in the Great Russian Empire" (quoted from Halder's War Diary entry of March 17).[18]
On March 30, Hitler addressed over 200 senior officers in the Reich Chancellery. Among those present was Halder, who recorded the key points of the speech. He argued that the war against the Soviet Union "cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion" because it was a war of "ideologies and racial differences." He further declared that the commissars had to be "liquidated" without mercy because they were the "bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism."[19] Hitler stipulated the "annihilation of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia" (thus laying the foundation for the Commissar Order), dismissed the idea of courts martial for felonies committed by the German troops, and emphasised the different nature of the war in the East with the war in the West.[20]
Hitler was well aware that this order was illegal, but personally absolved in advance any soldiers who violated international law in enforcing this order. He claimed that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 did not apply since the Soviets had not signed them.[19] The Soviet Union, as a distinct entity from the Russian Empire, did not, in fact, sign the Geneva Convention of 1929. However, Germany did, and was bound by article 82, stating "In case, in time of war, one of the belligerents is not a party to the Convention, its provisions shall nevertheless remain in force as between the belligerents who are parties thereto."
Abuses against individuals
editAbuses within German society
editAbuses and economic exploitation
editThe Nazi regime committed numerous civil rights violations which were based on economic exploitation of slave labor, as well as other abusive economic practices.
Extermination through labour (or "extermination through work", German: Vernichtung durch Arbeit) was the practice in concentration camps in Nazi Germany of killing prisoners by means of forced labour.[21]
Official programs
editOrganisation Todt (OT) was a civil and military engineering organisation in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during World War II. It became notorious for using forced labour. From 1943 until 1945 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labor to industry.
Slave labor
editPoland
editThe SS Ostindustrie GmbH ("East Industry", abbreviated as Osti) was one of many industrial projects set up by the Nazi German Schutzstaffel (SS) using Jewish and Polish forced labor during World War II. Founded in March 1943 in German-occupied Poland, Osti operated confiscated Jewish and Polish prewar industrial enterprises, including foundries, textile plants, quarries and glassworks. Osti was headed by SS-Obersturmführer Max Horn, who was subordinated directly to Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA), the SS economic administration department.[22] At its height, some 16,000 Jews and 1,000 Poles worked for the company, interned in a network of labor and concentration camps in the Lublin District of the semi-colonial General Government territory.[23][22]
SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik hoped to make Ostindustrie into an armaments company, but gave up the idea to pursue Operation Reinhard instead.[24] The company was dissolved ahead of the Soviet counter-offensive of 1944.[23][22][24] The entire slave-labor workforce of Osti was exterminated in the process of the company's dissolution, during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in Poland.[25]
Types of atrocities
editTypes of atrocities refers to specific types of persecutions, abuses, and atrocities which were significant in their own right as societal practices which violated standard norms of human rights.
Human experimentation
editNazis performed various experiments on human subjects which resulted in major physical abuse of the subjects, up to and often including death.
Rape
editNazi occupation forces frequently committed state-sanctioned rape on a wide scale.
Civil rights violations
editCivil rights violations refers to the dissolution of civil rights by the Nazi state, firstly in Germany during it s accession to power, and then throughout the countries occupied by Nazi forces.
Deportation of intellectuals and dissidents
editIntellectuals and political opponents of the Nazi Party were deported to the first concentration camps set up by the Nazis, within the first twelve months after the accession of the Nazis to power as the ruling regime of Germany in 1932.
Military and governmental processes and units
editAs part of the Nazi onslaught on military invasion and occupation, numerous practices and official units were established which were war crimes on a massive scale.
Participation in wider persecutions
editDuring World War II the government of Nazi Germany, the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) and the Army High Command (OKH) jointly laid the foundations for genocide in the Soviet Union.[26] From the outset, the war against the Soviet Union was designed as a war of annihilation.[27] The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as populated by non-Aryan "sub-humans", ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators.[28] It was stated Nazi policy to murder, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations according to the Master Plan for the East.[28]
Before and during Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops were indoctrinated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic propaganda.[29] Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "Red beast".[30] Many German troops viewed the war in Nazi racialist terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human.[31] In a speech to 4th Panzer Group, General Erich Hoepner echoed the Nazi racial plans by claiming the war against the Soviet Union was "an essential part of the German people's struggle for existence", and that "the struggle must aim at the annihilation of today's Russia and must therefore be waged with unparalleled harshness."[32]
The murder of Jews was common knowledge in the Wehrmacht. During the retreat from the Soviet Union, German officers destroyed incriminating documents.[33] Wehrmacht soldiers actively worked together with the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, the Einsatzgruppen, and participated in the mass killings with them such as at Babi Yar.[34] Wehrmacht officers considered the relationship with the Einsatzgruppen to be very close and almost cordial.[35]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ Kulesza 2004, PDF, p. 29.
- ^ a b Gushee 2012, pp. 313–314.
- ^ "Poland | www.yadvashem.org". poland-historical-background.html. Retrieved 2019-05-25.
- ^ "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties". www.projectinposterum.org. Retrieved 2019-05-25.
- ^ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010, pp. 411–12.
- ^ Kulesza 2004.
- ^ Various authors (2003). "Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). The Nazi evolution in German foreign policy. Documentary sources". Versions of the GPO. Alexandria, VA: World Future Fund. Resources: Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe. Ibid.
- ^ IPN 2013, pp. 5, 21, Guide.
- ^ Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Iacob, Bogdan (2015). Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies. Central European University Press. p. 243. ISBN 9789633860922.
In April 1991, the Polish Parliament changed a statute in force since 1945 about the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland.
– "More important than the change of the name was that the activity of the [earlier] commission was... totally controlled by the communists." Jerzy Halbersztadt (31 December 1995). "Main Crimes Commission in Poland". H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online. Archived from the original on 2 May 2019. Retrieved 5 October 2013.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Janusz Gumkowski and Kazimierz Leszczynski, "Hitler's War; Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe", 1961, in Poland under Nazi Occupation, Polonia Publishing House, Warsaw, pp. 7–33, 164–78.
- ^ Gordon 1984, p. 100.
- ^ Lukas, Richard C. (2013). Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. University Press of Kentucky. p. 2. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Moor-Jankowskiwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b Piotrowski 2007, p. 23.
- ^ Piotrowski 2007, p. 23. See also: Europa für Bürger original in the German language — 15. März (1940): Himmler spricht in Poznan vor den versammelten Kommandanten der Konzentrationslager. Eine seiner Aussagen: "Alle polnischen Facharbeiter werden in unserer Rüstungsindustrie eingesetzt. Später werden alle Polen aus dieser Welt verschwinden. Es ist erforderlich, dass das großdeutsche Volk die Vernichtung sämtlicher Polen als seine Hauptaufgabe versteht.".
- ^ Burleigh 1997, p. 65
- ^ Manfred Messerschmidt, Forward Defence (as included in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1945, edited by Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (2000); page 388
- ^ Messerschmidt; page 389
- ^ a b Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Touchstone Edition) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990)
- ^ Kay 2011, p. 72.
- ^ European History Quarterly, 2009, Vol. 39(4), 606–632. doi: 10.1177/0265691409342658.
- ^ a b c Dobroszycki, Lucjan (1984). "Introduction (Ostindustrie)". The chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto: 1941-1944. Yale University Press. p. lxi. ISBN 0300039247. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
- ^ a b Yad Vashem (2013). "Ostindustrie GMBH" (PDF file, direct download 19.6 KB). Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
- ^ a b Longerich, Peter (15 April 2010). "Murders and Deportations 1942–3". Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press. p. 377. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
- ^ Stone, Dan (1 September 2010). Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0191614203. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
- ^ Wette 2007, p. 25.
- ^ Förster 1988, p. 21.
- ^ a b Stahel 2009, pp. 96–99.
- ^ Evans 1989, p. 59.
- ^ Evans 1989, pp. 59–60.
- ^ Förster 2005, p. 127.
- ^ Ingrao 2013, p. 140.
- ^ Wette 2007, pp. 199–201.
- ^ Heer et al. 2008, p. 38.
- ^ Hilberg 1985, p. 301.
Category:Nazi war crimes
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