26: A Policy of Oppression

The Jews were not the only victims of Hitler's New Order. Millions of others, particularly in occupied Russia, had been shot, gassed and beaten to death. To those who opposed this policy, arguing that liberated Russians should be treated as potential allies against the Soviet regime -- and even allowed the right of self-determination -- Hitler said:

"It's only an illusion. You have a right to think only of the moment and of the situation weighing upon us at the present time, but that is also where you fall short. I have a duty of think of tomorrow. I cannot forget the future for the sake of a few momentary successes."

In a hundred years, Hitler argued, Germany would be a nation of 120 million people. "For that population I need empty space. I cannot grant the Eastern peoples any sovereign rights of independence and replace Soviet Russia with a new national Russia which is, for that very reason, much more firmly knit together. Policy is made not with illusions but with facts. Space is the deciding question for me in the East!"

And so his policy of oppression continued, accompanied by the ruthless starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. Alfred Rosenberg bore witness to this inhumanity in a scorching letter to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. It charged that of the 3,600,000 Soviet prisoners of war, only a few hundred thousand were in good health. The great majority had been starved or shot out of hand in a series of atrocities. Countless other Soviet prisoners, along with Jewish inmates of concentration camps, were dying in medical experiments as previously discussed.

The administration of occupied territories throughout Europe had also resulted in manifold executions as reprisals for acts of sabotage and rebellion. These were legalized by an order issued by the Fuehrer on December 7, 1941, once he realized all hope of taking Moscow was gone and eventual victory was dubious. Bearing the odd but apt title, "Night and Fog Decree," it ordered that all persons endangering German security, except those to be executed immediately, were to "vanish" without leaving a trace. Their families were to be told nothing of their fate.

From the first days of the German invasion of Poland, Polish civilians were executed in every city and town. At least 16,000 Poles were killed in the first two months. Civilian hostages were shot in retaliation whenever a German was attacked. Religious, political and communal leaders were tortured and killed. By the end of the war, in addition to three million Polish Jews, as many as two million non-Jewish Poles, most them Roman Catholics, had also been murdered.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Communist political commissars were shot on sight. throughout German-occupied Russia, villagers were murdered in the hundreds of thousands, and hundreds of villages were burned to the ground. More than three million Soviet soldiers, taken prisoner on the battlefield, were murdered in captivity. Millions of German prisoners of war captured by the Soviets also perished.

The killing of prisoners of war was not confined to captive Soviet prisoners. In May 1940, at two villages near Dunkirk (one of them named Paradis), SS troops shot dead 170 British soldiers after they had been captured and disarmed. In June 1944, at three villages near Caen, 70 disarmed Canadian soldiers ere also shot dead by SS troops.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Greece and Yugoslavia were rounded up, held hostage and killed, their bodies often left hanging in the streets as a deterrent to resistance and protest. As many as a million Serbs were murdered by the Germans. At Kragujevac, 7,253 Serbs were shot down in cold blood in a single massacre.

Gypsies everywhere were singled out for detention and death. By 1939 many German and Austrian Gypsies had been sent to Buchenwald and Dachau. In 1940 all surviving German Gypsies were deported to Poland and forced to live in sections set aside for them within Jewish ghettos. In January 1942, some Gypsies were included in almost every deportation of Jews to the death camp at Chelmno, where 4,300 Gypsies were killed. On December 16, 1942, an SS decree ordered Gypsies from all over Europe to be deported to Auschwitz where 16,000 were murdered on arrival. Some 231,800 Gypsies in Europe were murdered between 1939 and 1945.

In Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were murdered, there were many non-Jewish victims. These included a quarter of a million Poles, 20,000 Gypsies, and 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were also the victims of the wartime bombing of cities and towns throughout Europe. In Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and Belgrade, many thousands of Polish, Dutch, British and Yugoslav civilians were among the victims of German aerial attack between 1939 and 1941. Later in the war it was German civilians who suffered most from bombing. In Hamburg, during Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, more than 42,000 German civilians were killed.

There were also occasions, when the Germans acted against a local population, where the victims were predominantly Christian, but where Jews were caught up -- in some cases by accident -- in the killings. On March 24, 1944, seventy-three Jews were among the 335 Italians seized at random in Rome and executed by the SS in the Ardeatine caves outside the city, as a reprisal against Italian partisan activity.

On June 10, 1944, four days after the Allied landing in Normandy, the SS killed 642 French villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane, as a reprisal for the killing by a French partisan, in another village, of a German SS commander. The women and children of Oradour were ordered into the church, which was locked and set on fire. The men were killed by machine-gun fire. Among the dead were seven Jews. Two years earlier they had found refuge in Oradour and had no reason to believe that they would not be safe until liberation.

As previously discussed, following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in June 1942, the Czech village of Lidice was burned to the ground and the ruins dynamited. This also happened to the village of Lezaky. More than three hundred inhabitants of both villages were killed. Eighty-two children from Lidice were sent to Chelmno, and murdered there. In Prague, 860 Czechs were shot in reprisals; in Brno, 395 were shot.

Reprisals in German occupied Greece were also savage. The death of a single German soldier, shot by a Greek partisan, could lead to the destruction of a whole village. At Klissura, where 233 villagers were killed, fifty of the dead were children under ten years of age.

At Mikulino, in Russia, all 275 women patients in the town's mental hospital were killed.

An estimated 32,000 German civilians were executed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 for so called "political offenses." They included Communists, Socialists, Catholics and Protestants, writers, journalists and teachers. An additional 100,000 physically and mentally disabled Germans, many of them children, were killed in the T-4 Program.

German homosexuals were also singled out for brutality and execution in the concentrations camps. So, too, were Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the nation over God or to sign a statement repudiating their religion.

A million and a half Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. An estimated twenty to thirty thousand children survived the war in hiding. These "hidden children" were those, under the age of fourteen, many of them babies, whose parents managed to find someone -- a non-Jewish person or family, or a Christian institution -- with whom they could live without their Jewishness becoming known. Many hidden children led the life of a Christian child, saying Christian prayers, attending church and school, becoming part of a Christian family circle, taking on a Christian-sounding first name.

A few hidden children survived alone, in forests and barns, living from day to day with the threat of capture and death hanging over them. All of those in hiding had to make daily efforts to hide the fact that they were Jewish. One slip could mean betrayal, arrest and deportation. Some children were hidden by many different families and individuals. After the war, most hidden children discovered that their parents had been murdered, that they were the sole survivors of once large families.

It was not until forty-five years after the end of the war that the lives of the hidden children became widely recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust. In 1991, a meeting was held in New York, organized by those who had survived the war as children in hiding. A second meeting was held two years later in Jerusalem. On notice boards at both meetings, those who attended pinned up appeals for people who might have known their parents, or known the children themselves in hiding.

The Hidden Child Foundation we set up in New York, to organize meetings, publish a newsletter and coordinate hidden child activities throughout the world. Each year saw new revelations.

In 1999 it was learned that the head of the Munich Jewish community, Charlotte Knobloch, was a hidden child. Born in Munich in 1932, she survived the war in hiding with two local farmers.

In 1998, Miriam Winter told the story, in her book Trains, of how, when she was eight, here parents gave her to a stranger in the Polish town of Ozarow, near Lublin. She had to endure, in addition to the daily fear of discovery and capture, the abuse and exploitation of her rescuers. In 1945 she realized that she was the sole survivor of her family.

In 1993, following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, a Czech Hidden Children association was formed, with a hundred members. They decided to compile a list of those non-Jewish families who had taken them in and saved their lives. More than thirty families were identified and honored.

In 1999 the World Conference of Hidden Children was held in Prague. Recalling the first conference that had been held in New York eight years earlier, Eva Benesova of Prague reflected: "Only there could I rid myself of the burden of having been a hidden child." Ann Shore told the Prague gathering: "We are here to remember the past, celebrate our survival, and help each other heal."

Abraham Foxman was hidden as a young boy in Vilna. He would later become the president of the American-based Anti-Defamation League. He told the first Hidden Child conference in 1991:

"We hidden children have a mission, a mission to proclaim and recognize goodness. For the first fifty years after the Holocaust survivors bore witness to evil, brutality and bestiality. Now is the time for us, for our generation to bear witness to goodness. For each one of us is living proof that even in hell, even in that hell called the Holocaust, there was goodness, there was kindness, and there was love and compassion."