MOSAIC OF VICTIMS: IN DEPTH

Jews were one of four groups racially targeted for persecution in Nazi Germany and in Germancontrolled Europe. The Nazi regime also persecuted and killed members of other groups.

Among the earliest victims of discrimination and persecution in Nazi Germany were political
opponentsprimarily Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, and trade union leaders. The Nazis
also persecuted authors and artists whose works they considered subversive or who were Jewish. In
1933-1934, the German central government and various local governments as well as local battalions
of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilungen; Assault Detachments) and SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squads)
established concentration camps throughout Germany to detain political prisoners. The SS, which
centralized and took control of the concentration camp system in 1934, had established its first
concentration camp, Dachau, in March 1933.
RACIALLY TARGETED GROUPS
While Nazi ideology targeted Jews as the primary enemy of Germany, the Nazis also targeted Roma
(Gypsies) on racial grounds. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws (which defined Jews by blood) were later
applied to Roma. Drawing on traditional prejudices in German society, the Nazis termed Roma as
prone by race to be "work-shy" and "asocial" with an inherited inclination to engage in petty crime.
Among the first killed in the mobile gas vans at the Chelmno killing center in German-occupied
Poland in early 1942 were Roma deported from the Greater German Reich to the Lodz ghetto. SS and
police authorities deported more than 20,000 Roma to theAuschwitz-Birkenau camp, where the
camp authorities killed almost all of them in the gas chambers.
In the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union, German military and SS-police officials shot tens
of thousands of local Roma, often on trumped-up justification that the Roma were engaged in
espionage for the Soviet authorities. Two of Nazi Germany's Axis partners also engaged in the mass
murder of Roma. The authorities of the so-called Independent State of Croatia killed approximately
25,000 Roma, many of them at the Jasenovac concentration camp complex. In Romania, the
government of General Ion Antonescu killed between 13,000 and 36,000 Roma, both in Romania
proper and in Transnistria.
The Nazis viewed Poles and the Slavic and so-called Asiatic peoples of the Soviet Union as racially
inferior, and slated them for subjugation and forced labor. They implemented a policy of physical
annihilation of the political, intellectual, and cultural elites of Poland and the Soviet Union. German
occupation authorities murdered tens of thousands of members of the Polish elite classes (including
intellectuals and Catholic priests) in an operation known as Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion
(AB-Extraordinary Pacification Action). The Commissar Order, issued to German military

commanders on June 6, 1941, called for shooting captured political commissars serving in the Red
Army. German SS and police units received instructions to kill high-ranking and mid-level officials
of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist Party.
During the autumn and winter of 1941-1942, German military authorities and the German Security
Police collaborated on a racist policy of mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war: Jews, persons with
Asiatic features, and top political and military leaders were selected out and shot. Around three
million others were held in makeshift camps without proper shelter, food, or medicine with the
deliberate intent that they die. Approximately two million Soviet soldiers died as a result of this
criminal neglect in the winter of 1941-1942. Even after the Germans decided to permit the remaining
Soviet soldiers to survive so that their labor could be exploited, Soviet soldiers were generally
incarcerated under harsher conditionsoften in concentration campsthan any other group of
prisoners of war.
Backed by willing supporters in the medical, healthcare, and social service professional
communities, the Nazis viewedinstitutionalized people with disabilities perceived as congenital to
be a threat to the gene pool of the so-called German master race. The Nazi leadership was
determined to use the opportunity of war to physically annihilate people with disabilities living in
institutions but perceived as unable to work.
Legislation passed during the 1930s required the identification of persons perceived as useless
eaters in institutions throughout Germany. After this legislation, officials of Hitler's private
chancelleryworking with officials of the German Ministry of Health and the German Criminal
Policeestablished plans and procedures for three killing operations. These operations fell under
the general umbrella term Euthanasia. All three were implemented during the war:
1) some 5,000 institutionalized small children with disabilities were murdered in institutions
throughout Germany and Austria

2) in Operation T-4 (named for the address of the Fhrer Chancellery office in Berlin at
Tiergartenstrae 4), some 70,000 institutionalized adults were murdered in six killing centers and
thousands of prisoners no longer able to work were killed in the concentration camps

3) approximately 110,000 other institutionalized adults with disabilities were murdered at

institutions throughout Greater Germany. The overwhelming majority of T-4 victims were murdered
in gas chambers; the other victims were killed by starvation, deliberately untreated disease,
poisoning, and lethal injection.

OTHER PERSECUTED GROUPS

In addition to racially targeted victims, the Germans persecuted, incarcerated in concentration
camps, and killed real and perceived political opponents of the Nazi regime inside Germany. This
included both Catholic and Lutheran clergy as well as persons engaged in real and perceived
activities of resistance movements in German-occupied Europe. Some of the so-called anti-partisan
operations, particularly in the occupied Soviet Union, were in effect efforts to depopulate the Soviet
countryside. The Germans massacred hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Soviet civilians in
their villages. The vast majority of these victims had little or no connection to partisan resistance.
The Nazi regime also targeted Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to swear an oath to the regime or
perform military service. Approximately 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were incarcerated in
concentration camps. Nearly a third of them died there. Another 250 were shot after being convicted
by a military tribunal. The Nazi regime also persecuted male homosexuals, whose sexual behavior
was considered an obstacle to the preservation of the German nation and an element of corruption
and immorality for German society. Tens of thousands of homosexuals were indicted for alleged
homosexual acts or behavior: some of those who could not be convicted, or who were picked up by
the Gestapo (German secret state police) after serving their sentences, were imprisoned in
concentration camps. Hundreds, possibly thousands died in the camps.
Finally, German Criminal Police officials arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps tens of
thousands of so-called asocials as well as real or perceived repeat criminal offenders, even though
they had not committed a new crime or violation. Thousands of these so-called asocial and
criminal prisoners were murdered in the camps.

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