What was also very interesting to consider, was the fact that the definition of the Holocaust (the definition of the Holocaust education programme which I attended), doesn’t explicitly mention the other minorities targeted, and murdered by the Nazis throughout WW2, and the years leading up to it. The Holocaust is defined as the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, by Nazi Germany, and its collaborators, during the Second World War. The definition doesn’t explicitly mention the minorities due to the fact that the Nazis wished to kill all Jewish people, no matter who they were. This was not the same for other groups; that being said, this does not discount the suffering and experience of other minority groups, and these must still be explored in a different context; namely the one I hope I provided.
In Nazi Germany, gay men were persecuted; approximately 50,000 were arrested, or had legal action taken against them, and out of them, around 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where the death rate was around 65%. As I mentioned before, these statistics are difficult to grapple with if they are not humanised. So, I’ll give the example of Richard Grune, a German visual artist, anti-fascist, and Nazi concentration camp survivor. He was born on August 2nd 1903, in Flensburg, Germany, and he studied for 5 terms at the Kiel School of Applied Arts, later spending a year at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. In 1933, Grune moved to Berlin to work as a Graphic designer, and following the Nazi rise to power later that year, he began contributing to anti-fascist publications which opposed the new government. In December 1934, Grune was arrested as part of the Nazi Party’s push to enforce Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual activity. He was held in so-called “protective custody” for 5 months in Lichtenberg concentration camp until May 1935, when he was sent back to Flensburg, for his trial. The trial took place in September 1936 (three months after the law against homosexuality had been tightened) and Richard was sentenced to 1 year and 3 months in prison, minus the time already spent in custody. However, when Richard was released from prison in the summer of 1937, he was immediately rearrested by the Gestapo and again sent into ‘protective custody’, this time in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In April 1940 he was transferred to another camp, Flossenbürg, where he remained until April 1945, when he was able to escape before the Nazis evacuated the prisoners. Apart from a gap in 1935-36, Richard had spent more than a decade in camps or prisons. After the war, Richard created a series of drawings showing scenes of life in the concentration camps which were published in a book, The Passion of the 20th Century (1947), one of the first accounts of the Nazi camp system.
Other groups were also persecuted by the Nazis: Black and mixed race people, including Theodor Wonja Michael, a German journalist and actor, as well as a prominent speaker on living as a prisoner in the Arbeitslager (Nazi forced labour camps). He was born in Berlin in 1925, and his father worked in human zoos, where Theodor also had to perform. When his mother died in 1926, he grew up as a half-orphan with foster parents, who were the operators of a human zoo, and used him there from 1927, at the age of 2, as an extra. His father died in 1934, and his siblings were all separated. Although he finished elementary school in 1939, he could not move further into education due to the Nuremburg Race Laws; enacted in Nazi Germany on the 15th of September 1935. He initially worked as a porter in a Berlin hotel, but was dismissed due to a guest's complaint about his skin colour. His German passport was revoked, and he thus became stateless. He then earned his living as a circus actor, and as an extra, in colonial movies made by Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft. In 1943 he was obliged to do forced labour, and was imprisoned in a labour camp near Berlin until the arrival of the Red Army in May 1945, followed by liberation. After 1945, he worked as a civilian employee for the US occupation troops and took on roles as an actor, and completed his high school diploma and studied political science in Hamburg and Paris, with a degree in economics. He then worked as a journalist and became editor-in-chief of the magazine Afrika Bulletin – despite a lack of formal education about Africa, he was asked to serve as an expert. He found his siblings Juliana and James again in the 1960s, and later lived in Cologne, and was an active member of the black German community; in 2013, Michael published his autobiography, Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu. Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen, which has been translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, and subsequently appeared in many television programs. In 2018, he was awarded the order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work as a contemporary witness to history.
Furthermore, disabled people were also murdered through the T4 Program; a Nazi German effort, framed as a euthanasia program, to kill incurably ill, physically, or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people. Theresia Karas was only 12 years old when she was transferred from the Evangelical Gallneukirchen Diakoniewerk to the Hartheim killing centre, and murdered. Her parents received a false report from the Pirna-Sonnestein Clinic that their daughter had died there unexpectedly from septicaemia. On March 1st, 1941, her parents and siblings received an urn with an accompanying note – that was all; none of her personal effects were ever returned to her family. Her mother and father died in 1962 and 1971, respectively, never knowing that their daughter had been murdered.
Thousands of unknown “politicals” were also imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis; Wilhelm Leuschner was one of them – he was elected to the board of the Allfemeiner Detscher Gewerkschaftsbund, or the Nationwide German Union Federation in January 1933, but by April of the same year, he was forced to resign, give up his office of Hessian Interior Minister, and the following May, he was arrested in the course of the Nazis’ union-breaking programme. In June, he was arrested once again, mistreated, an dheld for a year in Borgermoor prison, and Lichtenburg concentration camp. In June 1934, he was released from the concetration camp, and began to build a resistance network. In 1936, he took over a small manufacturing workshop which produced pub utensils, but it soon became the hub of the "illegal Reich leadership of German unions". Leuschner struggled actively in those resistance groups close to the unions and maintained contact with the Kreisau Circle and from 1939, also with the resistance group around Carl Freidrich Goerdeler After the planned coup d'état, Leuschner was most likely to become Germany’s vice-chancellor, however, Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, on the 20th of July 1944, failed. Leuschner was thereafter arrested on the 16th of August 1944, and was brought before the Volksgerichtshof; he was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on 29 September 1944 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. The total number of “politicals” who were silenced, till date, is unknown by historians.
Jehovah’s Witnesses were also sent to concentration camps, and targeted due to their beliefs; their refusal to accept and believe the Nazi regime to be the highest power was an inherent threat to the Nazis; around 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses were murdered for their beliefs, and Magdalena Kusserow was one of them – she was born in 1924, in Bochum Germany, and was the eighth of eleven children. During the 1920s, her parents, Franz and Hilda, became Jehovah’s Witnesses, and brought up their children with the new faith. In 1931, they moved to the small town of Bad Lippspringe, where their house became a centre of Witness activity. They held Bible study classes in their home, and distributed religious literature in local communities. Magdalena joined in this missionary work when she was 12 years old, but, by this time, the Nazis had come to power, and were persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses. After her family was denounced by local Catholic priests, the Gestapo regularly searcher the Kusserow household, looking for illegal Witness literature. Magdalena and her sisters hid the books during these searches. However, her parents were still arrested in 1936: although Hilda was released after six weeks, Franz stayed in prison until 1940. Despite Franz’s arrest, the Kusserow family continued to follow their faith and they suffered increasing persecution as a result. Apart from Magdalena’s brother Siegfried, who died in an accident before the war, every member of the family became a victim of the Nazis. In 1939 Magdalena’s three youngest siblings were taken from the family and sent to Nazi-controlled foster homes. Two of her older brothers were executed for refusing to serve in the German army. All of the other brothers and sisters were sent to prison or concentration camps; one brother died after the war as a result of the maltreatment he suffered in the camps. Magdalena’s turn came in April 1941 when she was arrested along with her parents and her sister Hildegard. As Magdalena was still legally a child, she was held in a juvenile prison until she was 18 in 1942. She was told that she could go home if she signed a statement abandoning her religion, but she refused. Instead, she was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women, where she worked in the camp garden and looked after the children of SS men. Within a year she was joined by her mother and sister Hildegard, and they stayed together in the camp for the remainder of the war. In April 1945, the women were forced on a Death March from Ravensbrück, but were liberated by the American army. They returned to their home in Bad Lippspringe with the other members of the family who survived the war.
The Nazis also pursued a genocide of the Roma and Sinti peoples; between 250,000 to 500,000 were murdered. Rita Prigmore, survived to speak of her journey. She war born on on 3rd March 1943 in Wuerzburg, Germany, together with her twin sister Rolanda, into a Sinti (Gypsy) family. Her parents Gabriel and Theresia worked at a theatre in Wuerzburg, and had a son named Rigo from Gabriel’s previous marriage. In 1941, Rita’s mother and several other members of her family were taken to the headquarters of the Gestapo. Once there, they were forced to sign forms agreeing to be sterilized, or else they would be deported. Theresia agreed, but before she attended her appointment, she tried to fall pregnant. Later in summer 1942 when Theresia was called to be sterilized, the doctors discovered that she was expecting twins – Rita and Rolanda. Theresia was told she would be allowed to give birth if she agreed to give her children to the authorities once they were born. She agreed, and the family was monitored throughout the pregnancy. After their birth, Rita and Rolanda spent most of their time in a clinic, only being allowed to stay with their parents every now and then. On one occasion the children were released to Theresia and Gabriel for the purpose of a propaganda photo-shoot, showing the parents happily pushing the children down a street in Wuerzburg. In April 1943, Gabriel and Theresia were notified that they would be deported, but without Rita and Rolanda. Theresia headed to the university where the children were being kept, and demanded to see them. She was refused, but after forcing her way in found Rolanda dead with a bandage on her head after being experimented on – Rolanda had died after the doctors tried to change the colour of her eyes with ink. In a panic she grabbed Rita and ran out of the clinic. A few days later the authorities caught up with the family and took Rita back to the clinic. She remained there for around twelve months, before being released to Theresia in April 1944. Soon afterwards the family split up, and Rita stayed with her mother. The pair both survived the war, but as a child and an adult, Rita started to experience various health problems - on one occasion she even crashed her car after blacking out. It was then discovered that this was linked to various brain experiments that had been conducted on her as a child by Nazi doctors. Only after the end of the war and only after emigration to the USA, Rita was able to reconstruct what had happened to her. Since then, she has been spreading her story. So, her experiences, as well as those of her mother, are archived in the Holocaust Memorial in Washington. With the support of the Community of Sant ‘Egidio, she gives lectures all over Europe on the Nazi persecution of the Sinti and Roma.
Soviet prisoners of war also faced terrible deaths. Konstantin Alexandrovich Shilov, was one of the minority who survived starvation, and typhus. In total, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered, and 7 million soviet civilians were murdered. Czechoslovakian citizens who lived on land which Nazis wanted were also imprisoned in concentration camps; Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl, was only aged 14 when she died in Auschwitz, and was one of the approximately 40,000 to 50,000 subjects of “identity pictures” taken under duress at Auschwitz-Birkenau, by Wilhelm Brasse, who was a young Polish inmate at the time, in his late twenties. Brasse was trained as a portrait photographer at his aunt’s studio prior to the 1939 German invasion of Poland, at the beginning of WW2, however, during his time at Auschwitz, he was forced to photograph fellow inmates, under dreadful camp conditions and imminent death if he refused to comply.
The suffering of these minorities should not be discounted, but all the more understood by those who can properly learn from the Holocaust – it was not only Jewish people who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but countless others; this is a fact, which does not diminish, or demean in any way, the suffering of any of the victims of the Holocaust.
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