In , as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions.
We also know that, as in the early s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. In all, , people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources.
At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe. Nazi Germany began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that September.
About , Polish civilians were killed between and , with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. It was this policy that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2.
A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad. Some , German soldiers died in Soviet captivity. Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. By December , when it appears that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union.
Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5. Yet there were those among the religious community who did challenge the Nazis. Out of 17, Protestant clergy, three thousand were Evangelical Lutherans who opposed the Nazis.
Some of the members of the group were arrested and sent to concentration camps-never to return. Others worked quietly in their opposition. Some spoke out because of Hitler's attacks on the church, and a few because of his actions against the Jews. Jehovah's Witnesses, though few in number, also were seen as a threat to the Nazis.
Not only did they oppose war and refuse to fight, but they also urged others not to serve. In addition, Witnesses refused to salute the flag or to say "Heil Hitler. Not only the parents, but also their eleven children, were punished for being Jehovah's Witnesses. In , when the father, Franz Kusserow, refused to renounce his religion, he was put in jail until the end of the war. Two sons were executed because they refused induction into the army.
Another son was incarcerated in Dachau, where he contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the war. The three youngest children were sent to reform school for "re-education. Kusserow and the older girls were taken either to prison or to concentration camps. The Gypsies, like the Jews, were condemned by the Nazis to complete annihilation for being racially impure, socially undesirable, and "mentally defective.
In , a plan to put thirty thousand Gypsies aboard ships and sink the ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was abandoned, but many Gypsies were sterilized under a law that permitted the sterilization of "mental defectives.
At least half a million Gypsies were murdered by the Germans in the gas chambers, in experiments, or in general round-ups. Although the Nazis declared Polish people Untermenschen, or subhumans, thousands of Polish children who were blond haired and blue eyed were separated from their families and sent to Germany to be raised in German homes as Aryans.
The dark-haired, dark-eyed sisters and brothers remaining in Poland were to be taught only simple arithmetic, to sign their names, and to offer obedience to their German masters. Their purpose in life was to serve as slaves for the German empire.
Anyone caught trying to give further instruction to Polish children was to be punished. Despite the ban on education, secret schools flourished in attics and basements. Because of the ideological and racial antipathy toward Russian Communism, between two and three million Russian prisoners of war were purposely starved to death by the Nazis.
Others were shipped in cattle cars to concentration or extermination camps. Most died of disease, exhaustion, or starvation. No article on the non-Jewish victims would be complete without mentioning the first opponents of the Nazis: Germans who happened to be Communists or Social Democrats, judges and lawyers, or editors and journalists who had opposed the Nazis.
They were the first to be arrested. As soon as the Nazis came to power, the goal of eliminating all opposition took primacy. Trucks and police vans raced up and down the streets arresting any threat to Nazi rule, including those members of the artistic community who demanded cultural freedom. Books were burned. To read the whole article, go here: Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?
Nazi camps equipped with gassing facilities for the mass murder of Jews and other victims included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek-Lublin, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Approximately 2,, Jews were murdered at these camps, along with tens of thousands of Siniti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and other victims.
Auschwitz-Bi rkenau was the only camp that existed in Auschwitz. Auschwitz had many satellite camps that surrounded the main camp, encompassing a total area of 20 square miles. In total, there were three major camps in Auschwitz that were surrounded by subcamps:. Auschwitz I: The original and main Auschwitz camp located in southern Poland. It served first as a Polish military barrack before being converted into a concentration camp during Nazi occupation at first for non-Jews.
It was opened in October and was specifically used for the extermination of Jewish as well as Sinti and Roma peoples. Auschwitz II had four gas chambers on its premises. All Jews in camps received tattoo ed numbers on their arms. All of those imprisoned in the camp system received a serial number upon first entering. This was assigned not only for identification, but also served an integral part of the Nazi system of dehumanization in the camps.
These numbers were sewn onto uniforms, usually along with other patches of classification, such as reasons for arrest and national origin. Only individuals imprisoned at Auschwitz received tattoos, and not all who were imprisoned at Auschwitz were given a tattoo. Nazi-occupied Denmark was the only country in occupied Europe where Jews were not forced to wear the yellow Star of David badge. Jews in Nazi-occupied central Poland did not wear the yellow star badges.
Instead, they wore white armbands with a blue Star of David. What Pastor Niemoeller really said. According to his widow, Sybil Niemoeller, these are his exact words:. First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out — because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out — because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
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Login Become a Member. Search for:. Holocaust Misconceptions. There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust or 6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non-Jewish victims The number 11 million is a fictious number on a number of levels. The Allies could have saved more Jews Perhaps, but most of the killing occurred while Germany appeared to be winning the war.
Norwegian non-Jews wore paper clips to express solidarity with Norwegian Jewry Between 1, and 1, Jewish people were living in Norway when the Nazis occupied the country in June
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