On this date, October 10, 1944, 800
children were gassed to death in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Let us remember
those children in the holocaust. We will post information about the children
from several internet sources.
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Ghetto Litzmannstadt:
Children rounded up for deportation to the Kulmhof death camp
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/eight-hundred-children-are-gassed-to-death-at-auschwitz
On this day in 1944, 800 Gypsy
children, including more than a hundred boys between 9 and 14 years old are
systematically murdered.
Auschwitz was really a group of camps,
designated I, II, and III. There were also 40 smaller “satellite” camps. It was
at Auschwitz II, at Birkenau, established in October 1941, that the SS created
a complex, monstrously orchestrated killing ground: 300 prison barracks; four
“bathhouses,” in which prisoners were gassed; corpse cellars; and cremating
ovens. Thousands of prisoners were also used as fodder for medical experiments,
overseen and performed by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele (“the Angel of
Death”).
A mini-revolt took place on October 7,
1944. As several hundred Jewish prisoners were being forced to carry corpses
from the gas chambers to the furnace to dispose of the bodies, they blew up one
of the gas chambers and set fire to another, using explosives smuggled to them
from Jewish women who worked in a nearby armaments factory. Of the roughly 450
prisoners involved in the sabotage, about 250 managed to escape the camp during
the ensuing chaos. They were all found and shot. Those co-conspirators who
never made it out of the camp were also executed, as were five women from the
armaments factory-but not before being tortured for detailed information on the
smuggling operation. None of the women talked.
Gypsies, too, had been singled out for
brutal treatment by Hitler’s regime early on. Deemed “carriers of disease” and
“unreliable elements who cannot be put to useful work,” they were marked for
extermination along with the Jews of Europe from the earliest years of the war.
Approximately 1.5 million Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis. In 1950, as
Gypsies attempted to gain compensation for their suffering, as were other
victims of the Holocaust, the German government denied them anything, saying,
“Gypsies have been persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but
because of an asocial and criminal record.” They were stigmatized even in light
of the atrocities committed against them.
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Photos of the eventual Bullenhuser Damm victims showing their surgical
scars after Heissmeyer injected them with tuberculosis.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/alfred-trzebinski/]
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INTERNET
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Holocaust
Children were especially vulnerable to Nazi
murder or death in the era of the Holocaust. It is estimated that 1,500,000
children were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly or as a direct
consequence of Nazi actions.
The Nazis advocated killing children
of "unwanted" or "dangerous" groups in accordance with
their ideological views, either as part of the "racial struggle" or
as a measure of preventive security. The Nazis particularly targeted Jewish children, but also targeted Romani (Gypsy) children, and also children
with mental or physical defects. The Germans and their collaborators killed
children both for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or
alleged partisan attacks. Early killings were encouraged by the Nazis in action T4,
where children with disabilities were gassed using carbon monoxide, starved to death, phenol injections to the heart, or by hanging.
Those killings started officially in
1939 and grew steadily throughout the war. But many warning signs were already
present in Germany well before the war started, such as persecution of the
Jews, the notorious Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht in 1937. Jews
were forced out of the country, their property stolen and they were
increasingly deported to concentration camps.
This article deals with those
1,500,000 children who were killed by the Nazis. A very much smaller number
were saved. Some simply survived, often in a ghetto, very very occasionally in a concentration camp.
Some were saved in various programs like the Kindertransport and the One Thousand
Children in which a child fled his homeland. Other children were
saved by becoming Hidden Children
in their homeland. And see the important work done by Œuvre de
Secours aux Enfants (OSE)
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Starving children in
Warsaw Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland. Agfacolor photo.
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Numbers
killed
The Germans and their collaborators
killed as many as 1.5 million children, including over a million Jewish
children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, German children with
physical and mental disabilities living in institutions, Polish children, and
children residing in the occupied Soviet Union. Children from France, the Netherlands,
Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries also died as a result of
mass deportations. The chances for survival for Jewish and some non-Jewish
adolescents (13–18 years old) were greater, as they could be deployed at forced
labor. Although, the unfortunate, other children (usually infants or children
younger than an adolescent) were disposed of in killing chambers such as gas
filled rooms, or merely shot, to fulfill the German's "Final
Solution" to exterminate the Jews.
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Still photograph from
the Soviet Film of the liberation of Auschwitz, taken by the film unit of the
First Ukrainian Front, shot over a period of several months beginning on
January 27, 1945 by Alexander Voronzow and others in his group. Child survivors
of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire
fence. Among those pictured are Tomasz Szwarz; Alicja Gruenbaum; Solomon
Rozalin; Gita Sztrauss; Wiera Sadler; Marta Wiess; Boro Eksztein; Josef
Rozenwaser; Rafael Szlezinger; Gabriel Nejman; Gugiel Appelbaum; Mark Berkowitz
(a twin); Pesa Balter; Rut Muszkies (later Webber); Miriam Friedman; and twins
Miriam Mozes and Eva Mozes wearing knitted hats.
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Causes of
death
The fate of Jewish and non-Jewish
children can be categorized in the following ways:
1.
children
killed when they arrived in killing centers;
2.
children
killed immediately after birth or in institutions;
3.
children
born in ghettos
and camps who survived because prisoners hid them;
4.
children,
usually over age 12, who were used as laborers in kitchen camps, cleaning
prisoner barracks, or working in the stables with Nazi officer horses and as
subjects of medical experiments; and
5.
those
children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.
In the ghettos, which the Germans
established early in the war in many Polish towns and cities such as Warsaw and
Łódź, Jewish children died from starvation and exposure as well as lack of
adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this
mass death because they considered most of the younger ghetto children to be
unproductive and hence "useless eaters". Indeed, the Germans
deliberately restricted the food available to the strictly controlled ghettos
under their control. The ghettos were liquidated from 1942 onwards, and their
inhabitants murdered at various death camps.
Because children were generally too young to be deployed as forced labor, the
German authorities generally selected them, along with the elderly, ill, and
disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims
led to mass graves to be shot. The children that were healthy enough for the
labor were often worked to death doing jobs to benefit the camp, but sometimes
children were forced to do unnecessary jobs like digging ditches.
Non-Jewish children from certain
targeted groups were not spared. Examples include Romani (Gypsy) children
killed in Auschwitz concentration camp; 5,000 to 7,000 children killed as
victims of the “euthanasia” program; children murdered in reprisals, including
most of the children of Lidice; and children in villages in the occupied Soviet
Union who were killed with their parents.
Medical
atrocities and kidnapping
The German authorities also incarcerated
a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. SS
physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins,
in concentration camps for medical experiments that often resulted in the
deaths of the children. Concentration camp authorities deployed adolescents,
particularly Jewish adolescents, at forced labor in the concentration camps,
where many died because of conditions. The German authorities held other
children under appalling conditions in transit camps, such as the case of Anne Frank and
her sister in Bergen-Belsen, and non-Jewish orphaned children whose parents the
German military and police units had killed in so-called anti-partisan
operations. Some of these orphans were held temporarily in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp and other
detention camps.
In their "search to retrieve
'Aryan blood'", SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied
Poland and the occupied Soviet Union to be kidnapped and transferred to the
Reich to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Although the basis
for these decisions was "race-scientific," often blond hair, blue
eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the "opportunity" to be
"Germanized". On the other hand, female Poles and Soviet civilians
who had been deported to Germany for forced labor and who had had sexual
relations with a German man—often under duress—resulting in pregnancy were
forced to have abortions or to bear their children under conditions that would
ensure the infant's death, if the "race experts" determined that the
child would have insufficient German blood.
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Wall display of
prisoner identification photos by the SS in Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943, created
through force with both an unwilling subject and an unwilling creator, notably
prisoner Wilhelm Brasse of Poland. Image taken by Skyliber in Auschwitz
concentration camp in 2004.
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Auschwitz
Children were exposed to
experimentation at other camps, especially at Auschwitz, where Joseph Mengele
was active. Mengele's research subjects were better fed and housed than other
prisoners and temporarily safe from the gas chambers. He established a
kindergarten for children that were the subjects of experiments, along with all
Gypsy children under the age of six. The facility provided better food and
living conditions than other areas of the camp, and even included a playground.
When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as "Uncle
Mengele" and offered them sweets. But he was also personally responsible
for the deaths of an unknown number of victims that he killed via lethal
injection, shootings, beatings, and through selections and deadly experiments.
Lifton describes Mengele as sadistic, lacking empathy, and extremely
antisemitic, believing the Jews should be eliminated entirely as an inferior
and dangerous race. Mengele's son Rolf said his father later showed no remorse
for his wartime activities.
A former Auschwitz prisoner doctor
said:
“He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire ... And then, next to that, ... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay.”
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Josef Mengele sometime
before 1945
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Twins were subjected to weekly
examinations and measurements of their physical attributes by Mengele or one of
his assistants. Experiments performed by Mengele on twins included unnecessary
amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or other
diseases, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the
victims died while undergoing these procedures. After an experiment was over,
the twins were sometimes killed and their bodies dissected. Nyiszli recalled
one occasion where Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night via a
chloroform injection to the heart. If one twin died of disease, Mengele killed
the other so that comparative post-mortem reports could be prepared.
Mengele's experiments with eyes included
attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into the eyes of living
subjects and killing people with heterochromatic eyes so that the eyes could be
removed and sent to Berlin for study. His experiments on dwarfs and people with
physical abnormalities included taking physical measurements, drawing blood,
extracting healthy teeth, and treatment with unnecessary drugs and X-rays. Many
of the victims were sent to the gas chambers after about two weeks, and their
skeletons were sent to Berlin for further study. Mengele sought out pregnant
women, on whom he would perform experiments before sending them to the gas
chambers. Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two Gypsy twins
together back to back in an attempt to create conjoined twins. The children died of
gangrene after several days of suffering.
Means of
survival
In spite of their acute vulnerability,
many children discovered ways to survive. Children smuggled food and medicines
into the ghettos, after smuggling personal possessions to trade for them out of
the ghettos. Children in youth movements later participated in underground
resistance activities. Many children escaped with parents or other
relatives—and sometimes on their own—to family camps run by Jewish partisans.
Between 1938 and 1939, the Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was
a rescue effort which brought about 10,000 refugee Jewish children (but
importantly, without their parents) to safety in Great Britain from Nazi
Germany and German-occupied territories.
Hidden Children: Some non-Jews hid
Jewish children and sometimes, as in the case of Anne Frank, hid other family
members as well. Sometimes these were actually hidden; in other cases they were
"adopted" into the family of the heroic well-doer. And see the work
of Œuvre de
Secours aux Enfants.
A unique case of hiding: in France,
almost the entire Protestant population of Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon, as well as many Catholic priests, nuns, and lay
Catholics, hid Jewish children in the town from 1942 to 1944. In Italy and
Belgium, many children survived in hiding.
After the surrender of Nazi Germany,
ending World War II, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout Europe
for missing children. Thousands of orphaned children were in displaced persons
camps. Many surviving Jewish children fled eastern Europe as part of the mass
exodus (Brihah) to the western zones of occupied
Germany, en route to the Yishuv (the Jewish
settlement in Palestine). Through Youth Aliyah (Youth Immigration), thousands
migrated to the Yishuv, and then to the state of Israel after its establishment in 1948.
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