Not Quite Human, Part IV

We return now after a few weeks to look at what happens when a society declares a group of people to be "sub-human" as well as the source of problems in that society.  We have seen how the Jewish people came to be despised in Germany, with full-blown anti-Semitism developing by the early twentieth century.  We followed this as it developed into all forms of persecution, closing Jewish businesses and resulting in beatings and other abuse.  Kristallnacht in 1938 was one of the culminations of generations of Germans who had been taught of the evil and sub-human Jew. 

Most Jews who could leave Germany did so, and less than half a million remained by the beginning of the second World War in 1939. By that time, Hitler and his physicians had already begun the process of mass extermination of infants and small children that they had deemed "unfit".  First with chemicals, those selected to die were involuntarily euthanized, and when chemicals proved to be too expensive and inefficient, carbon monoxide gas was used.  Having begun solving one "problem", that of the "undesirable" children (and later adults), the Nazi leadership began to work on the much larger "Jewish problem".  It was after the onset of World War II, with the invasion of Poland and Eastern Europe, that there were large numbers of Jews that came under Nazi control.

During that first year of the war, Jewish people were required to be identified and wear a yellow star.  many Jews were sent to concentration camps.  Initially, these camps were simply holding places, although forced labor was required.  A portion of Warsaw was walled off, the "Ghetto", where living conditions with starvation and disease all but precluded survival.  The real effort at exterminating the Jews, however, began not in these camps and ghettos, but in the villages and towns throughout Poland.  The Nazis organized Einsatzgruppen from the Schutzstaffel, (or "SS"  as it is commonly known) for the purpose of disposing of Jews in the newly conquered territories.  I must warn you that the following material is quite graphic.

These Einsatzgruppen roamed the Polish countryside, raiding homes and farms and businesses.  The men and women, boys and girls, young and old were usually rounded up to some central location and then shot.  The mass killings were usually performed by having the victims lie prone and then receive a bullet to the back of the head.  Hundreds and then thousands of these executions were performed.  The killings were not restricted to Einsatzgruppen, however.  Even ordinary German citizens who were too old or unfit to serve as soldiers worked in police squads that were employed for the work of eliminating Jews.  If a Jew was found in a home or hospital and was too weak or ill to make it to the killing site, they were simply shot in bed.  If they escaped to the surrounding countryside or forest, they were hunted down.   As opposed to firing at enemy soldiers across a battlefield, innocent people had the backs of their heads blown off at close range.  The killers were frequently covered with blood, brains, and skull fragments.  All in a day's work, I suppose.  Get cleaned up and go out the next day to start another job.

 

Woman and Child

(yadvashem.org)

 

The killings soon expanded into Russia in 1941, and the picture above of the woman holding her daughter is presumed to be from Ivangorod.  In Babi Yar, near Kiev, 35,000 Jews were shot and killed over two days.  But this was not efficient enough.  The lessons learned from the Nazi euthanasia program would soon be put into use.  That same year, the first executions using carbon monoxide gas were carried out in Chelmno, Poland, using mobile vans.

 

 

(inconvenienthistory.com)

 

 

The "Jewish problem" was considered big enough by the Germans to convene a large meeting known as the Wansee Conference in 1942.  Wansee was a small town outside of Berlin, and there the Nazi leaders gathered together under the leadership of Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich to come up with the "final solution", once and for all with how to eliminate the Jews.  Two new camp systems were developed from the concentration camp model: the extermination camps and the work camps.  The purpose of both was to kill the Jew; the work camps simply extracted labor from the Jew until they died of starvation and exhaustion.  The names of the extermination camps, all in Poland, will be forever remembered:   Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Majdanek.  Of note is that Auschwitz was a combined extermination and work camp.  Upon entry into the camp, those thought fit enough to work were spared immediate execution.  Numbers were tattooed on the forearms of those kept alive, and Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz with those tattoos can still be seen alive today.  And Auschwitz was where Zyklon B, a form of cyanide gas, was introduced to the killing system.

 

Eight to twelve hundred Jews could be gassed in these chambers.  Their teeth with gold fillings were extracted, and their bodies were burned in the crematoria ovens:

 

 

(israelarbeitergallery.org)

 

There are many, many more horrific pictures and stories available to the interested reader on multiple websites.  Before it was all over, it is estimated that over six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazi regime.  Yet it must be remembered that "Nazi" was a political party, just as we have political parties in this country.  Not all Germans, or even German military members, were Nazis.  In his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen shows how Germans from all walks of life were complicit or involved in the process.  Generations of anti-Semitism had led the Germans to see the Jews as "sub-human" and the source of almost all of Germany's problems.  Even if the average German did not actually break a storefront or shoot a Jewish child, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  Looking back today, we cannot comprehend how the unthinkable was thinkable. 

 

Several things came together to make all of this a reality.  It wasn't so much that human life was devalued, it was that the Jew was not really human.  Many are familiar with the word Ubermensch which was created by Freidrich Neitzsche, meaning "superman".  But there was another word in German, Untermensch, which came into use in the 1920's before Hitler and his Nazis were in power.  It means "underman", or "sub-human."  Later, in his book, Der Untermensch, Heinrich Himmler described the Jewish Untermensch: "The sub-human-- that biologically same shaped creation with hands, feet and a kind of a brain, with eyes and mouth, is nonetheless a totally different, terrible creature, is only an approximation of man, with human-like facial features--spiritually, psychologically, however standing lower than any animal."  It only took a few generations of teaching and preaching this point of view for it to be widely accepted. 

 

The Jews were a problem to be eliminated, and why not use murder to extinguish something that was not human?   There was no need to keep this secret from the German people, as had been the case with the Nazi euthanasia program.  And medical science had provided some of the breakthroughs in the mass execution process, for it was easier to exterminate people from behind a cement wall with gas than it was to actually put a bullet in the back of someone's head.  The execution process had now become a "procedure". 

 

We are fortunate now to live in a world where nothing like that could ever happen again.  Basic truths about life and what it means to be a human will not change because of a few generations of teaching and educating.  Our modern society values human life far too much to take lives to serve its own purposes.  We would never look at the human condition and its difficulties as a simple "problem" needing a simple "solution."  We would never allow medicine, with its wondrous ability to preserve life, to be used to perform "procedures" to eliminate human beings.  We would never, in this world today, put to death people without their knowledge or consent, as the Nazi euthanasia doctors did, simply because someone decided someone else was "unfit."  Something like this, suffering on an unimaginable scale, could never happen again. 

 

Right?

 

 

(doctortipster.com)

 

"...that biologically same shaped creation with hands, feet and a kind of a brain, with eyes and mouth...is only an approximation of man, with human-like facial features."

 

Part V to follow...