The following has been supplied by our Branch Officer Alistair Mitchell:
Every year on 27 January we mark Holocaust Memorial Day by remembering the millions of people killed in the Holocaust.
Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. From the time they assumed power in 1933, the Nazis used propaganda, persecution, and legislation to deny human and civil rights to Jews. They used centuries of anti-semitism as their foundation. They introduced legislation intended to deny Jews freedom and restrict their rights. Boycotts of Jewish doctors, lawyers and shops began in 1933 and by 1935 Jews were not allowed to join the civil service or the army. The introduction of the Nuremberg laws in September 1935 further increased Jewish marginalisation. Jews were banned from marrying non-Jews and their citizenship was removed, including their right to vote. As time progressed, more restrictions were brought in – Jews were barred from all professional occupations and Jewish children were prohibited from attending state schools. In 1938, further laws decreed that men must take the middle name ‘Israel’ and women ‘Sarah’. All German Jews would have their passports marked with a ‘J’. Jews were not allowed to sit on park benches, go to swimming pools or the theatre or cinema.
As Jews had more and more of their rights taken away from them, some of them packed their suitcases and tried to leave the country. Some parents decided to send their children away to safety, through a programme known as the Kindertransport.
The Kindertransport was a unique programme which ran between November 1938 and September 1939. Approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, were sent from their homes and families in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Great Britain to escape from Nazi Germany. Strict conditions were placed upon the entry of the children and every child had to have a guarantee of £50 to finance his or her eventual re-emigration. Many of the children did not see their families again.
The first concentration camp was established at Dachau on 23 March 1933. As the Nazis captured more territory through wartime invasions, the camp system was greatly expanded and used as a tool in the creation of a single-race state. The Nazis created thousands of camps – including forced labour, transit, and extermination camps throughout German-occupied territories.
Camp inmates were often subject to forced labour, overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, starvation and cruel treatment, with a high death rate resulting from the poor conditions.
After initial attempts to commit mass murder through shootings and mobile killing units proved ‘inefficient’, the Nazis extended the camp system to include six extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Their purpose was to carry out genocide – using gas chambers.
By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children had perished in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps.
