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East Germany Holocaust
After Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the Nazis conducted
a campaign to "purge" German society. Those who could not be
integrated into the new state were removed; German concentration
camps became the repository for all "socially undesirable"
elements, including communists, socialists, liberals, pacifists,
homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and gypsies. Himmler's SS, to
which the Gestapo was subordinated, became responsible for this
process. Arrests were eventually extended to include Jews, a
small minority, which had been made a scapegoat for Germany's
problems.
Anti-Semitism, which had been emphasized by Austrian and
German conservative political parties since the late nineteenth
century, assumed a radical form under the Third Reich. The Aryan
Paragraph of 1933 decreed that Jews could not hold civil service
positions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legalized racist antiSemitism , deprived Jews of the right to citizenship, and
restricted relationships between "Aryans" and Jews. These laws
did, however, initially reduce random acts of violence against
Jews on the streets. By 1938 Jews were not permitted to change
their names and were restricted in their freedom of movement.
After the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) of November 9,
1938, during which acts of violence were perpetrated by Nazis
against Jews in all parts of Germany, the persecution of Jews
entered a new phase: random acts of violence were replaced by the
systematic elimination of the Jewish population in Germany,
numbering about 600,000 at that time.
During World War II, the SS filled the concentration camps
with foreign nationals, Russian prisoners of war, and non-German
Jews. After 1941 the number of camps and inmates increased more
rapidly when the SS began to create extermination camps. NonJewish prisoners were assigned to forced labor and/or designated
for liquidation; but the "final solution," the Nazi euphemism for
genocide, called for the extermination of every Jew. Himmler's
Special Duty Section (Sonderdienst--SD) took charge of the
extermination camps. The SS carried out extermination by working
victims to death, physical torture, medical experimentation, mass
shootings, and gassing. The tempo of the mass murder of Jewish
men, women, and children was accelerated toward the end of the
war. Hitler's preoccupation with the "final solution" was so
great that the transport of Jews was at times given preference
over the transport of war matériel. Some authorities estimated
that 6 million European Jews became victims of the Holocaust. A
large number (4,565,000) of these victims came from Poland and
the Soviet Union; about 125,000 German Jews were exterminated.
Data as of July 1987
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