1076 Ch. 26 • World War II320,000 and 350,000 German “outcasts” between 1934 and 1945; these
included people determined by Nazi doctors to manifest “hereditary simple
mindedness,” alcoholism, homosexuality, chronic depression, schizophre
nia, or those who were deemed “work shy.” Hitler mandated experiments to
determine how thousands of people could be killed “efficiently” in assembly
line fashion.
In 1939, Hitler told Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the leader of the
S.S., to plan for the occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union. The short,
stout Himmler was obsessed with the pagan Germans of prehistory, estab
lishing several spurious academic institutes to study his crackpot theories.
Himmler welcomed Hitler’s order to “eliminate the harmful influence of
such alien parts of the population.” Hitler announced to the Reichstag on
January 30, 1939, that the result of the anticipated war would be “the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” the “final solution.”
Nazi plans to exterminate Jews took shape as German military defeats
mounted in Russia. There the massacre of Russians had already begun. In
January 1941, Himmler announced to S.S. leaders a change in policy. Hitler
no longer wanted to transform Slavs into a slave labor force, but rather
wanted to destroy at least 30 million of them. Germans eventually would
occupy their lands. German troops and death squads executed Russian
prisoners and civilians. Before the war ended, at least 3.3 million Soviet
prisoners of war—of 5.7 million captured—were executed or died in Ger
man prisoner-of-war camps.
A Gestapo directive on July 17, 1941, ordered commanders of prison
camps in the east to liquidate “all the Jews.” In October 1941, the Nazis
began to prepare for the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews. Her
mann Goring ordered Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), the chief of the
secret police, to prepare “a total solution of the Jewish question.” By the
end of 1941, 1 million Jews had been massacred. Heydrich and other Nazi
officials met in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, in January 1942. There they
drew up even more systematic plans for genocide.
The assembly-line-like murders of Jews began, first in mobile vans, using
carbon monoxide gas, then in the extermination camp of Auschwitz
Birkenau near Krakow in southern Poland. By 1942, the Nazis had built
other extermination camps, surrounded by barbed-wire, electrified fences,
and watchtowers (see Map 26.5). Gallows stood in an open space near the
prisoners’ wooden huts. But most victims were exterminated in airtight gas
chambers with Zyklon B gas, chosen because it killed with efficiency. The
victims’ eyeglasses, gold from their teeth, and all other valuables became
the property of the Reich.
Inmates of the camps wore tattered striped uniforms, and they were
identified by numbers tattooed on their arms. They were ordered to file
past an officer, who selected those deemed “unfit” for hard labor, which at
Auschwitz was about 70 to 75 percent. He sent them toward a building
marked “shower” or “bath,” and some were given, in the ultimate cynical