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Tolerance and Inhumanity Jeff McDonald

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Martin Niemoeller

  The Nazi campaigns of persecution and mass murder caused many people to resist the Nazis in the Third Reich itself and throughout occupied Europe.

  Although Jews were the primary victims, they too resisted Nazi oppression in a variety of ways, both collectively and as individuals

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  Facing almost certain death, many Jews resisted the Germans and their collaborators, as underground resistance movements developed in over 100 ghettos.

  Jewish prisoners succeeded in initiating uprisings in some of the Nazi camps, as partisan units developed in France, Belgium, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Poland.

  While organized armed resistance was the most direct form of opposition to the Nazis, resistance also included escape, hiding, cultural activity, and other acts of spiritual preservation.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_nm.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005213&MediaId=3543

  Keys to survival   Chance   Will to survive   Staying clean   Wish to bear witness   Family

  Superior, armed power of the Germans.   German tactic of “collective responsibility.”

  This retaliation tactic held entire families and communities responsible for individual acts of armed and unarmed resistance.

  Isolation of Jews and lack of weapons.   Secrecy and deception of deportations

  Nazi deception and the human tendency to deny bad news in the face of possible harm or death took over as most Jews did not believe the stories of the gas chambers.

http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/resource/resistance.pdf

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  Acts of unarmed resistance were more common as Jewish ghetto activists did not usually risk armed resistance until the last days and weeks before the destruction of the ghettos. These acts included:   Underground newspapers and radios   Acts of sabotage   Underground couriers   Spiritual Resistance

  Spiritual resistance refers to the attempts by people to maintain their humanity, personal integrity, dignity, and sense of civilization in spite of attempts by the Nazis to dehumanize and degrade them.

  Most often, spiritual resistance refers to the refusal to have one's spirit broken even in the midst of horrible degradation. Forms include:   Culture and Education   Documentation (Archives)   Religious Observance

  Armed resistance in the ghettos was an act of desperation that came after the Jews realized that the Nazis planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

  Initially greeted with skepticism, the reports of the death camps were later verified by couriers and could no longer be denied by the ghetto inhabitants.

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Jewish armed resistance . . . , when it came, did not spring from a sudden impulse; it was not an act of

personal courage on the part of a few individuals or organized groups: it was the culmination of Jewish defiance, defiance that had existed from the advent

of the ghetto.

Vladka Meed, a Holocaust survivor, based on her experience in the Warsaw ghetto

When the Jews were convinced of their impending death, they were empowered by it.

Why does this happen?

  Jewish resistance was most widespread in the occupied territories of eastern Poland, Lithuania, and Belorussia.

  In all, the Jews in at least 60 ghettos had attempted revolts, mass escapes, or the formation of armed underground movements.

  The most successful organized resistance was in Minsk, which helped an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people escape into the forest.

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  On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw.

  The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.

  The population of the ghetto was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews.

  German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.

  Food rationed to the people in the ghetto was not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day.

  Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.

  Smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto was widespread, and kept the death rate from being higher. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005069

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  From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to the death camp at Treblinka.

  After a Jewish “spy” returns from one of the deportations, rumors begin to circulate about the deportations of the remaining 70,000-80,000 Jews in the ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – Video Link

  The Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB)   Organized by young leaders, the ZOB buy weapons

to form an armed resistance.   They push aside the Judenrat and take charge of

ghetto leadership.   They are aided by Catholic Poles and the Polish

Underground.

  January 18, 1943   The ZOB ambush Germans to free deportees and

steal weapons, uniforms and bullets. The SS and police units halted the operation and withdrew

  The liquidation of the ghetto   As a birthday present for Adolf Hitler, on April 19,

1943, the SS and police force appeared outside the ghetto walls, intending to liquidate the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants to Treblinka and the forced labor camps in Lublin.

  The German forces were met with great resistance, as the armed ZOB surprise them and force the Germans to retreat.

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  They return the next day, prepared to bomb and burn the ghetto to the ground.

  The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well- armed and equipped SS and police units.

  On May 8, the headquarters of the ZOB is seized and poison gas kills all those inside (Mila 18).

  They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks before the Germans ended the operation on May 16.

  SS General Stroop reports after the destruction of the ghetto that 56,065 Jews were captured.

  Some 5,000-6,000 were killed in the bombardment and fires, more than 7,000 were shot, almost 7,000 were deported to Treblinka, and most of those remaining were deported to other camps.

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  Some resistance fighters succeed in escaping from the ghetto to join partisan groups in the forests around Warsaw.

  The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the largest Jewish uprising during the Holocaust, and the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe, and inspires Jews in other ghettos to do the same

  Kiddush Hashem – the sanctification of God’s name.   The ultimate act of Kiddush Hashem is when a Jew is

prepared to sacrifice his life rather than transgress any of God’s three cardinal sins: Serving idols (belief in another religion), committing certain sexual acts (such as incest or adultery), or committing murder.

  The Holocaust added a new dimension to the concept of Kiddush Hashem and religious martyrdom.

Many Jews committed suicide during the Holocaust – is this an act of resistance or an act of escape?

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  By the early 1930s, some 20,000 Germans were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  The Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to or fight in the army of any secular government.

  In Nazi Germany, they defied laws and practices that conflicted with their religious beliefs.   They refused to raise their arms in the “Heil, Hitler!”

salute   They did not vote in elections   They would not join the army after the reintroduction of

compulsory military service in 1935.

  Police arrested many Witnesses for their defiance, and by 1939, an estimated 6,000 were detained in prisons and camps.

  An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 Witnesses died in the camps or prisons from hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure, and brutal treatment.

  The Nazis executed more than 200 men for refusing military service

Never say you are walking your last road When leaden skies conceal blue days. Because the hour we have longed for will yet come Our step will beat out like a drum: We are here!

From the green land of palms to the white land of snow We arrive with our anguish, with our pain And wherever a spurt of our blood has fallen Our might and our courage will sprout.

The morning sun will gild our day; And yesterday will vanish with the enemy But if the sun and the dawn are late in coming May this song go from generation to generation like a password.

This song was written with blood, and not with pencil-lead. It's no song of a free-flying bird; A people amongst collapsing walls Sang this song with pistols in their hands.

Hirsch Glik, 1943

http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/index.php?id=zog_nit_keynmol_az_d