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Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis
Beginning with two general essays,the book explores Nazi slave labor policies, and Nazi policies in the occupied territories. The remaining chapters examine Nazi treatment of Gypsies, Russian POW's, homosexuals, Catholic activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and pacifists as well as Nazi medical experimentation policies.
1 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 1992
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August 13, 2014
This is a useful collection of short essays by different specialists on some painful and very controversial topics, which seldom get much of an airing. Again, I mention some of the most interesting.
The Polish Experience during the Holocaust
The author of this chapter wishes to protest against the stereotype of Polish antisemitism. So he states that the German victimisation of the Poles has been airbrushed out of history. The conclusion of a study of Nazi statements about the Poles is inescapable : that if the war had continued the Poles would have been obliterated either by outright slaughter in gas chambers or by a continuation of genocide by forced labour, starvation, "reduction of propagation" (a very sinister phrase) and Germanization. In the six years of war Poland lost 22% of its population, 3 million of which were ethnic Poles.
Very often, Poles have been depicted as co-conspirators with the Nazis in the Holocaust, all fanatic antisemites. But many Poles gave aid to Jews however, as recorded at Yad Vashem.
(Note : I hope the author of this chapter never read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kozinski - he would have been foaming at the mouth).
Slavs and Jews : Poland and Ukraine
Many Jews believe that Slavs shared Hitler’s desire to exterminate them. Many times it is said that it was no coincidence that so many of the major concentration camps were located in Poland, that “Poles were only too pleased to accept things that even the Germans wouldn’t stand for”. Elie Wiesel has singled out Ukrainians and Poles for especial condemnation. On the other hand, many Ukrainians seem to think or want to think that no Ukrainian ever harmed a Jew. The author writes:
Millions of Ukrainian civilians were deliberately burned, shot, starved or worked to death. Millions of others were pirated off for slave labour in Germany and untold numbers were frozen or starved to death as Soviet POWs. Slavs therefore were victims but are often portrayed as victimisers. Slavic victims of the Nazis are invisible in the histories of the Jewish Holocaust. The only visible Slavs in the history of the Jewish Holocaust are the collaborators.
Look at these numbers : In an approx population of 36m, 3m non-Jewish Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis. Another 2.4m were sent to Germany as slave labourers. The Israeli War Crimes Investigation Office gives the number of Ukrainian collaborators as 11,000.
(Always the statistics of World War Two will make your head spin.)
Inauguration speech of Erich Koch as Reichskommisar of Ukraine, September 1941:
Our task is to suck from the Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of the Ukrainians… I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the population.
The author of this chapter writes:
The historians record the Czech tragedy of Lidice, but hundreds of Ukrainian Lidices remained unnoticed by the Western scholars. All those women and children perished in anonymity, as if they were not part of humanity.
German-occupied USSR
The civilised world has witnessed nothing else like the violence that was perpetrated against the occupied Soviet Union by the Nazi invaders.
70 million people lived in the occupied Soviet regions of Ukraine, Baltic states, Belarus, Moldova and parts of the RFSR. This was divided into an area of military action and two occupied zones, Ukraine and Ostland. Strict daylight curfew was enforced. All workers became slave labourers, the working day being routinely extended to 14 or 16 hours. Pay was minimal and food severely restricted.
The peasant population could not travel beyond the borders of their territories and could not sell their produce. They had to give the produce to the German forces but were unable to buy anything with hard currency, so they starved, became ill and died of epidemics.
Approx 2 million of the able bodied were sent to Germany to work as slaves.
Approx 8.2 million people died during the Nazi occupation.
The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War
After the Jews, this was largest single group of victims. Their fate has been largely ignored. Between mid 1941 and 1945 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured. In January 1945 there were 930,000 Soviet POWs in the camps. Another 1 million had been released as “helpers of the Wehrmacht”. German statistics indicated that 500,000 has escaped or been liberated by the oncoming Red Army. That leaves 3.3 million, or 57% of the total 5.7 million, who died. Compare this with the 231,000 British and American POWs captured during the war – of these 8348 died, or 3.6%.
Also compare with the German soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviets : during the war 3.25 million were captured and 1.2 million died in Soviet camps, or 36%.
The chief reason for mortality of Soviet prisoners was deliberate starvation combined with totally inadequate shelter during the winters.
***
This book also covers such victims as children, homosexuals, gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, groups who rarely get any kind of concentrated attention.
The Jews suffered uniquely, but it is not disrespectful to say that their terrible fate has obscured the many other victims of the Nazis. I wish this book wasn't quite such a specialist historical series of monographs (hence only 3 stars) but it's still readable. It's extraordinary that so much of this information is hardly known at all generally.
The Polish Experience during the Holocaust
The author of this chapter wishes to protest against the stereotype of Polish antisemitism. So he states that the German victimisation of the Poles has been airbrushed out of history. The conclusion of a study of Nazi statements about the Poles is inescapable : that if the war had continued the Poles would have been obliterated either by outright slaughter in gas chambers or by a continuation of genocide by forced labour, starvation, "reduction of propagation" (a very sinister phrase) and Germanization. In the six years of war Poland lost 22% of its population, 3 million of which were ethnic Poles.
Very often, Poles have been depicted as co-conspirators with the Nazis in the Holocaust, all fanatic antisemites. But many Poles gave aid to Jews however, as recorded at Yad Vashem.
(Note : I hope the author of this chapter never read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kozinski - he would have been foaming at the mouth).
Slavs and Jews : Poland and Ukraine
Many Jews believe that Slavs shared Hitler’s desire to exterminate them. Many times it is said that it was no coincidence that so many of the major concentration camps were located in Poland, that “Poles were only too pleased to accept things that even the Germans wouldn’t stand for”. Elie Wiesel has singled out Ukrainians and Poles for especial condemnation. On the other hand, many Ukrainians seem to think or want to think that no Ukrainian ever harmed a Jew. The author writes:
Millions of Ukrainian civilians were deliberately burned, shot, starved or worked to death. Millions of others were pirated off for slave labour in Germany and untold numbers were frozen or starved to death as Soviet POWs. Slavs therefore were victims but are often portrayed as victimisers. Slavic victims of the Nazis are invisible in the histories of the Jewish Holocaust. The only visible Slavs in the history of the Jewish Holocaust are the collaborators.
Look at these numbers : In an approx population of 36m, 3m non-Jewish Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis. Another 2.4m were sent to Germany as slave labourers. The Israeli War Crimes Investigation Office gives the number of Ukrainian collaborators as 11,000.
(Always the statistics of World War Two will make your head spin.)
Inauguration speech of Erich Koch as Reichskommisar of Ukraine, September 1941:
Our task is to suck from the Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of the Ukrainians… I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the population.
The author of this chapter writes:
The historians record the Czech tragedy of Lidice, but hundreds of Ukrainian Lidices remained unnoticed by the Western scholars. All those women and children perished in anonymity, as if they were not part of humanity.
German-occupied USSR
The civilised world has witnessed nothing else like the violence that was perpetrated against the occupied Soviet Union by the Nazi invaders.
70 million people lived in the occupied Soviet regions of Ukraine, Baltic states, Belarus, Moldova and parts of the RFSR. This was divided into an area of military action and two occupied zones, Ukraine and Ostland. Strict daylight curfew was enforced. All workers became slave labourers, the working day being routinely extended to 14 or 16 hours. Pay was minimal and food severely restricted.
The peasant population could not travel beyond the borders of their territories and could not sell their produce. They had to give the produce to the German forces but were unable to buy anything with hard currency, so they starved, became ill and died of epidemics.
Approx 2 million of the able bodied were sent to Germany to work as slaves.
Approx 8.2 million people died during the Nazi occupation.
The Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War
After the Jews, this was largest single group of victims. Their fate has been largely ignored. Between mid 1941 and 1945 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured. In January 1945 there were 930,000 Soviet POWs in the camps. Another 1 million had been released as “helpers of the Wehrmacht”. German statistics indicated that 500,000 has escaped or been liberated by the oncoming Red Army. That leaves 3.3 million, or 57% of the total 5.7 million, who died. Compare this with the 231,000 British and American POWs captured during the war – of these 8348 died, or 3.6%.
Also compare with the German soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviets : during the war 3.25 million were captured and 1.2 million died in Soviet camps, or 36%.
The chief reason for mortality of Soviet prisoners was deliberate starvation combined with totally inadequate shelter during the winters.
***
This book also covers such victims as children, homosexuals, gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, groups who rarely get any kind of concentrated attention.
The Jews suffered uniquely, but it is not disrespectful to say that their terrible fate has obscured the many other victims of the Nazis. I wish this book wasn't quite such a specialist historical series of monographs (hence only 3 stars) but it's still readable. It's extraordinary that so much of this information is hardly known at all generally.
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