Non-Jewish Victims

of the Holocaust

Jan Courtney
ASC 4170 - Dowling
March 2011

Mauthausen
Concentration Camp
One of two main concentration camps,
Mauthausen, was also one of the only two camps
in all of Europe that were Grade III camps. They
were the toughest camps for the Incorrigible
Political Enemies of the Reich. Many other
camps were intended for all categories of
prisoners, but Mauthausen was mostly used for
extermination through forced labor of educated
people and members of the higher social classes
in countries under the Nazi regime.

Soviet prisoners of war at

Mauthausen concentration camp
in Austria, January 1942

Female inmates at Mauthausen

concentration camp, 1945

Mauthausen
New prisoners arrive after a

week-long trip in open railway

cars with no food or water.
Six thousand Mauthausen

prisoners wait in the camp

courtyard for disinfection. After
24 hours, nearly 140 had died
(July 1941).

The Dead at Mauthausen, April 1945

Roma (Gypsies)
The Nazis termed Roma

work-shy, unproductive and

socially unfit.
The Roma were deported to the

Lodz ghetto and were among

the first to be killed in mobile
gas vans at Chelmno, an
extermination camp in Poland

Example of a gas van

used at Chelmno

Nazi Racial Doctor Robert

Ritter questions a Gypsy
woman. Ritter characterized
Gypsies as a primitive people
incapable of real social
adaptation.

Polish Victims
of the Holocaust
The Poles were considered ideologically
dangerous. That included thousands of
intellectuals and Catholic priests. While
many prisoners were dying in starvation
bunkers, Hitler feasted well with his
field officers.

All Poles will

disappear from the
world. . . . It is essential
that the great German
people should consider
it as a major task to
destroy all Poles.
- Heinrich Himmler

Auschwitz-Berkenau
Concentration Camp

The front gate at Auschwitz deceived inmates with the

words Work Will Set You Free.

Other signs posted on the way to gas chambers instructed

people to lay their clothes down in an orderly fashion to
avoid problems in finding them again after the shower.
The victims did not know that the shower heads emitted
lethal gas.

The Nazi doctors at the death camps tortured men, women

and children and did medical experiments of unspeakable
horror during the Holocaust.

Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs,

castrated and frozen to death. Children were exposed to
experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia,
transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation
endurance and reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made
injections with lethal germs, sex change operations and
removal of organs and limbs.

Father Maximilian Kolbe

Father Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish

Roman Catholic priest who died as
Prisoner 16670 in Auschwitz on
Aug. 14, 1941.

When a prisoner escaped from camp, the

Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by
starvation in reprisal for the escape.

One of the 10 prisoners selected to die cried,

My wife! My children! I will never see
them again! When he heard this, Father
Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in
the prisoners place. His request was
granted.

As the 10 condemned men were led off to

the death block, Father Kolbe supported a
fellow prisoner who could hardly walk. No
one would emerge alive. Father Kolbe was
placed in a starvation bunker for two weeks
and eventually given a lethal injection to end
his life.

Systematic Killing of the

Handicapped
Five handicapped prisoners
photographed at Buchenwald
concentration camp
for propaganda purposes.
1938 1940

Hartheim Castle was a euthanasia killing

center where people with physical and mental
disabilities were killed by gassing and lethal
injection.
Hartheim, Austria

Anti-Nazi Resistance in
the Netherlands

The Ten Boom family were Dutch Christians who

resisted the Nazi regime in the Netherlands by
helping hide Jews and underground resistance
workers in their home, all of whom the Ten Booms
called their extended family.

Corrie Ten Boom and sister Betsie were taken to

Ravensbrck concentration camp, the largest female
camp in the Nazi prison system. Many women were
Jewish; others were political prisoners, Jehovah's
Witnesses, gypsies and criminals. The first two days
they had to sleep out in the open. The rain poured and
the ground became a sea of mud. They were packed
into a huge barracks built to house 400 people, but
there were now 1,400 prisoners in it. They slept on
straw mattresses filled with dust and swarming with
fleas. Even the guards did not like going into the
barracks because of the fleas.

Corrie was honored as a Righteous Gentile and

wrote a book entitled The Hiding Place about her
experiences both in Holland and in the concentration
camp.

Ten Boom Family

Corrie Ten Boom

Evil Personified versus

Righteous Among the
Nations

Hitler was responsible for the

death of more than 5.9 million
Jews (close to two thirds of
Europes Jewish population).
In 1968, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) asked
Corrie to plant a tree in the Garden of Righteousness, in honor of the
many Jewish lives her family saved. Corries tree stands there today
along with a plaque in her memory.

Black Victims of the Holocaust

Black prisoners of
war faced illegal
incarceration and
mistreatment at the
hands of the Nazis.

The Nazis did not uphold the

regulations imposed by the
Geneva Convention in the
treatment of black prisoners.

Jesse Owens debunks

Aryan superiority
Hitlers hatred of blacks

extended to black athletes.

When Jesse Owens, the
American track star, won
several honors at the 1936
Olympics in Berlin, Hitler
refused to be present when the
medals were awarded.
In a performance that would

remain unmatched for 48

years, Owens won four track
and field gold medals in the
same Summer Olympiad,
setting three world records
and one Olympic record.
Jesse Owens greatest opposition didnt run the 100m.
Theres more to the story than just the game.
July 2009 Sports Illustrated ad campaign (South Africa)

Homosexual Targets
of the Holocaust

One attempt by the Nazis to purify German

society was their condemnation of male
homosexuals as socially aberrant. Early in
the Nazi regime, male homosexual
organizations were banned.

In 1934, a special Gestapo division was

established to create pink lists of
homosexuals throughout Germany.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated

100,000 men were arrested, and of these,
some 50,000 homosexuals were sentenced.
Most of these men spent time in regular
prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000
were sent to concentration camps.

Lesbians were not subjected to systematic

persecution. Few women are believed to
have been arrested.

Those defined as homosexuals were designated by a

pink triangle (Jews who were homosexuals were
killed because they were Jews).

Richard Grune
Artist Richard Grune was arrested in

December 1934. He admitted to being

homosexual and was held in protective
custody for five months.
In September 1936, Grune was convicted and

sentenced to prison for one year and three

months. Its estimated that some 50,000 men
served prison terms as convicted homosexuals.
Grunes desire to bring attention to the terror

of the concentration camps led to the 1947

publication of a limitededition portfolio of his
lithographs. His work generally reflects what
he experienced at the Sachsenhausen and
Flossenbrg concentration camps; some
images are based on information from other
survivors.

Roman Catholic
Persecution

After Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich in

January 1933, he closed church-related schools and
started a campaign to defame religious orders in
Germany.

Father Rupert Mayer, pastor of St. Michaels Church in

downtown Munich, was outspoken against this
persecution. He was one of the first to recognize that
Nazism and Christianity were incompatible, and Hitlers
racist rejection of the Old Testament and of anything
Jewish in the New Testament was hysterical.

The Nazis arrested him on June 5, 1937, and he was

imprisoned the first of three times. He remained in
Stadelheim Prison for six weeks. He was re-arrested and
served his sentence for five months. At age 63, the Nazis
arrested him on Nov. 3, 1939 and sent him to
Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp where
his health deteriorated severely.

He was placed in solitary confinement in a Benedictine

abbey in the Bavarian Alps, where he remained until
American soldiers freed him in May 1945. He died
while celebrating Mass on Nov. 1, 1945.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich was executed in

Flossenbrg concentration
camp on April 9, 1945 for his
role in the resistance against
Hitler.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
German Protestant
theologian
Bonhoeffers letters and theological works still
influence Christians throughout the world.

Jehovahs
Witnesses

Jehovahs Witnesses were

subjected to intense
persecution under the Nazi
regime.

The Nazis targeted Jehovahs

Witnesses because they were
unwilling to accept the
authority of the state, because
of their international
connections, and because they
were strongly opposed to both
war on behalf of a temporal
authority and organized
government in matters of
Helene Gotthold, a Jehovahs Witness,
conscience.
was beheaded for her religious beliefs
on Dec. 8, 1944 in Berlin.
Here, she is pictured with her children
in June 1936.

American Prisoners of War (POWs)

Private First Class James

Watkins, 20, of Oakland,

CA, was found at the prison
hospital in Fuchsmuehl,
Germany by the U.S. Third
Army after surviving the
death march from the Berga
concentration camp.

American POWs
An American soldier

stands over the grave of

John Simcox, one of the
POWs who died in the
Berga concentration camp.
A special area of the
Berga cemetery was set
aside for the bodies of 22
Americans, some of whom
were buried in the same
grave without coffins.

American POWs

Thousands of Americans were captured

in the Battle of the Bulge and sent to
Stalag 9B. The Jewish GIs were
segregated and sent to a special barracks.
Later, those Jews and about 270
non-Jews were sent to a little-known
concentration camp called Berga where
they worked in mines with political
prisoners from a Buchenwald sub-camp
at Berga. This prison had the highest
fatality rate of any camp where
Americans were held 20%.

Of the 350 men who were sent there in

February 1945, fewer than 280 survived
the forced labor and subsequent death
march.
Lying on stretchers are some of the 63 emaciated
American POWs liberated in Fuchsmuehl,
Germany.

American POWs
An American soldier sent to

the Berga concentration camp,

where he was worked to the
verge of death. He barely
survived the death march after
the camp was evacuated in
April 1945. He was found at
the hospital in Fuchsmuehl,
Germany

No one yet knows what awaits the

Jews in the twenty-first century

but we must make every

effort to ensure that it is
better than what befell them
in the twentieth, the century
of the Holocaust.
- Benjamin Netanyahu