Of all the atrocities that this century has seen, the ones committed by the Nazis are the most infamous and the most horrible. From 1933 to 1945, the German government under the Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) killed eleven million people, 5,860,000 of them Jews. By the end of World War II, the Nazis had slaughtered two out of three Jews in countries Germany had conquered.

The Nazis did not persecute Jews alone. Five million Christians lost their lives as well. Gypsies; homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses; the physically and mentally handicapped; blacks, Slavic peoples such as Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians; and anybody who resisted or spoke against Hitler’s administration were all persecuted. In occupied countries like Poland, leaders including teachers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, religious officials, and even Boy Scouts were arrested or executed (Friedman ix, x, 1, 11, 146-147).

Adolf Hitler and his followers had planned to do this from the beginning. In the 1920s, Hitler was in jail for his "beer hall Putsch," an attempt to seize power in Germany with his personal army of troopers. There he wrote Mein Kampf, a summary of his ideas. Helping him was Rudolf Hess, another prisoner (Rossel 17-18). Hess would later become one of Hitler’s top aides (Morin 117).

Mein Kampf introduced the main points of Hitler’s philosophy, including anti-Semitism. Hitler blamed the Jews for all problems faced by Germany. He urged Aryans, or Caucasian Gentiles, to maintain the purity of their race by not marrying Jews. He also advised German Aryans to beware of "the Jewish plot." This plot, he argued, was the Jewish control of the government, banks, land, and media (Rossel 18-19). His argument ignored that Germany’s half million Jews comprised less than one percent of Germany’s total population (Meltzer 31). In Mein Kampf, Hitler also promised that he would eliminate all half-black, half-German children. Furthermore, he also stated his intention to lead Germany into occupying Eastern European nations in order to give Germans lebensraum, or living room (Friedman 91, 146).

Hitler got out of jail in 1924 and immediately began rebuilding his support and his troopers. His party received a major boost from the Great Depression. Spurred by the New York Stock Exchange’s plummet in 1929, the depression plunged the world into an economic slump and Germany into debts even greater than they had been before. A country humiliated by losing World War I was now poor as well. It was an excellent atmosphere for a new party to take control (Rossel 19-20).

Hitler and the Nazi party campaigned vigorously for the 1930 elections. Promising jobs and blaming Germany’s problems on Jews and the old German government, the Nazis won six and a half million votes, becoming Germany’s second largest party. The Nazis had so much political influence that when the aging German president, Paul von Hindenberg, failed to find a moderate leader to head the new government in 1933, he finally appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor (Rossel 20-21).

Hitler, meanwhile, had been forming his brown-clad storm troopers into a force of nearly half of a million men. With this power, he was soon able to begin arresting those who held opposing political views or had spoken against him. Eventually, he persuaded von Hindenberg to sign a decree allowing Hitler and the Nazis to control most freedoms. After this decree, the Nazis could read mail and telegrams and tap telephone conversations. They could also search without warrants, confiscate personal belongings, and control the media. It is not surprising that shortly after this decree, Hitler became dictator of Germany (Rossel 22-23).

The first enforcers of Hitler’s regime were his troopers, often called Brownshirts or the SA. Also working with the Nazis were the secret police known as the Gestapo and Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the SS. Nicknamed the Blackshirts, the SS later took control of German national security (Rossel 25). Eventually, Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS, created division of security police labeled the SD. The SD, which operated chiefly in Germany, was responsible for dealing with the "Jewish question." In other words, the SD was in charge of the complete elimination of the Jewish race and religion (Rossel 65-66).

The powerful Nazis quickly began establishing concentration camps (Morin 11). There was no shortage of prisoners, since the Gestapo has the legal "right" to throw anybody in these camps for any length of time. By the end of 1933, at least fifty concentration camps had been constructed throughout Germany. In the beginning, they were not as ghastly as they would later become; often, guards would severely beat inmates and then ransom them to family and friends (Meltzer 27-28).

This began to change when the SS took control. The camps now held three types of prisoners. The first type, "politicals," were Communists, members of the Social Democratic Party, Jehovah’s Witnesses, clergy who opposed the Nazis, Nazis who had been arrested, and anybody else who had spoken out against Hitler’s regime. The second category, "asocials," was composed mainly of inveterate criminals and sex offenders. Jews and Gypsies made up the last group, which was known as "inferior races." This group included children; fifteen percent were under the age of twelve (Meltzer 28).

Also in the camps were homosexuals. Although many top Nazis, including Hitler himself, were rumored to be gay, homosexuals were sometimes more brutally persecuted than political prisoners. Most of those arrested were castrated, imprisoned, or sent to concentration camps. Hitler and the SS often accused prominent Nazis of being homosexual as a method of purging them. The Nazis killed thousands of homosexuals by the end of World War II (Friedman 26-28).

The main target of Hitler's political and ethnic cleansing was the Jews, called "non-Aryans" by the Nazis. The Nazis defined a Jew as any person – the Nazis hardly considered them people – with a Jewish parent or grandparent. Hitler had a deep personal prejudice and hatred of Jews. He once wrote that a Jew "’is, and remains, the typical parasite…’" (Chartock and Spencer 174) Hitler’s sentiments carried into those of the Nazi Party. Part of the Party’s anthem is translated as "’When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then everything will be fine!’" (Meltzer 34)

With this philosophy in mind, the Nazis began their systematic campaign of persecution of the Jews. On April 1, 1933, Hitler announced the first official government act against non-Aryans (Meltzer 34): a one-day boycott on all Jewish stores (Chartock and Spencer 48). SS and SA men blocked the entrances to the shops, forcing prospective customers to seek Aryan-owned businesses. A week later, a German law stopped Jews from working for the public or as a civil servant. In Germany, the civil service included teaching positions, working with radio broadcasting, and most branches of entertainment. Soon, Jews could no longer be members of the guilds controlling the arts or of newspaper staffs. They could not hold important positions in businesses (Meltzer 34-35). Other laws passed in 1933 forbade Kosher butchering and allowed the government to revoke German citizenship for those it considered "undesirable" (Chartock and Spencer 49).

These developments convinced many Jews that it was time to seek a new life abroad. More than 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany by the end of 1933 (Meltzer 35).

Those who remained received treatment at the hands of the Nazis that was worse than before. The Nuremberg laws, introduced in 1935, pushed the Jews out of German society. Jews could only marry other Jews and attend Jewish schools. Sleeping and dining cars on railroads, barbershops, hospitals, restrooms, and waiting rooms all became segregated. The Nazis set curfews and shopping hours for the Jews and denied non-Aryans the use of public telephones. At the same time, they tore private phones out of Jewish homes (Meltzer 36-37).

To enforce all of this, the Nazis had to be able to identify Jews. Jewish passports and ration cards had to be marked with a "J," and laws required all Jews to carry special identification. Jewish men and women had to use the middle names "Israel" and "Sarah," respectively. Later laws required non-Aryans six years old and older to wear a Star of David on the left breast of their clothing. Jews also had to paste the stars, which had "Jude" (German for "Jew)" written on them, on their doors (Meltzer 37-38).

The Nuremberg laws dealt with the Romani, who are often called Gypsies, similarly. Gypsies were the only race besides Jews that was to be completely destroyed, and many Romani were sterilized. All Gypsies became second-class citizens. Anybody with two or more Romani great-grandparents was considered a Gypsy. Eventually, at least half a million Romani would die (Friedman 10).

In 1938, the Nazis conducted a mass "resettlement" of Jews. Although not as terrible a fate as the concentration camps, the deportation into Poland was still an outrage to the 15,000 people subjected to it. When the son of one of the refugees heard of what his father had gone through, he stormed into the German embassy in Paris and shot a minor official, killing him (Rossel 35-36).

This provided the Nazis with the perfect excuse for a heightened and even more appalling persecution of Jews. On the ninth and ten of November 1938, "the night of broken glass," government-instigated rioters destroyed Jewish shops, businesses, homes, and synagogues. The police were under orders not to interfere except to protect the property or the lives of Aryans (Meltzer 51).

Everything went according to the terrible plan. The majority of Germany’s synagogues were burned, hundreds of homes were destroyed, and 7,500 shops were ransacked or devastated. Although the property damage was estimated at several hundred million marks, the human figures are even more disturbing: 1,000 murdered and 26,000 locked away in concentration camps (Meltzer 51-52).

While the Nazis were busy attacking Judaism, Christianity was also under assault. Even though Hitler – who professed to be Catholic – had signed a Concordat in 1933 with the Pope in which Hitler promised to allow the Catholic church to continue to function, Hitler dissolved the Catholic Youth League. In its place, all Catholic children were required to join the Hitler Youth. Religious processions and Catholic newspapers were banned. Crucifixes had to be removed from some Catholic schools, and the Nazis arrested those who tried to replace them. Nazis razed the residence of Cardinal Faulhaber, one of the Catholic officials who dared to protest against the persecution of his Jewish brethren (Friedman 31-33, 47).

The Protestant churches also suffered. Hitler attempted to replace Christ with himself and to eliminate the Old Testament in his Nazi-created church, known as the German Christian Faith Movement. To counter this, three thousand Protestant pastors formed the Confessional Church (Friedman 33).

When all is accounted for, at least 2,270 priests and ministers were sent to concentration camps, most to Dauchau. Many nuns also went to the camps. Most did not survive (Friedman 33).

Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to fight in any war, were one of the groups the Nazis considered dangerous. To protect itself, the Nazi government decreed that Jehovah’s Witnesses could no longer meet, pray, study, sing hymns, or distribute their literature. Of the 25,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses living in Germany, more than 6,000 were imprisoned. Many children of that faith were sent to state homes to be raised as Nazis (Friedman 47-49).

Blacks and Arabs, regardless of their religion, were condemned and attacked as well. Some of them were members of the Allied force occupying Germany after World War I. The children of the black occupying soldiers became known as the "Rhineland bastards." Black athletes, such as Jesse Owens, and black musicians were also hated (Friedman 91).

Under the "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," about 400 "Rhineland bastards" were sterilized by Commission Number Three, a secret Nazi group assigned to the task. Black prisoners of war were separated from their units and shot. Had Hitler been victorious in his African campaign, large numbers of black troops would have lost their lives (Friedman 92-93).

People who did not belong to what Hitler considered an acceptable race or religion were not the only people the Nazis tried to eliminate. The "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," passed in 1933, ordered all people who were genetically physically or mentally handicapped, deaf, blind, or alcoholic to be sterilized (Friedman 64). This was in spite of the fact that Hitler had established a Nazi organization for the deaf (Friedman 110). A program of euthanasia, or "mercy killing," set up in 1939 quickly killed 75,000 mentally ill or retarded people. This continued until 1941, when the SS men in charge of the program were transferred to the concentration and death camps. After 1941, the Nazis reduced fuel and food ration to mental institutions so occupants starved or froze to death (Friedman 64-65).

As in every dictatorial regime, the Nazis sought to eliminate all opposing political parties. Two major victims were the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party (Friedman 111-112). SA men looted or destroyed Communist and Socialist offices and newspapers. They beat and arrested leaders of opposing parties (Rossel 24-25).

Through all this time, Hitler never changed his views on the Holocaust that he was in the process of creating. His hatred of the Jews, especially, had not weakened. As cited in "In the Nazis’ Words," Hitler addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in a speech commemorating the sixth anniversary of his rise to power:

"Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

It was not the "international Jewish financiers" who would plunge the world into war again, but Hitler and his armies. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Although the international community had tolerated Germany’s annexing Austria and portions of Czechoslovakia in 1938, this was the last straw. The United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany in September. The Second World War had begun (Morin 11-12).

Germany’s new enemies did not slow down its army in the beginning. The German military won victories in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Greece. Germany forced each nation it conquered to adapt a legal system toward Jews similar to Germany’s (Rossel 43, 45 48, 50). Also in 1939, the Nazis required all Gypsies to register with the Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace (Friedman 10).

Germany’s persecution of Jews seemed, in some countries, to be even worse than in Germany itself. Some of the countries subjugated by Germany, such as Poland, had already started anti-Semitic programs of their own before Germany’s takeover. According to Meltzer, the Polish government was coordinating its policy of anti-Semitism with Germany’s by 1938. Consequently, it was an easy transition from one regime’s oppression of Jews to another’s. If this was an attempt to appease Germany, it did not work. Poles were killed by the Nazis along with Jews (63-64).

Germany’s extermination of Jews in Poland began with the invasion. The Nazis deployed Einsatzgruppen, "mobile killing units" run by the SS, into Poland along with the invasion force. Their mission was simple and brutal: to kill as many Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and inmates of mental institutions as possible (Friedman 65). Aided by soldiers and the local populace, members of the Einsatzgruppen were drafted from the military division of the SS. Killing with guns and, later, gas vans, the Einsatzgruppen killed an estimated fourteen million Jews by the end of World War II (Meltzer 64).

Reinhard Heydrich, the SD’s leader, and Adolf Eichmann, head of the "Jewish desk" in Berlin, thought that the Einsatzgruppen alone could not solve the "Jewish question." Together, Heydrich and Eichmann decided to herd Jews into ghettoes (Rossel 65-66), which were Nazi-designated, walled-in, densely populated Jewish communities in large Polish cities such as Kovno, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw. Soon, German members of Jewish descent and faith began to join them. The Nazis supplied food to the ghettoes, but only if their occupants continued to work. The supplies the Nazis did provide usually allowed each person 800 calories worth of fats, bread, and potatoes each day. This led to starvation by the thousands, since an average man needs 2,000 calories daily just to maintain his body weight (Rossel 54-55, 58).

The largest ghetto was in Warsaw (Meltzer 82). Established in 1940 (Rossel 114), it occupied an area that had housed only 145,000 people before the war. After the Nazis took over, the Warsaw ghetto contained nearly half of a million people. Diseases spread quickly; a typhus outbreak in 1940 killed nearly 16,000 of its inmates. The Warsaw ghetto had fifteen well-guarded entrances. The only people allowed to leave were the members of closely watched work gangs, although small children sometimes managed to sneak out over the ghetto walls or through the city’s sewer system. The workers and the children occasionally smuggled in extra food or firewood, risking execution to do so (Rossel 56, 58).

Councils of Jews, called the Judenräte, ran the ghettoes. Formed by the Nazis, these councils had to obey the wishes of the Germans or be replaced. Enforcing their word was a Jewish police force, which the Germans issued uniforms, clubs, and whips. Many of these enforcers were criminals or individuals trying to keep their families alive. Since the Germans allowed the police to terrorize the occupants of the ghettoes, the police force provided little or no help to the Jews inside the ghettoes (Rossel 59). Gypsies were also separated from the rest of the world, although into areas separate from Jewish ghettoes (Friedman 10).

The German guards added to their passive and indirect abuse by actively killing and beating the Jews. Although, as Ludwik Hirszfeld, a hematologist and serologist who taught in a secret medical school in the Warsaw ghetto (Friedman 148), pointed out in Meltzer’s book, that not all German guards are murderers, they often treated their dogs better than the human beings they guarded. (85-86)

Ghettoes were never designed to be permanent. Instead, they were stopping places on the way to concentration camps. To make use of those in the ghettoes, the Gestapo rented out Jewish slaves to German industries (Rossel 66, 70).

The transfer to the camps began in 1942 when the top Nazis reached a decision to proceed with the "final solution to the Jewish problem" and kill the Jews in the ghettoes (Rossel 70). It would continue almost until the surrender of Germany (Meltzer 117).

When each trainload of people arrived at the camps from the ghettoes, Nazi officers first determined who would die immediately. Those who escaped this fate had to survive in a world much more horrible than the ghettoes. Jewish guards known as kapos served the same purpose in the concentration camps as the Jewish police force in the ghettoes. The ones who appointed and supervised the kapos were German, and sometimes Polish or Ukrainian, guards who were quick to beat or shoot anyone who disobeyed. Everything was scarce or missing altogether – bathrooms, food, medicine, and living space. Within a few days, thousands would die. The guards sometimes practiced their marksmanship on their captive targets for amusement. Some of the prisoners who lived preferred death to the hellish conditions, so they committed suicide by jumping onto the electric fences. Others tried to escape. Even their successes brought suffering to rest of the camp. If one person escaped from a barracks, the rest were executed (Rossel 71-72, 74).

As ghastly as the concentration camps seemed, another level existed in the hierarchy of Nazi-created terrors. Death camps, which were sometimes only an electric fence away from concentration camps, were the final stop for those condemned to death. The doomed women were first shaved so that their hair could be used to make blankets for German soldiers. Then all victims were told that they had to report to the showers. After receiving bars of soap, some still believed that they were going to clean themselves. Most, however, realized the appalling truth. They were going to gas chambers (Rossel 74-75).

In the beginning, the camps used carbon monoxide. Later, camp commandants such as Rudolf Hess discovered that the hydrogen cyanide in a product called Zyklon B worked more quickly – in as little time as three minutes. Zyklon B was dropped in pellet form into the gas chambers, where it turned into gas and killed the people crammed into the "shower" (Meltzer 127, 130).

The next thing the Nazis had to deal with was the amount of corpses they manufactured – as many as 34,000 in twenty-four hours. Initially, they buried the bodies in mass graves in the woods. However, the stench spread for miles, and the space needed for the graves grew with the gassing rate. Therefore, the Nazis started to cremate the bodies, first on a small scale, then in giant crematoria. Eventually, the camp administrators discovered that open pits were the most efficient way to destroy the bodies. Western "culture" had reached the ultimate ability to destroy human life (Meltzer 130).

The Nazis threw the Romani into gas chambers, as well. In 1942, all members of one tribe of the Gypsies, called the Sinti, who were serving in the army, were sent to Auschwitz. Members of other tribes were used in painful and pointless "scientific" experiments (Friedman 10).

Naturally, all Jews were not killed. Many members of other religions, especially Catholics in France and Protestants and Catholics in Belgium, hid Jews, especially children. One Catholic priest arranged to continue to instruct several Jewish children in hiding in the Jewish faith. Resistance movements also managed to smuggle Jews out of German-occupied nations. One Dutchman named Joop Westerweel ran a sort of Holocaust Underground Railroad, leading Jewish youth on foot out of Nazi territory to Spain. The Nazis caught him, and he gave his life for his heroic deeds (Rossel 84-85).

Occasionally, entire communities moved to save the Jewish population, such as in Bulgaria, where people mobbed the streets, shouting, "We want the Jews back!" (Rossel 85) The entire nation of Denmark worked to rescue the Jews. Led by King Christian X, who told a Nazi official that "The Jews are part of the Danish nation," the Danish government officially protested against Germany’s plans to round up Jews and send them to death camps. At the same time, Danish citizens worked with Sweden to slip more than 7,000 Jews across the fifteen mile stretch of water separating Denmark from Sweden. After the Jews left, the Danes protected the property of their compatriots (Rossel 86-87).

During the destruction of the people Hitler and the Nazis had marked for death, the tide had started to turn against Germany. The Allies landed at Normandy, France on D-Day, June 6, 1944 and began to fight their way across Europe. To the east, the Russians moved across Poland. By April 30, 1945, the situation appeared so desperate that Hitler killed himself in a Berlin bunker. A week later, Germany officially surrendered. The war in Europe was over (Rossel 115-116).

Part of ethics is deciding who is accountable for unethical actions and how to deal with it. Ethics in wartime is no different. When Germany surrendered, the Allies had to face several important decisions regarding the war crimes committed by the Nazis. There was a general consensus that the top Nazi officials had to be punished for their actions. The main disagreement was on how to proceed. Some Allied leaders were worried that a trial might give the Nazis an opportunity to defend their appalling doctrine. Therefore, those officials recommended that Nazi war criminals be executed without a trial. That idea was quickly rejected. In a civilized society, the Allies concluded, there can be no executions without due process of law (Morin 14).

Eventually, the Allies decided to form an International Military Tribunal (IMT) consisting of four judges and four alternates to try the Nazi leaders. The judges and alternates would come from France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two new categories of war crimes were introduced by the tribunal. The first, crimes against peace, consisted of starting or waging aggressive war or being involved in a conspiracy to do so. The second category was crimes against humanity, which included the enslavement or murder of civilians both before and during the war.  The IMT also tried defendants charged with traditional war crimes, such as murder, rape, and plunder (Morin 15-16).

After a great deal of debate, the Allies agreed on twenty-four people to try. They represented a selection of political, economic, and military leaders. Some important names were not on the list, including Hitler and Joseph Goebells, Hitler’s propaganda minister, both of whom had killed themselves. Another war criminal who had committed suicide was Heinrich Himmler, the man responsible for running the concentration camps (Morin 18).

The trials began in the German city of Nuremberg – the same place the Nazis had held party rallies – on November 20, 1945. The trial was, in some people’s minds, unfair, since there were no technical rules of evidence. Furthermore, they argued, how impartial could a trial be if the defendants were the losers in a war and the judges and prosecutors were the victors (Morin 25-26)?

Whether fair or unfair, the trial lasted until the end of August, 1946. The judges deliberated until September 30, when they announced their verdict 33 (Morin 39).

The following table, based on pages 115-120 of Isobel B. Morin's book Days of Judgement, summarized the results of the trial.  Two of the defendants charged were never tried.  Gustav Krupp was found unfit to stand trial.  Robert Ley committed suicide before he could be tried.

¹All defendants were charged with conspiracy.   Back

Were the Nuremberg Trials unfair?  Or did some powerful German officials get what they deserved?  Answer this and other questions at our message board.