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Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the “extermination of the Armenians” had led him to “the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine” over which Aryans would eventually triumph.5 He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: “Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality,” he exclaimed. “Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenian?“6 On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey’s regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government.7
A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the USSR during June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now followed close behind the advancing German army. Within thirty-six months, these Einsatzgruppen and their subunits, the Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, shot about two million people, according to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jews, although the Einsatzgruppen’s net also caught hundreds of thousands of Communists, Slavs, Romanis, Poles, homosexuals, hospital patients, unarmed prisoners of war, and even orphan children. These two million murders, moreover, do not include the gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death factories that began in the wake of the invasion.8
A 1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland smuggled out of Warsaw by the Jewish Labor Bund provided remarkably detailed and accurate early documentation of the work of the Einsatzkommandos.
From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using the Ukrainians and Lithuanian fascists for this job. It began in Eastern Galicia in the summer months of 1941. The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place—a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets. In many towns Jews were carried off to an “unknown destination” and killed in the adjacent woods. Thirty thousand Jews were killed in L’wow [Lvov], 15,000 in Stanislawow, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 2,000 in Zloczow, 4,000 in Brzezany (there were 18,000 Jews in this town, now only 1,700 are left). The same has happened in Zborow, Kolomyja, Sambor, Stryj , Drohobycz, Zbaraz, Przemyslany, Kuty, Sniatyn, Zaleszczyki, Brody, Przemysl, Rawa Ruska, and other places. . . . The number of the Jews murdered in a beastly fashion in the Wilno [Vilna] area and in Lithuania is put at 300,000.9
The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler’s government and German society. In January 1942, fourteen senior German government bureaucrats met at SS offices at Lake Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin, to coordinate efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes in their approach to the “Jewish Question.” Officials in charge of the economic exploitation of the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of able-bodied Jews as slave laborers, while Reinhard Heydrich of the SS had pushed for mass execution by the Einsatzgruppen. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement schemes, though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees and the extent of terror to wreak upon them.



The Pink Triangle: Gay Rights, Reproductive Rights and the Third Reich


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