Holocaust was
not about race but about the
wealth and power the Jews had gained.
Eighty years ago, the edict marked a turning point in the Nazi party’s efforts to push Jews out of the German economy
www.smithsonianmag.com
Approximately
11 million civilians were murdered during the Holocaust.
The SS and their accomplices murdered approximately
1.5 million Jewish children, thousands of Roma (Gypsy) children,
German children who had mental or physical disabilities and Polish children.
About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for
racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.
At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as
Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at
Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were
Communists.
Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000
Germans institutionalized for
mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called
Euthanasia Program
Approximately 11 million civilians were murdered during the Holocaust. 5,860,000 were Jews (this number is often rounded off as "six million").
5,000,000 were non-Jewish civilians, including Roma people (Gypsies), Serbs, resistance fighters,
anti-Nazi Poles and Germans, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so-called "anti-socials" and "undesirables" such as
beggars, vagrants, and mentally retarded people. All of these groups were
considered to be enemies of the Third Reich (Hitler's government). Only Jews, however, were singled out for complete annihilation.
"Holocaust"
hmh.org
- The earliest victims of Nazi mass murder were people with disabilities. The Nazis saw people with disabilities as a “burden” and killed them using gassing facilities often located at hospitals in Germany. As the Nazis invaded most of Europe, the program expanded to target people with disabilities in multiple countries and people no longer able to work in concentration camps.
Non-Jewish childrenfrom certain targeted groups were not spared. Examples include
- Romani (Gypsy) children killed in Auschwitz
- 5,000-7,000 German children, the vast majority of them non-Jews, killed as victims of the Euthanasia Program
- Children murdered in reprisals, as in the destruction of the Czech town of Lidice; and
- Children shot as civilians in the German-occupied Soviet Union together with their parents.