Speaking as an eye witness (who is an ethnic Roma), not even close. Even until the last country (Montenegro) left the alliance the former Yugoslavia was more ethnically diverse and ethnically tolerate than the break away states around it.
One of the major stumbling blocks to Jewish emigration was the German insistence that Jews basically turn over all of their money and assets to the Reich before being allowed to leave. That made finding countries actually willing to accept Jews much harder. Then there were things like the Haavara Agreement; stranger than any fiction and highly controversial to this day.
I agree the current German strategy of going after nonagenarian accountants & secretaries is both ethically and legally problematic. It’s as if their trying to make up for inadequate Denazification efforts 60+ years to late. One the other hand it’s impossible for me to bring myself to feel any sympathy whatsoever these people. My late grandmother’s thoughts on the matter are not suited to this forum.
Well, I would point out that the invasion of the USSR was only seven months before the Wannsee Conference. And while there were certainly organised attempts to murder Jews in the newly-conquered parts of the USSR, this wasn’t an attempt to murder all Jews; they weren’t shipping Jews from Western and Central Europe to the East to be shot by Einsatzgruppen. Thus I’ll stand by my claim that the project of sytematically murdering all Jews throughout Nazi-held territories didn’t get underway until January, 1942.
I don’t believe the concept of job placement really was all that part of selecting (not to be confused with Selektion.) If you looked fit enough to lug a body you either did it or were killed. If, as many did, you went mad, you were killed. Then the next guy is picked. Big deal.
As to the different of psychological trauma, of course it depends on so many things. Of the camp business, horrible indeed must it have been to be one the prisoners selected to put the corpses in the oven, and clean out the ashes and grease (at Auschwitz even the ashes were put to use, to give traction to trucks in winter).
A movie has just been released in the US, a quite extraordinary one by any account (it’s won all sorts of awards already), called Son of Saul. From an interview with the director I grabbed: “In the film, Saul discovers the body of a boy he believes is his son. It becomes his obsession to find a rabbi in the camp who could recite the mourner’s Kaddish (Jewish prayers for the dead) and then bury the boy.” (http://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/post/son-saul-graphically-exposes-nazi-horrors/
I haven’t seen it.
Oh, but they were. One notorious destination for Western European Jews being sent east for execution was the Ninth Fort near Kaunas Lithuania. As per the link, French, Austrian, and German Jews were sent there for execution. My recollection is that Dutch Jews were also sent.
One particularly egregious example of the practice occurred in the Ninth Fort in November 1941 when German Jews were executed there. And, this was even before January 1942.
My mistake for not being clear, and why I cited it in particular: Saul is a Kapo at one of the ovens in Asuchwitz, and the boy who may or may not be his son passes to him. (I believe, from other articles on the film, that that newspaper’s summary is incorrect: the fact that he himself is not sure is integral to the vision of the film.) The director, according to Wiki, “conceived” of the film from the book The Scrolls of Auschwitz, a collection of testimonies by Sonderkommando members. I am not sure if such a prisoner was a contributor.
In Claude Landzmann’s magisterial Shoah (which, by the way, has no footage from the war years whatsoever), a man speaks about his detail as a Kapo, to pack in as many people as possible in the gas chambers (as they were whipped by SS, not Kapos, I believe, but not checked), to throw the infants on top over their heads, seal the doors, remove the bodies, stack them, and clean the defecation, vomit, and miscarriages enough so from a corridor’s length, at least, it looked unremarkable.
I believe it was a family member (or it might have been a friend) who he told, begged, to move to the corners where his death would be quickest. (For all I know that might not even have been true about the dispersal of the gas, but he thought so.) He dwelled on, and seemed to find this the most upsetting then and now, that the person he frantically whispered to had no comprehension of what he was talking about.
Sonderkommando (“Special Forces”) is the collective name in which Kapo is a rank. The Wiki on the topic in general chooses in fact a (the?) unique photo of a Kapo at that labor in front of an oven (Sonderkommando - Wikipedia). (The picture crops out another man holding a blowtorch; the Wiki on Kapo is here: Kapo - Wikipedia.
I don’t know the circumstances of this photo; it is attributed there to proceedings of Dachau war crimes. There exist only four known photos taken by the Sonderkommando prisoners themselves. (See Georges Didi-Huberman,* Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz* (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2008); a brief essay is online at Yad Vashem which discusses and reprints three of these (http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/29/photographs_sonderkommando.asp#03).
Nitpick.
I think he’s ‘just’ a member of the Sonderkommando shepherding people to the gas chamber, etc.
There are several books by, or including testimony of, Sonderkommando members. We Wept Without Tears came out last year. On the other hand, Inside the Gas Chambers . .was released about five years ago. Both are, how shall I say, difficult reads.
Ignorance fought by this post and your links, thanks.
So the picture that emerges is this: In September 1941, the Germans decide to deport all Reich Jews - but not (at least explicitly) to kill them. They are to be deported to ghettos in the occupied eastern territories. The decision is implemented from October 1941 onwards. At least some of those deported are murdered immediately on arrival (Kaunas, November 1941). In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference decides on the systematic murder of all Jews.
It’s speculative, but it could be that the September 1941 decision didn’t explicitly involve killing, but those at the top fully expected the killing, or at least the early death, of the deported Jews, or many of them. If they didn’t explicitly decide on it, that made it easier for those involved at the lower levels in communicating and implementing the orders to believe, or persuade themselves, that the Jews were simply being relocated, not massacred. Those who made the deportation decision may have intended before much longer to make the murder decision explicitly, it being easier to decide to murder the Jews, and to implement that decision, once they were outside Germany rather than inside.
So we can perhaps see the Wannsee decisions as the culmination of a process which had begun five months earlier, and as not merely deciding on the murder of all Jews, but ratifying a process which had already begun.
But, relevant to the OP, we can still say that the explicitly genocidal phase of the Holocaust didn’t begin until late 1941/early 1942, and the concentration camp system had been in place for years before that.
Another nitpick, but I don’t believe the Wannsee Conference “decided” on much of anything. Rather, it was a meeting at which various bureaucrats from the SS, the Nazi party, and various ministries of the German government were informed of a decision that had already been made. It wasn’t a policy-making meeting, but a meeting to get everyone on the same page regarding a policy that had already been decided on at the very top–undoubtedly by Hitler himself.
Partly, the meeting’s significance in later history stems from the fact that a copy of the minutes of the meeting happened to have survived. Although these were somewhat bowdlerized at Heydrich’s orders, they were still pretty damned clear. But there must have been other meetings, with people much higher up in the Nazi hierarchy, for which we don’t even have a bowdlerized record of the words that were spoken.
- The Nazis needed slave labor.
- It would have been impossible to dispose all the bodies at once.