September 29 - The Babi Yar Massacre

This Day in History: 29 September 2020 

 

29 September 1941 

 

79 years ago, today, the Babi Yar massacre began in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, on the outskirts of Kiev. The city had been taken ten days prior by the German army, and special SS forces began to prepare to carry out Adolf Hitler's orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found in the area. More than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine in the north of the city, were ordered to strip naked, then machine-gunned into the ravine. The next day, the massacre ended, and the dead and wounded were covered over with dirt and rock. The massacre has been called the 'largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust'.  

 

Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Russian prisoners of war and Soviet officials were executed at the Babi Yar ravine in a similar manner. It is estimated that during the German occupation, between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed at Babi Yar. As the German army retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide the evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in pyres. However, many eyewitnesses and other evidence verified the atrocities committed at Babi Yar, and thus became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.  

 

Want to find out more about the Babi Yar massacre? Click here for more information, or here for more about the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

The Diary of Anne Frank

The diary tells the story of Anne Frank a Jewish girl living in Germany through the second world war. Anne starts by explaining what life is like during the war. Including some of the rules imposed on her and how it made her more grateful for things such as driving in a car. When things get worse, her family prepare to go into hiding and left soon after her father told her. The diary documents her thoughts and feelings showing that even though these troubled times she was able to act like a teenage girl, talking about her relationships and judging others based on her inactions with them. Anne goes onto talking about daily life in the annex and the things she fears and her reactions to several break in showing how she is terrified of being found out.  Despite this, she always manages to escape by thinking about what she would like to do in the future and imagining being somewhere else. When other people join the Frank family in the annex she hear stories from them about what the outside world is like. The diary also talks about the daily hardships of living in annex such as getting ration portions and daily arguments everyone had with the other residents. Anne wrote letters to other people giving her a better understanding and appreciation of the person. Despite having such a traumatic time, Anne feels humbled her situation, constantly saying that she was very lucky as she knew that many other Jews were having a much harder than she was. AS

“Knowledge is bigotry’s worst enemy”: Remembering and learning from The Holocaust

On April 6th 2011, we joined other local students on the Lessons From Auschwitz Project to Poland. Our visit consisted of visiting the Polish town of Oświęcim, later to become known as Auschwitz, as well as the camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz Birkenau. Now, three months later, we are still trying to process our experience; the immediate shock and anger of standing on the site where so many lost their lives has not been forgotten, but as time passes our desire to voice what we saw, what we felt, what we feel should be done, is becoming more pronounced.

It is easy to distance ourselves from The Holocaust and to ignore the individual stories, lives and cultures of the victims, instead remembering them only for the way they ended; the systematic destruction of six million Jewish people at Auschwitz. We ourselves were guilty of this before our involvement in the Lessons From Auschwitz Project. However it has become clear that this is the least effective way to ensure that The Holocaust is not forgotten. By allowing it to become just another date in history, another mass of people, we are only encouraging the dehumanisation of The Holocaust which so risks there becoming a time when it is looked upon as acceptable, or when it no longer causes shock over the scale of its destruction. The way to target this, the only effective way to really give the victims the dignity that they were denied, is to remember their stories, to share them, and to learn from them.

We were lucky enough to hear a first-hand account from a Holocaust survivor, Freddie Knoller, about his experiences not only at Auschwitz Birkenau, but his life before his capture in Vienna and Paris. It was amazing that hearing the testimony of just one person could make us understand the true reality and effects of The Holocaust more than any lesson or statistic about it could have. This point is perhaps best demonstrated by an analogy made by Nick Robinson, political editor for the BBC. He argues that numbers have come to mean very little in the modern day; we hear about the recession and the bank bail-outs totaling over £850 billion on nearly a daily basis until the figures no longer have an effect. They eventually become meaningless, something used to shock the audience but not reaching them at a deeper level and this is what is happening to The Holocaust as time passes, and it is what must be avoided.

Some may ask why it is so important to re-humanize The Holocaust. Indeed, we discussed at our Lessons From Auschwitz seminars why we should not simply forgive and forget, rather than dwelling on such an incomprehensibly evil event in our history. The answer is twofold. First, not to do so would risk allowing it to happen again. It may sound cliché, but the Holocaust presents an example of when we really must learn from the mistakes of the past. There are still problems of racial and religious tension prominent in today’s society; groups such as Roma Gypsies, who themselves were targeted during the Holocaust, are often greeted with prejudice in modern society, showing that whilst we may not reach the extremes of the 1930s and 1940s, we are far from having learnt from the Holocaust in our treatment of different racial groups.

The second is that, whilst we may try and convince ourselves that we would have acted differently, ordinary people allowed the Holocaust to happen. It was not just the Nazis who orchestrated it, but normal people, involved at every stage, and who watched as trains filled with Jewish prisoners passed through their local train stations as they made their own way to work. Nick Robinson shared with us the example of his Jewish grandfather, who worked as a doctor and received a letter from a client informing him that he still wished to use his services, but would be entering the surgery through the back door; a man who was willing to let a Jewish man save his life but would not help to save his in return. This, more than ever, shows that it is our duty now to educate ourselves and others about the problems in society, and to speak out about that which we consider to be wrong. Only then can we truly claim to have learnt from Auschwitz.

Here is more on Nick Robinson’s work with the Holocaust Educational Trust and you can read Freddie Knoller’s testimony here.

Many thanks to LD for this post

Lessons from Auschwitz: Sterilisation Law

Following my Involvement in the ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ programme (that included a one day visit to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau in April) I have been inspired to follow, and more importantly to, remember and respect those effected by, a number of key dates in the ‘calendar’ of significant events that mark the of years of the Holocaust.

Today marks the 78th anniversary of the Enactment in Germany of ‘The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring’. Commonly known as the Sterilization Law, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, was a statute in Nazi Germany enacted on July 14, 1933, which allowed the compulsory sterilization of any citizen who suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders. The poster above was published in 1936 as propaganda in support of the law.

The list of ‘diseases’ that resulted in the sterilization due to this law included:

Congenital Mental Deficiency
Schizophrenia
Manic-Depressive Insanity,
Hereditary Epilepsy
Hereditary Chorea (Huntington’s)
Hereditary Blindness
Hereditary Deafness
Any severe hereditary deformity.
Any person suffering from severe alcoholism

Nazi leaders believed that only a genetically pure “racial” body would prosper. Thus, state intervention should ensure that only “valuable” and “Aryan” Germans married and reproduced, while others should be prevented from reproducing. Under the Nazi rule, millions of people were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the name of racial hygiene, an effort to purify the German bloodline and establish internationally their superiority as a nation.

This calculated scheme to simply eradicate the reproduction of ‘non-perfect’ people encapsulates the strategic nature and inhumanity of the holocaust. The law, and the lack of opposition towards it, reveals the ever-present human capability to accept discrimination and injustice. Shockingly, Sterilization was never classified as a war crime because so many other Western countries, including the U.S., had similar laws. Thankfully since the darks days of the holocaust we have seen huge global progressions in attitudes to the treatment and acceptance of all kinds of people regardless of disability, sexuality or race. That said, discrimination and injustice is still very much alive all around the world and it is vital that such inhumane legislation as this Sterilisation Law is never forgotten.

For further information, click here for more about Nazi sterilisation and eugenics.
This is an interesting document with useful historical Sources about The Sterilization Law.
This is not specifically about the Holocaust but is a good history of the treatment of People with Disabilities.

Many thanks to ER for this post.

Lessons from Auschwitz

Two of our sixth form students, ER and LD, visited Auschwitz in April as part of a wider programme to remember what took place during the Holocaust and to explore its significance today. The "Lessons from Auschwitz" programme, organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, encourages those who participate to share their experiences with their colleagues back at school. They were also able to attend an event for Student Ambassadors on Tuesday where the political journalist Nick Robinson, whose grandparents fled Germany in the 1930s to escape persecution, spoke of why it was so important to remember what took place.

"It is through human stories and not numbers that the Holocaust comes to life," he said, "but there will come a time when survivors are gone and passing on the Holocaust will rest on future generations, particularly those young people who have participated in Lessons from Auschwitz."

Our ambassadors will be posting articles on the blog based on their experiences, and there will be another opportunity for Year 12s to take part in this programme next year.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. We were reminded of this at Nonsuch by Mr Sides' excellent assembly that focused on some of the lesser known stories of the Holocaust, such as the treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied Greece, and the work of Nicholas Winton, a British businessman who was able to transport 669 Jewish children out of Prague before the Second World War began. You can learn more about him here and here. He is still alive (aged 101!) and recently met 22 of the people who he saved. Channel 5 has made a documentary about him and you can watch it here.

The History Today blog discusses the opening of a new website, The Holocaust Explained, designed to explain why the Holocaust and other acts of genocide took place. There are useful timelines and answers to key questions. There is an also an article discussing the origins of the term "blood libel", used recently and controversially by Sarah Palin. It refers to a particularly unpleasant myth used to spread hysteria about Jewish communities, and is something that really should not be used outside of its historical context.

It may now be 66 years since Auschwitz was liberated, but Holocaust Memorial Day provides an important moment to stop and think about how we always have a choice either to either condone something we know to be wrong through inaction or stand up against it. It is up to us.

Holocaust evidence

The use and misuse of History were discussed several times during Question Time last night. The BNP's use of World War 2 imagery has come under much criticism. Nick Griffin's views on the Holocaust were also rather convoluted. If you are looking for good sources of historical evidence on the subject, this is a very good place to start.

PS: The picture above shows some of the evidence collected by war crimes investigators during the Nuremberg trials.