For nearly 25 years, Glen Williams (Sefton Unison Branch Secretary) has been running study tours to Auschwitz & Birkenau as part of our anti-racism campaigning. Over that time we’ve introduced thousands of local people young and old to the horrors of the Holocaust staging Holocaust Survivor events at the local Community Cinema, taking hundreds of people to Poland to Auschwitz, making films, writing books and helping to coordinate the annual Holocaust memorial Event on 27th January every year as part of national Holocaust Memorial Day.
“Never Again”
It’s A Call to Action not a slogan
Please contact us for details of the next Study Tour
Without being overly dramatic -this tour can change certain aspects of your life – my single aim is for us all to commit to doing something on our return that furthers the aims of the Tour. Finally—it is okay to have fun at times on this tour too!
Glen Williams – Sefton UNISON Branch Secretary
The European Jews
Just under 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, approximately 1.5 million of them were children. Jews were persecuted from the beginning of the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, they were forbidden to marry or have relationships with non Jews, were banned from all professions and the Civil Service, they were not allowed to own businesses. They were targeted for violence and hatred by government films and other propaganda and were prevented by use of ‘quotas’ from emigrating to safety in the USA, Palestine or the UK.
By 1943 the Nazis had built 6 special extermination camps in Poland – Chelmno, Sorbibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Maijdanek and Auschwitz. The biggest of these was Auschwitz in which approximately 1.1 million people were murdered, mainly Jews.
All those selected for extermination were ordered to strip, told they would be taken to showers and then gassed, sometimes in Auschwitz at a rate of 10,000 people a day. The gassings stopped as the Soviet Union captured Poland from the Nazis.
The genocide of the Jews remains the largest planned mass slaughter in history.
The Gypsies
The Gypsies were decreed by the Nazis to be an ‘inferior race’ like the Jews and were rounded up and sent to concentration camps – a massive exercise that went against their traditional way of life. Unlike the Jews they were allowed at first to live in family groups in the camps. They were studied and researched by German Universities in the camps. They were filmed, documented and analysed by pseudo Nazi sociologists who wanted to preserve a record of their way of life before exterminating them all. The Gypsies were sent to the extermination camps in Poland and by 1944 they were virtually annihilated.
Nearly 400,000 Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis a higher proportion of their population than any other group, including the Jews. Persecution of ‘Roma’ and ‘Sinti’ Gypsies continues in some countries to this day.
The Disabled people of Nazi Germany
The Nazis had from the beginning tried to persuade the German people that people with disabilities were a threat to the ‘health’ of the ‘German Master Race’. Films were made and shown at all local cinemas to demonstrate how these people had no real life and were a tremendous cost to the German tax payers. Under the so called 1935 Nuremburg laws many people with disabilities were sterilised – as was also the practice in Sweden and the USA in that period.
The Nazis took this a stage further and declared that they had a responsibility to get rid of ‘life unworthy of life’. People with disabilities – mental health, physical disabilities, the deaf and sometimes the blind – were sent to special institutions. The public were told that they would be cared for.
In fact they were murdered after a medical assessment carried out by 2 Doctors and a Social Worker. They were murdered by lethal injection and by gas, including tens of thousands of children.
The Political and Religious Opponents of the Nazis – Red Triangles
These prisoners were overwhelmingly, but not only, people from the ‘left’ of German politics – the trade union organisers, members of the German Social Democratic Party and the German Communist Party. There were also a number of Christian Ministers and traditional Conservative Politicians, individuals who dissented from the views of the organisations they belonged to.
It is important to state that it was only with the obvious certainty that the war was lost that many elements of the political right in Germany then decided to turn on Hitler—after having previously supported him.
After taking power in 1933 the Nazis banned and terrorised the trade unions and other political parties. The first concentration camp, set up in Dachau, was designed to keep ‘enemies of the state’ in prison. 30,000 left wing activists were rounded up and sent to camps in 1933. Most were tortured and killed. As they were still technically ‘German’ and therefore members of the master race, they were not systematically murdered like the Jews or the Gypsies. They were made to work in labour camps.
One particular group – the Jehovah’s witnesses – refused to assist the war effort. They were offered freedom from the camps if they gave up this belief, very few of them did and many of them died in Auschwitz.
Lesbians and Gay Men – The Pink Triangles
Nazi Germany is not the only system of government that has persecuted and discriminated against people because of their sexuality, but the Nazis systematically attacked and persecuted the Gay community as an offence against the Master Race. Central to Nazi ideology was the notion of the community made up of families, and families made up of women who had a subservient role to men. Within this context homosexuality was deemed unnatural, perverse even and an obvious threat to the vitality of the Nazi family.
The Gay community in 1930s Germany was besieged, persecuted and then imprisoned. German citizens were encouraged to spy on them and report them to the Gestapo – the state Police. Their rela-tionships were forbidden by law. They were sent to concentration camps and forced to carry out labour and work of a really demanding nature as punishment.
Yet some of Hitler’s closest allies were secretly gay. Most famously his former second in command Ernst Rhoem was gay as were many of his fellow officers.
The Green Triangles – Criminals
When the Nazis set up the concentration camp system they deliberately decided to have a category of prisoner who would be a supervisor over other prisoners. They became known as ‘Kapos’ in camp slang and nick named ‘the long arm of the SS’, they had a reputation for brutality and were feared by prisoners even more the SS men and women who were in charge of the camps.
They were German criminal civilians often serving life sentences for murder, violence, rape and other similar offences. But even then the SS saw them as ‘fallen’ members of the master race and still superior to Jews. In time though, many Kapos were prisoners from other nationalities and even Jews became Kapos as the camp system expanded.
When Auschwitz was set up in 1940 the Nazis quickly moved in a number of these Kapos to supervise the Jewish prisoners and the Soviet prisoners of war.
They did not have to wear the infamous striped uniforms of other prisoners, were allowed to carry whips and batons, had their own rooms in the huts of the camps, had better rations and were active in a thriving black market with the SS. They committed all kinds of offences, murdered prisoners, assaulted them, sexually exploited them and were very careful to be efficient in the eyes of their SS masters.
“Never Again”
It’s A Call to Action not a slogan
Please contact us for details of the next Study Tour
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