Other Groups Suffered as Much as Jews

The other groups suffered. The Roma genocide killed approximately 200,000 to 500,000 people; the T4 disabled-killing programme killed approximately 250,000; Soviet POWs died in Wehrmacht and SS custody at a rate of approximately 3.3 million from a captured population of approximately 5.7 million; Polish civilians died in mass shootings, deportations, deliberate starvation, the Warsaw uprising, the Zamość expulsions and the camp system to a total of approximately 1.8 to 2 million; Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and other categories of persecuted prisoners died in numbers smaller but real. The total non-Jewish civilian death toll under the Nazi regime was in the order of 5 to 6 million. Listing these numbers is not the issue. The issue is what the deniers do with the listing: they use it to suggest that the Jewish death toll was not specifically organised, not specifically targeted, not specifically larger than other categories, and therefore not the unique operation that the historical record describes.

What the differential record shows

The Jewish death toll of approximately six million was the planned, systematic and prioritised work of an organisation explicitly created for the purpose. The Operation Reinhard apparatus, the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads of summer 1941 onwards, the deportation network across all of occupied Europe, the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the gas vans at Chełmno, and the constellation of supporting bureaucratic, transport, financial and propaganda systems were all built to kill Jews specifically. The same regime killed Roma in the Auschwitz Gypsy camp and in scattered massacres but did not build dedicated Roma-killing facilities; it killed Soviet POWs by starvation and exposure but did not build death camps for them; it killed Polish civilians in pacifications and deportations but did not aim at the elimination of Polish ethnicity (it aimed at the Germanisation of the territory, which is a different operation). The Jewish operation was different in scale, in organisation, in priority and in stated goal. The regime’s own internal documents are clear about the distinction.

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 was specifically about the Jews of Europe; it had no Roma equivalent, no Polish-civilian equivalent, no Soviet POW equivalent. The Höfle Telegram of 11 January 1943 reports the year-end totals for the Operation Reinhard sites; the figures are exclusively Jewish. The Korherr Report of March 1943 was prepared on Himmler’s specific request for a statistical accounting of the Jewish question. The deportation correspondence from Eichmann’s department of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt was about Jews. The single-target structure of the documentation reflects the single-target structure of the operation.

The Roma genocide

The Roma genocide (the Porajmos) was a real and prioritised operation, killing approximately one-quarter to one-half of the European Roma population. The Roma were targeted on racial-biological grounds, persecuted by the Nuremberg Laws (extended to them in 1936), confined in camps, deported in transports, and killed in gas chambers and mass shootings. The Auschwitz Gypsy family camp, BIIe at Birkenau, held approximately 23,000 Roma between February 1943 and August 1944; approximately 19,000 died there, the survivors being deported to other camps when the Gypsy camp was liquidated on 2 August 1944, when the remaining 2,897 prisoners were gassed in a single night. The Roma case is a parallel genocide, smaller in scale than the Jewish but identical in many of its administrative and operational features. It is the closest analogue to the Jewish operation in the structure of the killing.

The Roma genocide is not in dispute among historians. It does not argue against the Jewish genocide; it stands beside it. The two operations were run by the same SS apparatus, on partly the same racial-biological theory. They are different things at different scales, both real.

The Soviet POWs

Approximately 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German military and SS custody between June 1941 and 1945, principally in the first winter of the campaign (1941 to 1942) when the Wehrmacht had no preparation to feed or shelter them and no policy to do so. The deaths were the result of deliberate starvation and exposure rather than gassing or shooting; the Wehrmacht’s own internal documentation makes clear that no provision had been made because no provision was intended to be made. The Soviet POW deaths were a parallel atrocity, structurally distinct from the Jewish killing but enormous in scale.

The Soviet POW figures, where the deniers cite them, are sometimes invoked to suggest that German military behaviour was generically brutal in a way that does not single out Jews. This misses the point. The Wehrmacht’s brutality towards Soviet POWs was extreme and is fully documented; it does not disprove the Jewish operation, which was organised, prioritised, sustained over years, and pursued long after the immediate military rationale had disappeared. The Wehrmacht stopped killing Soviet POWs by starvation in 1942 when the slave-labour use of surviving prisoners became the priority; the SS did not stop killing Jews until the camps were physically overrun. The two operations had different structures, different durations and different end-points.

The category-equivalence move

The deniers’ move is to take the various Nazi atrocities and treat them as a flat list of equivalent items, then argue that the Jewish dimension has been disproportionately memorialised. The list-flattening obscures the structural fact that the Jewish operation was the explicit, central, prioritised programme of the regime, with the others occurring in its shadow or alongside it. None of the others had a Wannsee Conference. None had an Operation Reinhard. None had a six-figure-strong Einsatzgruppen apparatus. None had dedicated killing facilities purpose-built across multiple countries. None had a continental deportation system. None continued to function with the regime’s last resources at the moment of military collapse. The differential is structural, documentary and operational. Listing other victims as equally numerous (some of them comparably numerous, some of them less) does not change the fact that the Jewish operation was the principal one.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses the genuine suffering of other victim groups as a rhetorical device to relativise the Jewish dead. The other victim groups deserve commemoration on their own terms; the Roma and the disabled in particular have been historically under-memorialised and the historiographical work of the past forty years has rightly corrected that. None of this work argues that the Jewish operation was not what it was. The denier move is to take the parallel atrocities and use them to imply that the Jewish dimension is overstated, which is a misuse of legitimate historiographical attention to other victims. Recognising the Roma, the Soviet POWs, the disabled and the Polish civilians does not require diminishing the recognition of the Jewish dead; the deniers wish to imply that it does.

What other operations were comparable in structure to the killing of European Jewry? Which of them had a Wannsee Conference, an Operation Reinhard, an Einsatzgruppen apparatus, a continental deportation network? In what sense are the operations claimed to be equivalent?

See also

• Soviet Prisoners of War
• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• The Einsatzgruppen
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The Nuremberg Laws
• Political Prisoners

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Sources

• Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991, with the comparative statistics for all victim groups
• Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, with chapters on each victim group
• Sybil Milton, “Sinti and Roma in Twentieth-Century Austria and Germany”, in German Studies Review, 23:2, 2000
• Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000
• Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, second edition, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009
• Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941 to 1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978, the standard scholarly study of the Soviet POW deaths
• Reinhard Otto, Rolf Keller and Jens Nagel, “Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene in deutschem Gewahrsam 1941 to 1945”, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 56:4, 2008
• Tatiana Berenstein, Adam Rutkowski and Stanisław Wroński (eds.), Eksterminacja Żydów na ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 1957, on the Polish civilian deaths
• Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, 1995, on the T4 disabled-killing programme
• Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, fourth edition, Hodder Arnold, 2000, on the comparative scale of the various operations
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Mosaic of Victims: An Overview”, “Genocide of European Roma” and “Soviet Prisoners of War”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org