The Nazis used public displays to spread their ideas of race. The chart shown here is titled "The Biology of Growth," and is labeled "Stages of Growth for Members of the Nordic Race."

A line of people wait to get a drink of water in the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto which housed

about half a million Jews. Living conditions were miserable; insufficient food and water, unsanitary conditions, and overcrowding led

to starvation and rampant disease.

A typical room in a ghetto

In Warsaw, a street

sign states,"Je

ws are forbidden to walk on this side of the street."

Soviet prisoners of war in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, January 1942.

View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (Auschwitz I). The gate bears the

motto "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free).

Prisoners from Buchenwald awaiting execution in the forest near the camp

Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945.

Photograph with the caption: "...because God cannot want the sick and ailing to reproduce." This image originates from a film, produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry, that aimed through propaganda to develop public sympathy for the Euthanasia Program.__________

Five handicapped Jewish prisoners, photographed in Buchenwald for propaganda purposes. 1938 - 1940.

Hartheim castle, a euthanasia killing center where the physically and mentally disabled were killed by gassing and lethal injection. Hartheim, Austria, date uncertain.

Dr. Fritz Klein, a former camp doctor who conducted medical experiments on prisoners, stands among corpses in a mass grave. Bergen-Belsen, Germany, after April 15, 1945.

Propaganda slide entitled "Jews from all countries and eras."

The Nazis interned some homosexuals in concentration camps immediately after the seizure of power in January 1933. Those interned came from all areas of German society, and often had only the cause of their imprisonment in common. Some homosexuals were interned under other categories by mistake, and the Nazis purposefully miscategorized some political prisoners as homosexuals. Prisoners marked by pink triangles to signify homosexuality were treated harshly in the camps. According to many survivor accounts, homosexuals were among the most abused groups in the camps.

Pink triangle that Nazi’s made homosexuals

wear.

Roma (Gypsies)                       The Roma, a nomadic people believed to have come originally from northwest India, consisted of several tribes or nations. Most of the Roma who had settled in Germany belonged to the Sinti nation. The Sinti and Roma had been persecuted for centuries. The Nazi regime continued the persecution, viewing the Roma both as asocial and as racially inferior to Germans. Although the Nuremberg Laws did not specifically mention them, Roma were included in the implementation of the statutes. Like Jews, they were deprived of their civil rights. In June 1936, a Central Office to "Combat the Gypsy Nuisance" opened in Munich. By 1938, Sinti and Roma were being deported to concentration camps. The fate of the Romani peoples paralleled that of the Jews after the beginning of World War II: systematic deportation and murder. First, western European Roma were resettled in ghettos. Then they were sent to concentration and extermination camps. Many Roma in the east--Russia, Poland, and the Balkans--were shot by the Einsatzgruppen.   In total, hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma were killed during the Holocaust.

Chart illustrating the transmission over three generations of the genetic traits for blue and (dominant) brown eye coloring, taken from a set of slides produced to illustrate a lecture by Dr. Ludwig Arnold Schloesser, director of education for the SS Race and Settlement Office, on the foundations of the study of heredity. [Lecture 1, Card 18]

Eugenics poster entitled "The Judaizing of Berlin 1932." The text of the pie charts reads (clockwise from the top): Jews were 42% of all physicians, 52% of all insurance physicians, 45% of all hospital directors, 35% of all dentists, 28% of all pharmicists, 48% of all lawyers, 56% of all notaries, and 80% of all directors of theaters. The German text at the bottom reads: "The Jews are our misfortune." This poster is no.61 in a series

•Under Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, male homosexuality was illegal in Germany. The Nazis arrested an estimated 100,000 homosexual men, 50,000 of whom were imprisoned.•During the Nazi regime, the police had the power to jail indefinitely--without trial--anyone they chose, including those deemed dangerous to Germany's moral fiber.•Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were interned in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. These prisoners were marked by pink triangle badges and, according to many survivor accounts, were among the most abused groups in the camps.•Nazis interested in finding a "cure" for homosexuality conducted medical experiments on some gay concentration camp inmates. These experiments caused illness, mutilation, and even death, and yielded no scientific knowledge.

1940-44: In early 1940 our family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where we were assigned one room for all six of us. Food was the main problem. At the women's clothing factory where I worked, I at least got some soup for lunch. But we desperately needed to find more food for my younger brother, who was very sick and bleeding internally. From the window at my factory I looked out at a potato field. Knowing that if I was caught, I'd be shot, I crept out one night to the field, dug up as many potatoes as I could, and ran home.

Paula GarfinkelBorn Lodz, PolandDecember 3, 1920

Daily Life For Poles Under German OccupationWe were...survivors of a period in which every able-bodied person aged 14 and up had to work ten hours a day, six days a week. Otherwise, we would be shipped to Germany,

to forced labor camps, or to work in factories of the German war machine. We were given rations of food so most of us went--often--hungry. We were decimated by

disease--typhus and typhoid fever were prevalent....We were terrorized by continuous dragnets--lapanka we called it in Polish. You walk on a street from your house to your aunt's house and suddenly the street is closed by the gendarmes on both sides and all

the people are surrounded and asked to show their papers. 'Are you working somewhere? Who are you? What's your occupation? What are you doing now?'

Whoever appeared not employed in a meaningful way that involved supporting the German war effort was being singled out, put on a truck, and shipped to the railroad

station and put on a train and shipped to Germany. There were hardly any families that did not feel the tragedy of war.

--A young Polish Catholic who emigrated to the United States after the war, Wallace Witkowski, describes the harsh conditions in wartime Poland. He served as a courier

for the Polish resistance.

More than one million Poles were deported to forced labor camps in Nazi Germany. There are no books, nor data showing the number of people who were murdered in those camps. Those who survived remember how cruelly they were treated. I am one of them. I have lost my young years and health over there.

        When Germany started the war, they mobilized every young German into the Nazi armed forces. There was a shortage of laborers at home. At first, they appealed to Poles to go and work in Germany. Some Poles went, since they had no means to survive in Occupied Poland. Later, the Germans applied forced deportation for work. They kidnapped young men and women in the street, in the marketplace, and in front of churches on Sundays. Special camps were set up for Poles, separate ones for men and others for women.        

Persons with Physical or Mental DisabilitiesThese people never were assigned a badge because they were rarely sent to concentration camps. Persons with physical or mental disabilities threatened the Nazi plan for human "perfection." In 1934, forced sterilization programs sterilized 300,000 - 400,000 people, mainly those in mental hospitals and other institutions. Propaganda was distributed which helped build public support for these government policies. Persons who were mentally ill or physically disabled were stigmatized, while the costs of care were emphasized in propaganda campaigns. In 1939, a Nazi "euthanasia      program" began. This term is used as a euphemism for the Nazi plan to murder those with physical or mental defects. Unlike the sterilization program, the "euthanasia" program was conducted in secrecy. "Operation T4" was the code term used to designate this killing project. As word leaked out about the "euthanasia" program, some church leaders, parents of victims, physicians, and judges protested the killings. Hitler ordered the end of Operation T4 in August 1941. However, the murders continued in a decentralized manner. Doctors were encouraged to kill patients with disabilities by starvation, poisoning, or injection.

1933-39: At 19 Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened during 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. After losing her trusted fox terrier, Lydi, she suffered a major breakdown. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was placed in Vienna's Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany.1940: Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even though her condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be released. Instead, Helene's mother was informed in August that Helene had been transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg "euthanasia" center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of "acute schizophrenic excitement."

Forced sterilization in Germany was the forerunner of the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler himself initialed a decree which empowered physicians to grant a "mercy death" to "patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health." The intent of the so-called "euthanasia" program, however, was not to relieve the suffering of the chronically ill. The Nazi regime used the term as a euphemism: its aim was to exterminate the mentally ill and the handicapped, thus "cleansing" the Aryan race of persons considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society.

Tomasz (Toivi) BlattDescribes gassing operations in the Sobibor extermination camp [1990 interview] (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections ...I am sure when they were in the gas chambers, they didn't believe it. When the first gas did come in, probably they didn't...understand what was happening to them. After I finished cutting the hair, they told us to go out, and while I was still on the way back to my...to the camp where our barracks were I heard already the motor, the gas motor working with a high...you know from the gas motor, the scream. They started...they started very loud like "Ahhh....," very loud, even louder than the motor. They had a big motor there. Later about 15 minutes down...down and until quiet was. This was Sobibor.