How Did It Happen? by Christoph Dieckmann

How Did It Happen? by Christoph Dieckmann

Author:Christoph Dieckmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


Manager of the orphanage Ženia Karpel and teacher Avraham Katz were murdered with the children.

We see here the basic German learning process: Instead of squeezing huge numbers of people into a small territory and sorting them out afterwards, as in Kaunas, it was more practical for the Germans to do a selection immediately and kill the “useless” and dangerous Jews during ghettoization, as in Vilnius and Šiauliai. Ghettos were meant for useful Jews, mainly craftsmen and manual laborers. No intellectuals, except for some doctors.

The selection process in the ghettos also depended on the number of the Soviet POWs available for labor. The POWs died like flies in Lithuania. Since there was an insufficient number of them able to work and replace skilled Jews, Jews were kept alive longer than originally planned.

There is a telling example from Kaunas. There were 10,000 prisoners of war in the city, many [of] them working at the Aleksotas airport building site. At the same time there were 30,000 Jews in the ghetto; those in the small ghetto were the unskilled laborers and the Germans planned on getting rid of them. The Germans had no intention of letting Jews work at the airport. In the middle of September 1941, a very prominent delegation arrived in Kaunas from an economic unit in Berlin and requested the airport work should be sped up. But the Soviet POWs were starving and many couldn’t work anymore. Now, 1,000 Jews would be sent there for the day shift and another 1,000 for the night shift. This led to postponing the already ongoing selection process in the small ghetto in Kaunas! The German police were ordered by somebody arriving on motorcycle in the middle of an “action” to stop the selection because more people were needed for work at the airport. Jews from the ghetto were to replace the starving prisoners of war. At that time, work meant life. Even if working conditions at the airport were horrendous, it was better than imminent death.

R: But what was the reason for keeping women, children, and the elderly alive in the city ghettos?

C: To avoid resistance. If the women, children, and the elderly were killed, the men in the ghettos would be too depressed to work or would seek revenge. The German policy was: one woman and two children allowed for each working man. This policy created a nightmare inside the ghettos. Imagine the Jewish council had to distribute bread ration cards for workers. Each working man was allowed to list the names of just one woman and two children. Only people whose names were on the card were given food. What do you do if you have more children? What do you do with your parents? You cannot put them on your bread ration card. When you read the diaries and reports from the Vilnius ghetto, you see people went crazy making these decisions!

R: Once you had made this decision and listed only two children on your card, to whom did you present



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