Not content with being master of most of Europe, Hitler then launched an attack against Russia in June, 1941 despite the non-aggression pact that Hitler had signed with Stalin in 1939. For over five years, Europe was a virtual slave empire under the Nazis. The people of Europe worked long, hard hours in farms and factories, receiving little more than subsistence rations in return, and millions of people were taken to Germany to work there. In occupied countries, any resistance was crushed ruthlessly; hostages were executed in retaliation for the killing of a single Nazi soldier, listening to British broadcasts, or possessing anti-Nazi literature were all made punishable by death. Harboring Jews was punishable either by death or by being sent to a concentration camp.
The Nazis were as efficient in setting up the machinery of death as they were in manufacturing arms. Over the years, they perfected a system of obtaining lists of all the Jewish inhabitants of a particular place and making them all wear a distinguishing mark in the form of a yellow star, herding them into “ghettoes” and then loading them into crowded cattle cars and dispatching them by train to concentration camps. There, they were either worked until they died, starved to death, or gassed. All through the war, the long trains of Jewish prisoners rolled through Europe, taking their human cargo to be killed. Even at the end of the war, when Germany’s defeat was obvious to everyone, the death trains continued to cross Europe, and the gas chambers continued to operate. Later, Jews were marched, or transported, from concentration camps outside Germany to other camps farther inland, many dying on these forced marches. The Nazis made sure that these Jews would be dead before the Allies could rescue them.
Both prior to the war and throughout the war years, the Nazis continuously depicted the Jews as “vermin” and as “sub-human.” Their propaganda machine produced endless articles, caricatures, and films portraying Jews as greedy, grasping people who secretly “ruled the world,” or as criminals who should be exterminated. It did not matter that the events of the war years proved decisively that the Jews were poor, weak, and powerless. In many countries of Europe, the inhabitants were rewarded for handing over Jews who had not yet been arrested. Here and there, however, some Europeans did risk their freedom, and even their lives, in order to help Jews and help conceal them from their Nazi oppressors. In Denmark, the king himself declared that he and the entire population would wear the yellow star, in sympathy with the Jews.
The Nazis used special terms, or euphemisms, to disguise their intentions and their treatment of the Jews. These constituted a “code,” which sounded fairly harmless to those—including the victims—who were not fully aware of their real meaning. Thus, the cattle trucks and trains in which Jews were sent to the concentration camps were only “transports.” Jews who had been designated for death in the camps underwent a “selection process,” and the mass murders in the gas chambers constituted “special treatment.” The total annihilation of the Jews of Europe was the “final solution of the Jewish problem.” Clearly, throughout World War II, from September 1939 until June 1945, Europe was ravaged by incessant war, its human andnatural resources used by the German occupiers for their own ends, its cities bombarded and laid waste, and its population terrorized. By the time that the war had ended, millions of people had been killed or made homeless, exiled from their homes and separated from their families. Meanwhile, the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis continued steadily and with brutal efficiency throughout all this chaos. When the war ended, the Jewish populations of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and part of Russia, embodying a unique and age-old culture, had been virtually wiped out.
Despite the efforts which the Nazis made to keep their systematic murder of the entire Jewish and Gypsy populations of Europe secret, most people knew, at least in rumored theory, if not in detail, what fate awaited those Jews who were “sent East.” The Nazis’ brutality, their disregard for the sanctity of human life, as well as their efficiency and ingenuity, made it obvious to anyone of even moderate intelligence that the Jews were being sent to a bitter fate. Many people closed their eyes to the truth, refusing to admit even to themselves the full horror of what was happening, or perhaps unable to grasp to what depths human bestiality could descend, while others, such as the Franks’ “protectors,” did what they could to help Jews evade the Nazis. Anne writes in her diary that it was apparent to a number of “outsiders”—for example, the man who supplied their bread, as well as the greengrocer who provided their vegetables—that people were in hiding, but these Dutch people kept the group’s secret, and even added extra rations when they could. Throughout Holland, some Jews, whether as individuals or as families, were kept in hiding in circumstances similar to those of the Frank family. There was a fairly active Dutch resistance movement, and this also played a part in ensuring that Jews were kept hidden and that their whereabouts did not become known to the Nazis. In every country which was occupied by the Nazis, a handful of that country’s courageous individuals concealed Jews, and this happened even inside Germany itself, but the individuals who were capable of putting conscience above fear, prejudice, or envy were few and far between. In some cases, Jewish people managed to place children who looked “Aryan”—that is, those who were fair-haired and blue-eyed—in the homes of non-Jews who, whether for money or out of humanitarian considerations, sheltered them in their homes.
The Germans’ euphemistic phrase, “the final solution of the Jewish problem,” in fact, referred to the total annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe. Anne Frank’s family, having moved to Holland from Germany in an attempt to escape Nazi persecution, and after living in hiding in the middle of Nazi-occupied Holland for two years, was discovered by the Nazis and sent to various concentration camps. All the members of the group in hiding, with the exception of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, perished in those camps.
