1940 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Nazis extend persecution of Jews to Poland, Romania, the Netherlands, and other occupied territories. SS troops surround a densely populated Jewish area in Czestochowa in January, herd thousands of half-naked Polish men and women into a large square, beat them bloody, and keep them standing for hours in the frosty night air while young girls are taken into the synagogue, forced to undress, raped, and tortured. Heinrich Himmler orders construction of a concentration camp at Auschwitz March 27 and rounds up Roms (gypsies) as well as Jews. At least one of every 10 Holocaust victims will be a Rom.

The Katyn Forest Massacre in March kills 4,143 Polish officers captured by the Red Army when it entered Poland 6 months ago. Imprisoned 15 miles west of Smolensk, the Poles have their hands bound behind their backs with ropes looped around their necks; they are then gunned down and buried in mass graves.

Oskar Schindler provides refuge for Kraków Jews (see 1939); the Court of Commercial Claims has let him buy an idle factory used some years earlier to make enameled kitchenware. Schindler has reopened it in January with 100 workers, he hires accountant Itzhak Stern to keep the new Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik's books, and with Stern's help he will expand its labor force within a year to 300, including 150 Jews (see 1942).

A Polish concentration camp opens June 15 at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) on a site near Kraków that was selected January 25.

Poet-playwright Nelly Sachs escapes to Sweden through the intercession of novelist Selma Lagerlöf and the Swedish royal family; not every Jewish woman is so lucky.

New York editor Varian M. Fry, 32, volunteers in June to help artists and intellectuals escape from Marseilles. Fry visited Germany in 1935 to observe conditions for a prominent magazine, witnessed Nazi thugs smash up Jewish-owned cafés, and watched in horror as they dragged Jewish patrons from their seats, knocked an elderly man over, and kicked him in the face. He has helped organize an Emergency Rescue Committee, speaks with Eleanor Roosevelt, manages to obtain 200 special visas, arrives at Marseilles, and finds that far more visas are needed. He finds a cartoonist who creates false identity papers and travel documents, bribes government officials, and by the time he is forced to leave in September of next year will have enabled somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 people to escape the Holocaust, among them mathematician Jacques Hadamard, philosopher Hannah Arendt, historian Konrad Heiden, writers Lion Feuchtwanger, Leonhard Frank, and Heinrich Mann, artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Wilfredo Lam, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.

Portugal's consul general at Bordeaux personally issues visas from June 17 to 19 to an estimated 10,000 Jews and 20,000 other refugees seeking to flee France's German invaders. A descendant of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 1497, Aristedes de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches has defied the Portuguese dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar; he is arrested, brought back to Lisbon, stripped of his pension, and barred from practicing law; Salazar will reject his appeal for reinstatement in 1945, giving other diplomats (who, in fact, obeyed orders not to grant visas) the credit for having rescued the Jews; the once-wealthy Mendes will die in poverty in 1954.

A June 26 memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long suggests ways to "effectively stop for a period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States" (see 1939). Long is intent on barring entry of Jewish refugees from Europe who seek to enter via Canada, Cuba, or Mexico.

Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara, 40, begins issuing transit visas at Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, July 9 to enable Poles—Jews and non-Jews—to escape from the advancing Germans via Japan. Sugihara acts on his own initiative, defying orders to cooperate with the Germans and their allies in persecuting Jews, Catholics, Roms (gypsies), and homosexuals. The newly-installed Soviet regime orders him to cease August 3, but he continues until September, when he moves to Berlin with his White Russian wife, two children, and newborn infant on instructions from Tokyo. Even as the train begins to depart he continues to sign documents from the window, and before he has finished he has handed out 2,139 visas to Jews, saving them from deportation to concentration camps and almost certain death (2,132 will make it to Japan).

France's new Vichy government takes its first anti-Semitic measures July 17, coming down especially hard on foreign-born Jews who represent a substantial portion of the 330,000 total (far more Jews live in France's North African colonies). The laws are more severe than the Nuremberg laws instituted by the Nazis in 1935 (see 1942).

U.S. Vice Consul Paul H. Dutko at Leipzig cables the U.S. Embassy at Berlin and the State Department at Washington, D.C., October 16 that the Germans appear to have begun a "euthanasia" program at the Grafeneck asylum in Württemberg, killing and cremating patients who have been either mentally retarded, senile, or born grotesquely deformed.

Anti-Semitic demagogue Julius Streicher, now 55, is stripped of his party posts following an investigation of scandalous irregularities in his personal life and business transactions; protected by his friend Adolf Hitler, he continues to edit the paper Der Sturmer that he founded at Nuremberg in 1923.

Warsaw's 360,000 Jews move from their apartments and houses into the city's ghetto October 31 on orders from German occupation authorities. They have been forbidden to enter city parks or sit on public benches, otherwise humiliated, and obliged since December of last year to wear bands on their forearms identifying them as Jews; more than 120,000 Jews from neighboring areas are herded into the ghetto and forced to live in close confinement behind walls, but many will soon be moved to labor and extermination camps (see uprising, 1943).

Maidanek (Lublin-Maidanek) concentration camp opens in November on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland (see 1942).

Quebecois women finally gain the right to vote in provincial elections; most other Canadian women have had voting rights since 1918, and in many other respects the women of Quebec continue to have fewer rights than women in other provinces (see 1964).