1941 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

President Roosevelt calls in his January 6 message to Congress for a world that provides protection for the "Four Freedoms"—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear (see Painting [Rockwell], 1943).

Polish police arrest Franciscan priest Maksymilian Maria (originally Raimund) Kolbe, 47, in February for helping Jews and the Underground. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 for anti-Nazi activities, he was released, but this time he is shipped to Auschwitz, volunteers his life in place of condemned prisoner Frandiszek Gajowniczek, and is injected with phenol August 14. His body is incinerated.

Estonian, Galician, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian Jews flee at the approach of advancing German troops, and some Jews fall victim to violence on the part of their neighbors: a massacre of as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children at the village of Jedwabne, Poland, July 10 will be blamed for 60 years on the Gestapo before Polish authorities acknowledge that it was planned and perpetrated by local townspeople who coveted the Jews' homes and businesses (more than 400 of the Jews are incinerated alive in a thatch-roofed barn). Jews caught by the Germans are drafted into labor gangs, driven into ghettos, forced into military brothels, massacred with machine guns, or shipped in freight cars to detention camps, where many are found dead on arrival. Jewish shops, factories, department stores, libraries, synagogues, and cemeteries are plundered and destroyed.

Adolf Hitler gives the signal for the "Final Solution" (die Endlösung) to Europe's "Jewish problem." SS Lieut. Col. Adolf Eichmann, 35, proposes "killing with showers of carbon monoxide while bathing," but the cyanide gas Zyklon-B will prove cheaper and more efficient than running hoses from motorcar exhaust pipes into gas chambers (see 1942).

SS units machine-gun some 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children to death in the suburbs of Minsk and Mogilev while German military authorities stand by.

Josef Stalin issues Order Number 270 August 16, calling for the internment of any woman whose husband surrenders to the Germans.

Babi Yar 30 miles outside Kiev is the scene of a massacre that begins September 29 and continues for 2 days as Nazi invasion forces machine-gun to death between 50,000 and 96,000 Ukrainians of whom at least 60 percent are Jews. The victims have been forced to strip, and their bodies are rolled down the slopes of a ravine. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women are shipped to Germany and used as forced labor.

The Jasenovac concentration camp opened by the Germans in Croatia will be used to kill at least 85,000 Serbs, gypsies (Roma), and Jews (Serbs will cite much higher figures). Dinko Sakic, now 20, will head the camp beginning next year and run it until 1944.

Nearly 800 Romanian and Russian Jews board the 150-foot steamer Struma at Constanza on the Black Sea December 11, having paid the equivalent of $1,000 each for passage to Palestine. Romanian police have taken virtually everything of value from the vessel, including copper pots from her galley; her engine breaks down a few miles out, a passing tugboat captain repairs her in exchange for the passengers' gold wedding rings, she breaks down again 3 days later, Turkish tugs tow her into Istanbul but police there do not permit passengers to disembark (one family of four is allowed to leave following intervention by Muslim businessman Vehbi Koc), and the ship will be held for 70 days while the Parliament at London debates the issue of what to do (see 1942).

President Roosevelt appoints a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) June 25 under Executive Order 8802. A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters has threatened a march by 50,000 blacks on Washington to protest unfair employment practices in war industry and the government, and the president has acted to prevent any disruption in defense production (see Randolph, 1925; 1948).

Panamanian women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.

The Japanese Army conscripts thousands of young girls for the military brothels it has built since 1937 as its armies extend their reach into Southeast Asia and the South Pacific (see 1937). Most are from Korea and China (see 1991).