1942 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Wannsee Conference at Berlin January 20 formalizes a blueprint for annihilating every Jew in Europe. SS Lieut. Col. Adolf Eichmann has called the conference in order to gain approval for a more efficient way of killing Jews—and one less taxing on his SS men—than machine-gunning them. The meeting lasts a mere 90 minutes but is attended by 15 of the Reich's top leaders. Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler begins a methodical murder of all European Jews within German reach (see 1940). Some 8,000 Greek Jews from Salonika are transferred to concentration camps in the mountains of Macedonia; another 45,000 will be deported in the next 3 years, leaving scarcely 500 in the city (see Poland, Denmark, 1943).

Turkish police take over the refugee ship Struma at Istanbul February 23 and tow her up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, where she is set adrift without a working engine (see 1941). A Soviet submarine sinks the ship at dawn February 24, those aboard who are not killed outright are left to flounder in the icy cold water, and all but one of the 779 people aboard die within hours (the only survivor is 18-year-old David Stoliar, who had fled Romania with his girlfriend and her parents).

British agents help Czech patriots assassinate deputy Gestapo chief and Reich "protector" of Czechoslovakia Reinhard Heydrich May 31 at age 38 (President-in-exile Benes has given orders for the hit). The death of der Henker (the Hangman) brings swift and terrible retribution: the Germans burn the Czech village of Lidice in Bohemia June 6 after executing every male in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich. Only one man reportedly escapes; the female population is abused.

Nazi authorities at Kraków arrest Oskar Schindler April 29 for violating the Race and Resettlement Act (see 1940). He has been seen kissing a young Jewish girl at his kitchenware factory during a birthday party the previous day, but well-placed bribes to SS and Abwehr officials soon gain his release. The Germans begin deporting Kraków's Jews to labor camps in June, deportations by year's end will have reduced the city's Jewish population from 17,000 to about 4,000, but Schindler's factory will have grown from 4,000 square meters to 45,000 and its payroll to nearly 800 men and women, including 370 from the Kraków ghetto whose records will have been falsified with Schindler's approval (see 1943).

Amsterdam's Roman Catholic hierarchy speaks out against the harsh treatment of Jews by German occupation authorities, who redouble their roundups and deportations.

Paris police round up some 30,000 Jews in pre-dawn raids July 16 under terms of an agreement made by Prime Minister Laval. The 2,000 gendarmes lock about 13,000 people into the Winter Velodrome stadium for 8 days without water or toilet facilities (they include invalids, pregnant women, infants, and children). German officials have promised not to deport any French Jews to Germany if the French will arrest foreign Jews, and Laval claims that he can save 75,000 lives, but the Germans bus thousands out of the city and the French National Railroad Service (SNCF) cooperates in taking them to Nazi death camps, closing and locking the doors of boxcars (wagons) containing the deportees; only 30 will survive.

Nazi leader Klaus Barbie, 28, is appointed chief of the Gestapo at Lyons, where in the next 2 years he will interrogate, torture, and execute some 4,000 French prisoners, many of them Résistance members, and deport some 7,500 others, including 44 Jewish children, aged 3 to 13, and their five teachers, who will be sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Of the 76,000 French Jews sent in 77 train convoys to the death camps beginning March 27 of this year about 2,500 will survive (see 1945).

Switzerland closes her borders to Germans who are persecuted solely because they are Jewish, even though it is clear that Jews are being systematically annihilated by the Nazi regime. The Swiss have required German passports for Jews to be stamped with a "J" since 1938, and although they will admit 51,000 civilian refugees by the spring of 1945, and 21,000 of them will be Jews, most of the Jews will have slipped into the country illegally and then been allowed to remain.

U.S. diplomat Howard Elting, 35, sends a cable August 11 advising the State Department at Washington, D.C., that "based on the highest German authorities" the Nazis have plans "to exterminate at one blow this fall three and a half to four million Jews." A vice counsel to the Geneva consulate, Elting uses language drafted by Berlin-born World Jewish Congress representative Gerhart Riegner, 30, but although he attaches a memorandum vouching for Riegner's credibility the State Department remains skeptical and does not act on Riegner's request that the information be transmitted to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress. Riegner has also given the information to British diplomats at Geneva, they pass it on to the British Foreign Office, and Rabbi Wise receives it via a member of Parliament who heads the British Section of the World Jewish Congress. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles summons Wise to Washington November 24 and authorizes him to release the news (see 1944).

The Germans convert the concentration camp at Maidanek that opened outside Lublin 2 years ago into a death camp in the fall and use it to kill Jews, first from Bohemia and Moravia, then from Poland, the Netherlands, and Greece, who are shot down en masse in the neighboring forest (see 1943).

Buchenwald concentration camp commander Karl Koch of the SS is relieved of his command and will be executed in 1945 after being convicted of corruption and graft. His wife, Ilsa, has become notorious for beating prisoners with her riding crop, requiring them to participate in degenerate orgies, and collecting book covers, gloves, and lampshades made from the tattooed human skin of dead inmates (see 1947).

All German gypsies (Roma) are ordered deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz by a decree issued December 16 (see 1938). A special section of the camp will be set aside for gypsies, and some 20,000 will die there. Nearly 25,000 of Romania's gypsies (2.5 percent of the total) will be deported to Transnistria, where all but 1,500 will die (while at least 250,000 Romanian Jews will die), but although somewhere between 90,000 and 196,000 of Europe's several million gypsies (more than 220,000 out of 700,000 total according to some estimates) will have been killed by 1945 the Nazis will not be consistent in their persecution of the Roma as they have been and will continue to be vis-à-vis the Jews. The gypsies will nevertheless be singled out for more persecution than any other group besides the Jews.

Executive Order 9066 issued by President Roosevelt February 19 calls for internment of some 110,000 Japanese-Americans living in coastal Pacific areas. California's attorney general Earl Warren, 50, is running for governor and has urged the measure against opposition from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, among many others. Federal agents later round up about 200 of the 2,500 Japanese nationals in New York and its suburbs and take them into custody, no internment actions are taken against Japanese-Americans in the Hawaiian Islands or the U.S. East and Midwest, nor against alien Germans or Italians, but native-born U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast are rounded up along with Japanese aliens and will be placed in "relocation centers" (some people will call them concentration camps) in remote areas of Arizona (Gila, Poston), Arkansas (Jerome, Rohwer), inland California (Manzanar, Tule Lake), Colorado (Granada), Idaho (Minidoka), Utah (Topaz), and Wyoming (Heart Mountain), where they will live in tar-papered barracks heated with coal stoves and guarded by military police armed with rifles. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) makes no protest and will remain mum on the matter for years, but 22-year-old Japanese-American Fred Korematsu and others refuse to obey the order and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (see 1943). The interned Japanese-Americans (two-thirds are U.S. citizens) will lose an estimated $400 million in property, of which Washington will repay $38.5 million.

The Swiss Red Cross delivers packages of dried U.S. blood plasma to a Yokohama prisoner-of-war camp. Japanese Army bacteriologist and physician Ryoichi Naito visited the United States before the war, tried to obtain a vial of yellow-fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute, later observed the freeze-drying process developed by Sharp & Dohme at the University of Pennsylvania, returned home with a vacuum pump, conducted experiments with it, and subsequently gave the freeze-drying technology to his mentor Shiro Ishii, who has used it for germ-warfare research near Harbin, Manchuria, where he has employed Chinese and Russian prisoners, including women and children, as human guinea pigs, studying frostbite, pathogens, and starvation under conditions that continued until the prisoners' deaths. Naito gains War Ministry approval to construct a plasma-drying facility at the Army Medical School in Yokohama, sets up seven blood collection centers throughout the city, and draws blood from women donors, but he will soon have to give up the program as enemy firebombs make it unsafe to line up to give blood (see medicine, 1951).

Japanese authorities in Sumatra establish an internment camp for Dutch, British, and other western women: 200 of its 600 inmates will die of disease or starvation.

Federal employee Elmer Henderson boards a Southern Railway train at Washington, D.C., May 17 for a trip to Atlanta on government business. When he goes to the dining car for dinner he finds that two tables at the end of the car are reserved for black passengers unless white passengers want them, three of the four seats at those tables are occupied by whites, the steward refuses to seat Henderson at the remaining seat, he goes without dinner, and he files a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission (see Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896). The Southern Railway responds by setting aside two tables at the end of the car exclusively for blacks and rigging up a curtain to separate those tables from the rest of the dining car (see 1949).

The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 June 1 in Betts v. Brady that neither the Sixth nor the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to provide defense counsel for an indigent defendant except in a rape or murder case (see 1932; but see also Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963).

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded by University of Chicago students employs passive resistance tactics pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi in India; headed by Texas-born activist James (Leonard) Farmer, 22, as national chairman, CORE will stage sit-ins to end racial segregation and discrimination (see 1961).

Ethiopia outlaws slavery, but the practice will continue in parts of the country and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.

Afrikaner political leader James Hertzog dies at Cape Town November 21 at age 76, having isolated South Africa's blacks from the political process and laid the groundwork for what later will be called apartheid. He has alienated both militant Afrikaners and those fighting the Germans.