1944 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Nazis convert the Stutthof forced labor camp outside Danzig into an extermination camp early in the year. Intended mostly for Jewish women from the Baltic countries and Poland, it will soon be used also for Hungarian Poles, and some 50,000 people will die there and in satellite camps in the next 16 months from hunger, disease, or in the gas chambers.

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his aides meet with President Roosevelt in the White House Oval Office January 16 to discuss the plight of Europe's Jews (see 1942). The State Department finally agrees to show some compassion, and the president signs Executive Order 9417 January 22 establishing a War Refugee Board that is to take all necessary means to rescue people in danger of being annihilated in what will come to be called the Holocaust. The president has mostly turned a deaf ear to earlier pleas for such action and he has signed the order chiefly to shut off discussion in Congress that might embarrass the administration. Treasury Department official John Paley is appointed acting director of the board, the first 982 refugees arrive in August at a hastily-constructed camp set up at Oswego, N.Y., and the board will eventually help about 200,000 Jews to escape, a small fraction of the number that might have been saved had the United States acted sooner.

Nazi troops gun down 335 Italian men and boys in the Ardeatine Caves beside the Appian Way outside Rome March 24 in reprisal for the killing of 33 German soldiers by partisans. Of the dead, 255 are civilians, 68 soldiers; the status of 12 will remain a mystery, but all are victims of Herbert Kappler, 37, the SS colonel who has ordered the massacre and has actually fired the first shot when the soldier assigned to do so became physically ill. Kappler will be convicted of war crimes in 1948 and be sentenced to life in prison but will be smuggled out of a hospital in 1977 and die 6 months later in Germany; SS captain Erich Priebke, 30, will escape from a British prisoner-of-war camp, flee to Argentina, and not be extradited for trial until 1995.

Nazi SS troops lock women and children inside a church at the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in Normandy June 10 while they cut down their men with machine-gun fire in retaliation for the capture of an SS officer by the Résistance. The SS start fires on the church altar, and when the women try to escape they are shot by the Germans, who poke their guns through the windows to fire on those inside. Only six of the town's 648 people survive the massacre, and 14 Alsatian Frenchmen will be convicted of having participated in the killings, although the Germans forced 13 of them to join the SS.

German forces in Hungary threaten the safety of that country's 700,000 Jews. Nazi authorities jail bishop Jozsef Mindszenty, 52, for prohibiting Roman Catholics to say a Mass and sing a government-ordered Te Deum "in thanksgiving for the successful liberation of the town [Budapest] from the Jews" (see 1948). The newly-established American War Refugee Board and the Swedish government send diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, 32, to Budapest with orders to initiate a rescue plan. Wallenberg's financier uncle Marcus died last year; he designs a Swedish protection passport (Schutz-pass), arranges "Swedish houses" that offer refuge, and will be credited with saving up to 100,000 Jews from annihilation, but the Germans ship nearly 500,000 Jews off to the death camps in just 12 weeks (see 1945).

Soviet forces liberate the Maidanek death camp outside Lublin July 29 but find only a few hundred prisoners still alive; anywhere from 200,000 to 1.5 million people have died at the camp, either from privation or by execution.

Amsterdam Jew Otto Frank and his family are betrayed to the Gestapo August 4 after more than 2 years in hiding and deported with eight others in the last convoy of cattle trucks to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Local housewife Miep Gies and her husband, Jan, have kept the Frank family in a camouflaged annex above Frank's small pectin trading company offices, where Mrs. Gies has been employed. Frank's daughter Anne, 15, has her head shaved at Auschwitz (the Reich uses women's hair for packing round U-boat pipe joints and for other purposes), but is not gassed. She will be shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and die there in March of next year, probably of typhus, but three notebooks left behind at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam will be found by her father, the only survivor, to contain her diary, chronicling the period in which she and her family hid from the Gestapo (see Theater, 1955). Dutch sympathizers have risked their lives to help 20,000 of the nation's 120,000 Jews survive.

Gen. de Gaulle issues a decree August 25 giving French women the right to vote on the same basis as men (see 1945).

The Union of Italian Women (Unione delle Donne Italiane, or UDI), founded late in the year, attracts anti-Fascists of all political stripes to continue the spirit of the Resistance (see 1943).

An American cannot be denied the right to vote because of color, the U.S. Supreme Court rules April 3. The case of Smith v. Allwright involves a Texas primary election, but voting districts throughout the South will continue to make it difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to vote (see Voting Rights Act, 1964).

Baltimore housewife Irene Morgan, 27, suffers a miscarriage in July, travels by bus to leave her son and daughter with her mother at Gloucester, Va., and boards a Greyhound bus July 17 for the return trip to have a medical checkup. She has paid $5 for her ticket from the window marked "Colored" at Haye's grocery store, she walks to the fourth row from the rear and takes an aisle seat in the "colored" section, but 30 minutes later she is told by the driver that she and another black woman must give up their seats for a white couple. When Morgan refuses, the driver takes his bus to the town of Saluda, where a sheriff's deputy boards the vehicle with an arrest warrant. Morgan rips it up and throws it out the window, the deputy grabs her arm, she knees him the groin, he staggers off, and another deputy drags her out, arrests her, and has her jailed. She shouts from the jail to a black youth and asks her to have a local clergyman call her mother at Gloucester, her mother arrives within an hour and posts $600 bail, Morgan pleads guilty to resisting arrest at her trial in the Middlesex Circuit Court (black and white spectators sit side by side but the courthouse door bears the charter of the Ku Klux Klan), Morgan is fined $100, but she refuses to accept guilt for violating the state's Jim Crow law, and she loses on appeal (see 1946).

Australia's parliament enacts legislation empowering Aborigines to apply for citizenship, but the terms are so restrictive that few will benefit.

South African lawyer Nelson R. (Rolihlahla) Mandela, 26, law student Oliver (Reginald) Tambo, 26, political activist Anton Lembede, 31, and others organize a militant African National Congress (ANC) Youth League movement, will work to remove the 32-year-old ANC's conservative leadership, help elect the 46-year-old Rhodesian-born Zulu chief Albert J. (John) Luthuli president, and begin militant but non-violent campaigns of work stoppages to protest systematic oppression by whites of the country's black majority (see 1924). Transkei-born Johannesburg real-estate operator Walter (Max Ulyate) Sisulu, 32, has helped his fellow Xhosa tribesman Mandela get through law school, and Mandela will head the Youth League beginning in 1950 (see apartheid, 1948).