1945 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz January 27 but find fewer than 3,000 prisoners at the Polish death camp where more than 2 million have died in SS gas chambers (the camp's commandant Rudolph Hoess will boast that the total was 2,345,000). The SS has evacuated the rest of Auschwitz's inmates to camps inside Germany, forcing most of them to walk in their pajamas on death marches that took weeks, during which time many died.

SS guards at Königsberg round up about 7,000 concentration-camp inmates, mostly young women, and march them 25 miles in 2 days to a vacant lock factory at Palmnicken (later the Russian town of Yantarny). Wearing only thin rags emblazoned with six-pointed yellow stars, with cups and tin-can bowls strung from telephone wire around their waists, and wooden-soled shoes on their feet, perhaps 4,000 are left by the time they arrive January 31, whereupon they are herded to an abandoned amber mine on the shore of the Baltic, split into groups of 50, forced onto the beach and the ice, mowed down by machine-gun fire, or taken to the mine and shot at point-blank range.

Soviet occupation forces in Hungary arrest Raoul Wallenberg (see 1944). It will later be reported that he was seen at Moscow's Ljubyanka Prison, but no definitive account of him will hereafter be found.

U.S. private Eddie D. Slovik dies before a firing squad outside the village of Ste-Marie aux Mines January 31, the first American to be executed for desertion since the Civil War. A Hamtramck-born Detroit plumber before the war, Slovik was drafted last year at age 24, having been rejected earlier; his commanding officer in basic training recognized his "total inability" and tried to obtain his discharge or at least a transfer to a noncombat unit, it took Slovik 6 weeks to locate his unit after being shipped overseas, he claimed to have deserted and said he would desert again, he signed a "confession" calculated to keep him out of combat, was court-martialed and found guilty of desertion, and Gen. Eisenhower approved his execution.

The first black U.S. Army infantry platoon (Fifth Platoon, K Company, 394th Regiment, 99th Infantry Division) reaches the front at Remagen on the Rhine March 12 with orders to join K Company, whose men took the bridge at Remagen March 8 but are pinned down by enemy fire and badly in need of reinforcements. The 50 black rookies battle their way uphill to their white comrades, firing more rounds and taking more prisoners than any other platoon, and they receive a warm welcome, but when they return home at war's end they face the same discrimination they experienced before they were drafted (see 1948).

Russian Orthodox nun Maria Skobtsova, 53, goes to the gas chamber at the Ravensbrück concentration camp on the eve of Easter. Having fled the excesses of Bolshevism in her homeland, she became a nun in 1932 despite twice having been married and divorced, worked to house and feed French derelicts, gave succor to Jews in wartime Paris, and was arrested in 1943 and sent to Ravensbrück. It will be said that she went to her death voluntarily "in order to help her companions die."

Gen. Patton and Corps Commander Walton H. (Harris) Walker, 45, liberate Buchenwald April 1 after 56,459 have died there of starvation, disease, or from the deliberate sadism of guards; British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen April 15 as U.S. troops liberate Nordhausen. U.S. troops enter Dachau April 2, but they are able to rescue only 500,000, many of whom will die of the effects of hunger and disease. Soviet troops liberate the Ravensbruck concentration camp April 29. The Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria is liberated May 6. Soviet troops liberate about 700 inmates of the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp May 8; an estimated 130,000 people were killed at the facility (140,000 Jews were sent there, fewer than 9,000 survived), and Rabbi Leo Baeck, now 72, is among those scheduled for execution May 9, but he restrains the other inmates from killing the camp's guards. The Nazi genocide has exterminated an estimated 14 million "racial inferiors" including Poles, Slavs, gypsies (Roma), and close to 6 million Jews. One third of the world's Jews have died in Nazi death camps in the last 6 years, including those killed with cyanide gas at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland. Bulgaria has protected her Jews and that country actually has more Jews at the end of the war than the 50,000 or so she had in 1940.

SS leader Heinrich Himmler conspires with a Swedish diplomat to have 15,000 concentration camp inmates released (most are Scandinavians) as he tries to negotiate a separate peace with Britain and the United States, Hitler hears of his treachery and dismisses him, he shaves off his moustache and flees Berlin in disguise, wearing an old Army uniform and an eyepatch, but a British detachment captures him near Bremen, he reveals his identify, swallows a cyanide vial rather than face trial, and dies May 23 at age 44. Demagogue Julius Streicher disguises himself as a painter but U.S. troops capture him near Waldring, Bavaria, May 23. U.S. authorities seize Lyons Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie but will recruit him for counterintelligence work (see 1942; 1951). Birkenau extermination camp physician Josef Mengele goes underground and will work as a stablehand on a farm near Rosenheim, Bavaria, for 4 years before escaping to South America via Genoa in 1949. Using forged papers and funds supplied by an elaborate network of former Nazis, hundreds if not thousands of other war criminals will escape the country, hiding in barns, Catholic monasteries, and homes of sympathizers.

Industrialist Oskar Schindler pretends until May to produce parts for German V2 bombs but has actually manufactured nothing since July of last year, letting men in his factory turn out counterfeit rubber stamps, military travel documents, and official papers needed to protect the delivery of food bought on the black market (see 1943). Now 37, Schindler has exhausted his personal resources to save 801 men and 297 women from the Holocaust; he will depend on food and cigarettes from the Joint Distribution Committee as he and his wife, Emilie, try to survive at Regensburg and then at Munich, but they will soon emigrate to Argentina, where he will remain until 1958 (see 1974).

The World Zionist Congress demands admission of 1 million Jews to Palestine in a statement issued August 13.

French women vote for the first time October 25 under terms of a new enfranchisement bill (see 1944).

Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Yugoslavian, Irish, Guatemalan, and Senegalese women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Japanese feminist Iusae Ichikawa, now 52, organizes the Confederation of New Japanese Women with objectives that include clean elections and political education for women (see 1919). Japanese women gain voting rights December 15 under terms of a new Election Law passed by the Diet under pressure from Allied occupation authorities (see 1946).