Fascist Barbarities during the Second World War

The Fascist Barbarities during the Second World War!

The fascist aggressions and occupation were accompanied by the most inhuman barbarities against the occupied peoples.

The term ‘fascism’ has been used to describe the system set up by all the three Axis powers namely, Italy, Germany and Japan. Each of them had its own peculiar features.

Of the three, the German version, Nazism was the most brutal. With their theories of racial purity and supremacy of the ‘Aryan’ race, the Nazis considered most of the rest of humanity to be sub- humans deserving extermination, or at least enslavement.

They tried to convert Europe into a huge slave camp and a death camp. The aggressions committed by these countries led to the Second World War, the most destructive war in history. The war ended with the victory of the anti-fascist alliance, comprising the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain, and their allies.

This alliance was the fundamental basis, an essential condition, for the defeat of the fascist powers. Besides, in each country which was invaded and occupied by the fascist powers, and within the fascist countries, resistance movements of the people grew and they played an important role in the defeat of the fascist powers.

The Nazi barbarities had started in Germany itself. Concentration camps were set up and anti-fascists and Jews were sent there and many of them were killed. In 1939, an order was issued to exterminate the “chronically insane and incurable” and within that year about 70,000 people were killed. However, the real war of annihilation began with the invasion of the Soviet Union.

A large part of the civilian population of occupied Europe was either exterminated or used as slave labour. The Jews were particularly singled out. In 1941 alone, one million people of the Soviet Union were murdered. About half of them were Jews.

Concentration camps were set up by the Nazis in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Holland, France and Germany. These included Auschwitz, Belzec and Treblinka in Poland and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in Germany. Millions of people from all over Europe were transported to these camps.

Some of these were purely death camps. In July 1941, an order was issued on the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem. This meant “the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories”.

The full facts about these camps came to light only when the Allied troops liberated the territories in which they were located and subsequently when the Nuremberg Trials took place for war crimes.

In the beginning, the victims were shot. But this was found to be expensive and messy and, therefore, horrible means of exterminating human beings were invented. A pest control firm, a subsidiary of the German Company I.G. Farben, produced a gas which, from 1942 onwards, was used for the purpose.

Its first use began on 17 March 1942 at the Belzec death camp in Poland where 15,000 people could be killed in a day. The victims were marched into cellars which they were told were places for bath. The cellars were actually gas chambers with a gas-proof metal door.

Then the crystals of the gas were pushed inside and after twenty-five minutes the gas-laden air was removed through exhaust pumps and the metal door were opened. After removing the gold teeth and hair, the piled-up dead bodies were removed to the furnaces where they were reduced to ash, which was scattered in the nearby streams.

Instead of murdering people straightaway, the Nazis generally let the German industrialists first make full use of their labour. The inmates of the camps began to be leased out to some industrial concerns such as the Krupps, I.G. Farben, Siemens, etc.

Some of these industrial concerns set up their industrial units near the camps. As the trains carrying the victims arrived, women, children, the old and the sick were taken straight to the death camps and the healthy to work sites where many of them were worked to death. Those found sick were transferred to the death camps every morning. Some industrial firms manufactured goods from human skins.

Besides extermination in the gas chamber, the inmates of the camps were also used for conducting biological experiments by the Nazi doctors. Various kinds of disease were induced in the victims and vaccines tried.

Some were slowly frozen to death and biological changes taking place in their bodies studied. These experiments are too horrible to be described. In recent years, information about similar experiments conducted by the Japanese has come to light.

The total number of the civilian population killed by the Nazis is estimated to be over ten million. These included killings through mass murders—for example, the entire male population of the village Lidice in Czechoslovakia was wiped out in retaliation for the murder of the Nazi governor of Czechoslovakia, Heydrich—and other brutalities, but most of all by the systematic extermination in the camps.

The number of victims in the Auschwitz camp is estimated to be four million. A majority of the murdered were Jews—about six million of them, that is, 75 per cent of the total Jewish population of Europe.

This mass murder of the Jews has come to be known as the “holocaust”. Besides the millions of Europeans who were brought to the camps to perform slave labour and to be exterminated, another 7,500,000 people from various parts of Europe were brought to Germany to work as slave labourers in German factories. They included about two million prisoners of war.