Behind the atrocities of Holocaust Student: Şerban Claudiu, Class X H Mihail Kogălniceanu Focșani Economic College Coordinating teacher: Toader Diana 1. Human rights The human rights are the rules who entitle every person at an equal and rightful treatment. These give humans the freedom of speech and behavior of any kind, in legal limits. The Western notion of human rights appear for the first time in the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers and in the ideas of Judaism and Christianity. In some countries, the human rights are protected by constitution (USA) and in others consist of laws and manners created in hundreds of years (UK). 2. WAR CRIMES Before 1945, every soldier or officer who violated the rules was arrested or killed. At the end of World War 2, The Allies set up special courts of justice for the war criminals who infringed the Geneva Convention rules, or for the mass murder of Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust.
3. The sentences of the international military court, delivered against SS, gestapo and SD for war crimes. The accusation named the gestapo (the political police force of the Nazi state) and the SS ( a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party) as groups or organizations who need to be declared criminal, assuming the strong link between these two. At the beginning, one of the gestapo’s main missions was prevention of every political opposition against Nazi regime. The main weapon of gestapo where the concentration camps. The gestapo had not the administrative control over camps but as a part of RSHA (Reichs-Sicherheist-Hauptamt), was responsible for political prisoners interrogation, which where made in concentration camps. The interrogations where led almost every time by gestapo’s officials. Second, both gestapo and SD (the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany) were in charge of the investigation of those who were accused of betrayal, press problems and subsequent to the Jewish people.
On 24th of January 1939, Heydrich (chief of the Reich Security Main Office, including the Gestapo and SD), was commissioned to expedite the emigration and eviction of jews from Germany and, on 31st of July 1941, „to resolve” the Jewish problem from European countries under German domination. Within the leadership of the Standartenfuhrer’s Eichmann it was born a new route of gestapo’s departments (within RSHA), wich deals with the Jewish problem and who sent their agents in occupied territories „to research” about it. Within RSHA was found a special authority consisting of gestapo commanders who had the responsibility to organize the deportations of Jews from Axis-occupied countries, in order of „Final Settlement”. SS was used for purposes who, according to State Court, are criminal : expulsion and extermination of Jews, atrocities and assassinations in concentration camps, excesses in occupied teritorial administration, forced labor program, torture and assassination of war prisoners.
About 6 million Jews died during Holocaust.