Introduction to Minority Persecution

"Whenever I mentioned that my parents were survivors of the Holocaust, people would look at me oddly and say 'Oh, I didn't know you were Jewish?' I realized that most people were not aware of any other Holocaust victims except Jews."

~Terese Pencak-Schwartz

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The word "Holocaust" brings to most people's minds the genocide of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. However, another 9 million gentiles of various smaller groups perished at the hands of the Nazis. To forget or exclude these victims would be the ultimate insult to add to their suffering and sorrow and loss. We will examine a number of these persecuted groups in an effort to further reveal the atrocities of Hitler's Nazi machine.

The stars, triangles, and markings in this poster are symbols used by the Nazis to isolate and identify their victims. Almost everywhere under Nazi rule Jews were forced to purchase and wear a six-pointed Star of David whenever they appeared in public. The yellow or blue star was worn on an armband or pinned on a shirt or coat. Concentration camp prisoners wore triangular badges that identified them by their arrest category. Many badges also identified the bearer's race or nationality. Yellow triangles were for Jews, red triangles for political prisoners, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, black for Gypsies and "asocials," and blue for emigrants. Letters printed on badges usually indicated nationality.

Minority groups selected for extermination or forced labor included Poles and other Slavs (Byelorussian and Ukranian), Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), the physically and mentally disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, and homosexuals. Millions of these were also singled out, and at the hands of the Nazis died due to execution, starvation, extreme mistreatment, and disease. If Hitler determined that any minority group got in the way of this purposes, he would concoct a reason to exterminate them.

This categorizing and labeling of people, followed by the dehumanization of them by means of Propaganda allowed the Nazis to view these groups as valueless, and their deaths as insignificant, even necessary and beneficial to the state. The heinous atrocities heaped upon these lesser-known groups, along with the Jews, during the Holocaust were among the most shameful in human history. Rather than forget about this horrible chapter of mankind, we must remember it forever, for...

"Surely the most sacred command of our generation is memory: not to forget how silence became indifference, indifference became complicity, and finally turned into a nightmare of slaughter for millions upon millions."

-American Jewish Congress, in a letter sent to Pope John Paul II

Return to Minorities Persecution home page or continue on and read about the Polish.