Holocaust Victims - Others

Others

In Eastern and Southern (and later Western) Europe, the SS and police troops often unleashed mass actions against civilians with alleged links to resistance movements. In numerous cases resulting in wholesale slaughter of entire villages, such as in the infamous cases of Lidice, Khatyn, Sant'Anna and Oradour-sur-Glane (in Poland, one whole district of Warsaw was massacred). In Poland, Nazi Germany formally imposed the death penalty on anybody found sheltering or helping Jews. "Social deviants" – prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, open dissidents, pacifists, draft resisters and common criminals – were also often imprisoned in concentration camps. The common criminals frequently became Kapos, the inmate-guards policing other prisoners.

In the late 1930s, the Nazi program to punish many rich German persons as "enemies of the state" confiscated properties and placed thousands of them in concentration camps. According to Nazi policies formulated in part by Joseph Goebbels, the rich elite manipulated the German economy and held seditious liberal views. The Nazis had targeted other groups to be imprisoned for their political views deemed threatening by Hitler or the party; such as the members of women's rights groups who were accused of spouting "communist-socialist" dogmas of gender equality. Some of the Germans and Austrians who had lived abroad for a significant proportion of their lives were also deemed to have too much exposure to foreign ideas, many were put into concentration camps. These prisoners were called "Emigrants" and marked with a blue triangle.