Not so fast there Nadine. CB was meaning just those in the concentration camps and actually murdered, up close and personal, not by starvation
The Einsatzgruppen killed up close and personal, and their units were attached to the military in the invasion of Poland. They were wiping out whole towns all over German occupied Poland. Also, killing by artificially engineered starvation is certainly killing. The Germans imposed a rationing scheme in the ghettoes in which Jews got about 800 calories a day.
There was nothing much done in 1939. It was only in 1940 that things were on a full-scale war footing with no holds barred and full-on carnage. Until then, there was some pussy-footing around
I don't know what countries you're thinking of, but this certainly does not apply to Germany:
The very moment the Germans entered a town or city, they turned the Jews into outcasts of society. On entering Warsaw, the Germans agreed to distribute soup to the hungry population, having extracted one million zloyts from the municipal administration for that purpose. The agreement stipulated that all the hungry in the city, without exception, were to benefit. Yet immediately the Germans began to eject the Jews from the soup lines, calling upon the Poles on the line to do the same "because the Jews deprive the Poles of their spoonful of soup."...Terror enveloped the Jews. The Germans reenacted the Kristallnacht in every town and city they invaded and occupied.
All over Poland synagogues went up in flames...Everywhere the Germans organized pogroms, rounding up the non-Jewish population to witness and learn how to mock, abuse, injure and murder Jews. Unbridled killiing and senseless violence became daily commonplaces for the Jews; the fear of sudden death became normal and habitual.
from The War Against the Jews: 1933 - 1945 by Lucy Dawidowicz, p 200 |
