Pogroms to Auschwitz-Birkenai I.
Photograph above, GNU Free Documentation License.
The Nazi’s Pogrom programme was suggested 400-years earlier by controversial Martin Luther (1483-1546), founder of the German Reformation. Luther suggested anti-Semitic views in his treatise: ‘Von den Jüden und iren Lügen’ (‘On the Jews and their Lies’); published in 1543. (vid., image left) Luther suggested that their ‘Synagogues and schools should be set alight, Prayer Books destroyed, homes razed to the ground, properties, liquid assets, and money confiscated; without mercy’. Four hundred years later the Nazis begun the state-sanctioned discrimination of the Jewish people (Nazi convention, Nürnberg, 15 September 1935) through facilitating the enactment of the Nuremberg laws. These laws legalised the isolation of the Jews depriving them of German citizenship. And eventually culminating in the Holocaust, id est., ‘the mass murder of the Jewish people’.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Santayana,The Life of Reason ( 1905 ).
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was ‘Der Führer’.’The Leader’ of the Nazi Party 1920-1921.and ‘Kanzler’. ‘Chancellor’ of Germany 1933 – 1945. Chiefly responsible for initiating, all the programmes that led to those most terrible crimes. He initiated the Pogroms Kristallnacht. That is, ‘Crystal night’ or ‘Night of Broken Glass’. Also referred to as: ‘Reichskristallnacht’, or ‘Novemberpogrome’. Kristallnacht was a coordinated expansion for the wider persecution of the Jews. It was conducted by the Sturm Abteilung (SA), the Waffen-SS, and the Reichsjugendführer, in Germany and Austria; 9, 10 November 1938. Two-hundred and sixty-seven Synagogues were destroyed, wholesale slaughter of 99 (q.v.) innocent Jews, an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 (q.v.) falsely imprisoned, and their properties confiscated; and businesses ransacked. The Kristallnacht was the precursor to the Holocaust. Kristallnacht (vid., image right), when the Nazis violently attacked Jews and their properties, after which followed his ‘Reichsbürgergesetz’ ‘Law of the Reich Citizen’, which deprived Jews of German 
citizenship, and the ‘Gesetz zum 
Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre’ (“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”), which forbade marriage between Jews and German citizens; eventually leading to the Holocaust. Three and a half years later, beginning in July 1942, 10,000 to 20,000 Jews per day, were transported from Warszawa, to the numerous Vernichtungslager (‘death camps’) including: Bergen-Belsen, Maidenek, Oswieçim, Treblinka, and to the largest and most lethal of the camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau II (where Zyklon-B was used), where between 14 June, 1940, and 27 January, 1945, a medial estimate of 1.2 million people were put to death, of which 90 percent were Jews. During the 12-year period from 1933 to 1945, 90 to 100,000 homosexuals – acc. to figures extrapolated from the United States Holocaust Memorial, Washington DC – were deported from all the Nazi occupied (or annexed) territories; to the Vernichtungslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau II Schirmeck, Dachau et al, where they received the worst treatment, often being beaten to death, by the German soldiers and fellow-prisoners. Notwithstanding 10 to 15,000 (q.v.) deaths, homosexual Holocaust victims were excluded from the historic record for an approximate period of 30 or 40-years; only receiving recognition in the 1970s and 80s. In 2005 the European Parliament marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau II camp with a resolution which included, in part, the following text:
“…27 January 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a combined total of up to 1.5 million Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians and prisoners of various other nationalities, and homosexuals, were murdered, is not only a major occasion for European citizens to remember and condemn the enormous horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, but also for addressing the disturbing rise in anti-Semitism, and especially anti-semitic incidents, in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimising people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, social classification, politics or sexual orientation…”
“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”.