Courage and
reconciliation

In the 1920s and 30s the division of people into racially motivated categories was quite commonly spread. Drawing from that theory the National Socialists developed their racial ideology. According to their ideology different races have different value and it says that the German race (“Aryan”) is the most valuable. To prevent the German race from “impurity” the National Socialists enacted the Nuremberg Racial Laws in 1935 which among other things prohibited marriage between “Aryans” and “Non-Aryans”. The “non-Arian” category included Roma, Sinti, the Slavic „subhuman” and Jews, who the National Socialists defined as a “hostile” race – not as a religious community. People with disabilities or incurable health issues were also seen as a danger to the purity of the Arian race. This racial ideology led to the exclusion and later to euthanasia and genocide of the aforementioned social groups.

The Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia is one of the less known concentration camps and was established in 1940 as a sub-camp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp located to the north of Berlin. Since 1941 the camp had its own administration. About 100 sub-camps were part of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp - several of them were located not far from Kreisau/Krzyżowa. The prisoners, mainly victims of political or racial persecution from Poland or the Soviet Union, were forced to work in quarries, mines or for the arms industry. In total, it is estimated that 120.000 - 125.000 people have been imprisoned in Gross-Rosen between 1940 and 1945. About 40.000 of them were murdered or died because of the exceedingly difficult conditions of labour and detention.