Star of David armbands

On 23 November 1939 Governor-General Hans Frank signed in Kraków the decree “on the marking of Jews and Jewesses in the General Government”. Its first paragraph read: all Jews and Jewesses in the Government who had reached the age of 10 were, from 1 December 1939, to wear on the right sleeve of their clothing and outer garments a white armband at least 10 centimetres wide bearing the “Star of Zion”, that is, a blue Star of David. Jews had to obtain the armbands themselves. Failure to comply was punishable by imprisonment, and cases were to be heard by German special courts. The obligation also applied to assimilated Jews and to those who had converted to Christianity, for the occupier went by descent, not by religion.

The decree affected some one and a half million people, and as Jews from the territories annexed to the Reich were deported into the General Government, the number grew. From December 1939 in Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin and Radom, and in hundreds of small towns, every Jew in the street could be recognised at a glance. The armband with the Star of David became one of the first and most visible signs of German policy towards the Jews in occupied Poland.

The first local orders

Frank’s decree was not the first regulation of its kind. From the first weeks of the occupation German military and civil authorities in individual towns had ordered Jewish shops and workshops to be marked, and soon the Jews themselves as well. This happened with no plan and no single pattern. The first known order was issued by the German commissioner of Włocławek, Hans Cramer. Sources give two dates, 24 and 29 October 1939. Jews in the town were to wear a yellow triangle on their backs and, according to some accounts, on their chests as well. Włocławek lay in the territory that had just been annexed to the Reich.

In November the regulations multiplied. On 14 November the president of the Kalisz administrative district, Friedrich Uebelhoer, ordered Jews in Łódź and other towns of the district, regardless of age or sex, to wear on the right arm an armband in “Jewish yellow”. On 18 November the governor of the Kraków district, Otto Wächter, issued an order under which from 1 December all Jews in the district aged 12 and over were to wear a visible identifying mark outside the home. In Płock, which had been joined to East Prussia, Jews aged 10 and over were ordered on 20 November to wear two yellow triangles, on the back and on the chest. In the Lublin district the governor ordered yellow patches to be sewn onto clothing, and in the Dąbrowa Basin, incorporated into the province of Silesia, armbands with a blue Star of David on the left arm were introduced.

The decree of 23 November replaced this chaos with a single rule throughout the General Government. The local marks gave way to a white armband with a blue star, and the age limit was set at 10. Different regulations applied in the annexed territories. In Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau), Gauleiter Arthur Greiser replaced the yellow armbands in December with a yellow Star of David that had to be worn on the chest and on the back, so that a Jew could be recognised from behind as well. In this form the badge remained in the Warthegau, including the Łódź ghetto, until the end of the occupation.

A badge that returned from the past

The requirement to wear a distinguishing mark had a long tradition in Jewish history. In medieval Europe its basis was laid by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which ordered Jews and Muslims in Christian lands to wear dress distinguishing them from Christians. Over the following centuries this took the form, in different countries, of yellow circles, patches and pointed hats. The custom died out in the age of emancipation, and in the nineteenth century Jews in most European countries gained equal rights. The Nazis drew on this tradition deliberately. When on 1 April 1933 SA men boycotted Jewish shops, Robert Weltsch, editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, called on Jews to wear the yellow badge with pride. Six years later the badge ceased to be a metaphor.

In Germany itself, however, it was not introduced before the war. In May 1938 the idea of marking Jews was put forward by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and after Kristallnacht, at a conference held by Hermann Göring on 12 November 1938, by the head of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich. At that time the idea was not put into effect, partly because of the possible reaction abroad. In occupied Poland there were no such considerations. Poland as a state had, in the German view, ceased to exist, and its citizens had no legal protection whatever.

Autumn 1939 in the General Government

The armbands were one link in a chain of regulations by which the occupier stripped Polish Jews of their rights within a few weeks. As early as September Jews fell victim to killings committed by the army and by the Security Police’s task forces, accompanied by the burning of synagogues and by plunder. On 21 September Heydrich instructed the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen to concentrate Jews in larger towns on railway lines and to set up in the Jewish communities councils of elders, which were to be responsible for carrying out German orders. In October the first transports of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate set off for Nisko on the San, sent by Adolf Eichmann under the Nisko Plan. In Piotrków Trybunalski the first ghetto in occupied Poland had existed since 8 October.

On 26 October, the day the General Government was established, Frank introduced compulsory labour for Jews. In November Jews were barred from access to their bank accounts and to larger sums of cash, and on 28 November, five days after the armband decree, Frank ordered a council, a Judenrat, to be set up in every Jewish community. The councils had to carry out German orders, and one of their first duties was to make sure that their fellow Jews wore the armbands. A couple of weeks earlier, on 6 November, the Germans had arrested the professors of the Kraków universities. Policy towards Poles and towards Jews followed the same logic of depriving them of their rights, but towards the Jews it went further: it was meant to set them apart from society and, before long, to separate them physically as well.

Living with the armband

From 1 December the armband became part of daily life. The Jewish communities, and later the councils, distributed them among the inhabitants. In Warsaw, then home to some 360,000–400,000 Jews, they were sewn and sold in the streets. The poorer wore home-made paper or linen armbands, the better-off carefully made ones, sometimes of celluloid. German posts and patrols checked whether the armband was in place, whether it was of the prescribed width and whether it was clean. Not wearing an armband, wearing a crumpled one, or wearing it on the wrong sleeve was punished with a fine, with arrest and very often with a beating on the spot. Jews identified by their armbands were seized in the streets for forced labour, humiliated and beaten.

The humiliation and violence connected with the armbands are recorded in notes from those months, among them those of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who from the autumn of 1939 described life under occupation in Warsaw and later created the underground archive of the ghetto. Some Poles showed sympathy to their Jewish neighbours. Others took advantage of the fact that every Jew was now visible to blackmail and rob them. That was precisely what the occupier was counting on. The armband was meant to humiliate and intimidate the Jews and to cut them off from the rest of society even before a wall did so.

Its place in the war

The decree of 23 November 1939 was one of the first steps on the road that led from marking through isolation to murder. A badge that allowed any German policeman to identify a Jew in the street made registration, round-ups for labour and later deportations easier. In 1940 the Germans shut the Jews into the Łódź ghetto and the Warsaw ghetto, and in March 1941 into the Kraków ghetto. From October 1941 leaving a ghetto in the General Government was punishable by death. In 1942–1943 the Jews of the ghettos were deported to the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, and Jews with armbands on their sleeves marched in columns to the railway stations.

The pattern tested in Poland was later extended by the Germans to the rest of occupied Europe. On 1 September 1941 Heydrich issued a police decree which, from 19 September, required all Jews aged 6 and over in the Reich, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and in the Polish territories annexed to the Reich to wear a yellow star bearing the word “Jude”. Badges had been introduced earlier in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. In 1942 the obligation to wear the yellow star was extended to Jews in the Netherlands, Belgium and occupied France. States allied with the Reich – Slovakia, Croatia and Romania – introduced similar regulations themselves, and Hungary only after the entry of German troops in 1944. The armband with the blue Star of David, ordered in Kraków in November 1939, became one of the most recognisable symbols of the Holocaust.