The Juni-Aktion (English: June Action) was a wave of arrests carried out in Nazi Germany in June 1938. It formed part of the wider police campaign known as Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich and is regarded as an important step in the radicalization of the persecution of Jews in 1938. [1] [2]
In 1938, Nazi persecution policy intensified markedly. The arrests carried out in the spring and summer of that year were new in their systematic and Reich-wide character. German memorial institutions describe the campaign as directed against a heterogeneous group of people stigmatized by the regime as asocial, including poor and homeless people, the unemployed, previously convicted persons, as well as Jews and Sinti and Roma. [3] [4]
Within this wider campaign, the Juni-Aktion referred specifically to the June 1938 arrests of Jews, especially men whom the authorities classified as criminal or asocial. Historiography treats the operation as a distinct stage in the anti-Jewish escalation before the November pogrom of 1938. [5] [6]
According to the Sachsenhausen Memorial, more than 10,000 people were arrested in the Reich-wide mass arrests of 1938 and sent to concentration camps. In June 1938 alone, more than 6,000 people were deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp under the accusation of asociality. [7] [8]
The Buchenwald Memorial states that, in the April and June arrest waves combined, the police sent more than 4,000 men to Buchenwald. Under the cover of the operation, hundreds of Sinti and Roma and more than a thousand Jews were deported there for the first time. [9]
The Juni-Aktion is considered significant because it linked the broader police campaign against people labelled asocial with a sharpened anti-Jewish policy. Scholarly work on the subject treats it as an important precursor to the more openly violent anti-Jewish measures of late 1938. [10] [11]
German memorial institutions also emphasize that many prisoners persecuted under the label asocial remained marginalized in public remembrance for decades after 1945. [12]