preview

The Holocaust: Buchenwald

Better Essays

Introduction
The Holocaust is the most horrifying crime against humanity of all times. "Hitler, in an attempt to establish the pure Aryan race, decided that all mentally ill, gypsies, non supporters of Nazism, and Jews were to be eliminated from the German population.He proceeded to reach his goal in a systematic scheme." One of his main methods of "doing away" with these "undesirables" was through the use of concentration camps. "In January 1941, in a meeting with his top officials, the 'final solution' was decided". The Jewish population was to be eliminated. In this paper I will discuss concentration camps with a detailed description of the worst one prior to World War II, Buchenwald.

Concentration …show more content…

When the prisoners first arrived at the camps, those sent to the left were transferred to death camps. When Jews entered the death camps, their suitcases, baby bottles, shawls, and eyeglasses were taken and were sold.

Once in the death camps the prisoners were again divided. Women were sent to one side to have their hair shaven and the men to the other. "They were all sent to the showers, naked with a bar of soap, so as to deceive them into believing that they were truly going into a shower. Most people smelled the burning bodies and knew the truth. "

There were six true death camps; Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz (Birkenau), Sobibor, Maidanek, and Belzec. These camps used gas from shower heads to murder their victims. A seventh death camp, Mauthausen, used a method called "extermination through labor". Most would not consider Buchenwald as a death camp because it had no gas chamber, but it did have special rooms for mass shootings in which hundreds of prisoners died in every day.

Buchenwald
Buchenwald, located in Poland, was built on the site of Mt. Ettersberg, near Weimar. The camp, surrounded by walls and barbed wire, was encircled with guard towers at spaced intervals. Buchenwald was actually a series of internal subcamps with wooden and stone barracks, old horse stables, and tent cities. The "little camp", built beyond the