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
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was located in the southwest corner of Poland, near the town of Oswiecim. According to “Auschwitz-Birkenau: History
Eventually Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were sent to death camps, while others went to forced labour camps and used as slaves to produce materials for weapons in war, and a range of goods, such as shoes, clothes and good. These death camps
As the prisoners arrived at the camps and even before, the Nazi forces strip them of all their belongings and their identities and thrown petrol on, shaved, and showered. As shown in the book Night they had to relinquish all valuables on their way to Auschwitz, when the Nazis conditioned them for the concentration camp, and when they took away their names (Wiesel 18, 26, 27, 31). When the Nazis stripped them of their valuables; their homes, jewelry, livelihoods, everything they worked hard to achieve, it made them vulnerable and low in
The prisoner population expanded rapidly, reaching 110,000 by the end of 1945.” (Jewish Virtual Library, pg. #1) To explain, Buchenwald was liberated the year of 1945 which was also when the Holocaust ended. Forced labor was one of the things that the Jews had to deal with, meaning they were either sent into factories and work for the SS or they were sent to go build sub-camps. All the prisoners that were forced to labor were all young and strong men. The living conditions of the camp were terrible. The prisoners lived in places called barracks, which were beds made out of wood. The barracks never had mattresses or anything to lie on besides the wood. There were about 3 prisoners that stayed on one barrack. Most of the time there were no room for prisoners to sleep so you would have to sleep on top of people in the
Once the Jews got to the camp, the Nazis took their belongings and gave them very thin clothing. They were separated into groups based on strengths and who could work. The babies and handicapped were immediately killed. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke.
Auschwitz was located in Oswiecim, Poland. The location was set perfectly so the compounds would have easy access to rail. The Auschwitz
World War II was a terrible, chaotic war with many deaths. Innocent people were killed, only because they were a different race. During World War II, the Germans/Nazis absolutely hated the Jews for no good reason. There were prisons built to torture and use Jews for forced labor. Those prisons were called concentration camps. In World War II, three of these concentration camps were same of the largest ones created and were called the Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the Dachau. The Auschwitz had three main camps and was located 37 miles of Krakow, the Buchenwald was constructed in 1937 about five miles northwest of Weimar, and the Dachau was one of the first camps created and has an incident that leads to many deaths.
The command area surrounded the prisoner camp. Nine guard towers, ditches, tall concrete walls, and electrified barbed wire encircled the whole camp. A maintenance building and living quarters for 200 SS trainees and 200 camp guards were positioned near to the camps
The concentration camps were located in Oswiecim, Poland. There were three main camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Auschwitz-Monowitz (Auschwitz-Birkenau- “The). Auschwitz-Birkenau was divided into ten different sections that had electric barbed wire fences. Men, women, Gypsy and Jewish families were isolated in their own sections. Auschwitz-Birkenau had the largest prisoner population
One of the many reasons why the jewish called them “DEATH CAMPS”. (living conditions, labor and executions)
One of the most known Concentration camps was Auschwitzs. Located in Southern Poland, Auschwitzs was the largest Concentration camp, which also had the most deaths. There were many smaller camps inside Auschwitzs including the extermination camp at Birkenau. Here they had four large gas chambers that held around 2,000 people each. On January 25th 1945 the Solviet army liberated the camp. But shortly before its liberation 60,000 prisoners were sent on a death march. If you couldnt continue any farther or fell behind you were shot.
For example, they sometimes would hand the prisoners a bar of soap so they would think that were actually going to take a shower. Usually in this case they were just led to the gas chambers. In these gas chambers, a form of Zyklon B was dropped in there, and once it made contact with air it changed to the gas form. After this, the bodies of the dead were taken to the crematoriums. Jewish prisoners were given the jobs of transferring the deceased bodies to the crematoriums. Every day many died. Almost one million people were killed in Auschwitz alone.
Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the
The Holocaust is one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity. "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." (Bauer, 58) One of his main methods of exterminating these ‘undesirables' was through the use of concentration and death camps. In January of 1941, Adolf Hitler and his top officials decided to make their 'final solution' a reality. Their goal was to eliminate the Jews and the ‘unpure' from the entire population. Auschwitz was the largest
During the Nazi Holocaust, multiple working and death camps were created to hold the captured Jews. While the Jews lived in this camp, they were tortured, mistreated, worked to death and eventually were put to death by either execution by firearm or were put into a death camp which exterminated the Jews using poison gas. The Nazi Party had developed many death camps in the central european area including the 6 death camps of Poland; Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Majdanek.