uniform that got very worn out quickly, and was not very suitable for the harsh conditions they had to endure. Their uniforms were only exchanged once every six months. Just surviving one day at Buchenwald could be considered a amazing feat. One of the most feared people at Buchenwald was named Ilse Koch also known as “Witch of Buchenwald.” She was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch,the commandant of Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. She was known as the Witch of Buchenwald because her sadistic and extremely cruel abuse of prisoners. One of things Ilse Koch took pleasure in doing was watching prisoners as they came, and looking to see if the had any interesting tattoos that she had liked. If they did she would have the immediately executed and …show more content…
The unfortunate first group of prisoners at Buchenwald even had to construct their own death camp. Buchenwald was a huge city that consisted of brick buildings and wood barracks, so prisoners would have to lift heavy bricks and giant rocks back and forth from the main camp to the quarry. Buchenwald also had more than 100 subcamps, the largest and most important being Dora-Mittelbau (Buchenwald). Dora-Mittelbau had huge tunnels built into the surrounding mountains that were also dug by prisoners. Even after Buchenwald was finished being built they still made prisons carry heavy rocks back and forth. If the rocks they were carrying were not big enough according to the guards watching at the time, they would be automatically shot and killed. Another thing they made the prisoners do as forced labor was haul all the dead bodies to the crematories and then burn them. As a result of such hard labor many of the prisoners died from being …show more content…
The Nazi's ultimate goal was to completely and totally eradicate the whole Jewish population, along with blacks, gays, Romani gypsies, and more. In doing this their beliefs were by eliminating all the “undesirables”, it could allow a pure Aryan bloodline to spread creating a perfect nation; So Nazis tried finding the fastest and most effective ways to get rid of them. Buchenwald used methods like gas chambers, public hanging, shootings, and injection. The hanging of prisoners was unique to Buchenwald because none of the other concentration camps used this to kill. The area that the hanging occurred was called the execution room or strangling chamber, walls in the chambers stood about 6 1/2 feet above the floor and each wall had multiple hooks nailed into it. When the prisoners were chosen and then hung, if they showed any signs of struggling they were hit with wooden mallets until they finally stopped moving. Avoiding death in Buchenwald was was almost inevitable, there was no way to hide from it so most prisoners just tried to accept
In 1943 or as you may know it as The Holocaust, there were many different ways they executed the people at the Auschwitz camp, including hanging, shooting their heads or even letting them starve to death. But I'm not going to talk about them. This may tickle your fancy or wreck with your emotions after seeing the movie. I'm going to be talking about the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber is probably the worst place to be EVER, because you're going to be standing in a grey metal room ,butt naked surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of other people. Everyone is crammed inside the room as Cyclone B (a highly used deadly mixture) was sprayed into the room, causing you to either burn to death, or have to sit around dying slowly over an amount of days
...saw the image as artistic, subsequent events compel us to try and see the image of the Polish girl with Nazis as journalism. In this endeavor, we must uncover as much as possible about the surrounding context. As much as we can, we need to know this girl's particular story. Without a name, date, place, or relevant data, this girl would fall even further backwards into the chapters of unrecorded history.
Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day is a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others.
While being forced to live in Auschwitz they endured many cruel and harsh punishments. The main form of punishment was the gas chambers. These chambers were cells that were made underground and were able to be sealed. Zyklon-B was the poison used to gas and kill the Jewish people. “It takes about 10 minutes to kill 2,000 to 3,000 people in the gas chamber.” (Saldinger p.57) After gassing they would then be extracted from the chamber and taken to the crematorium where the bodies would be disposed of. Sometimes it wasn’t even the guards who would dispose of the bodies, most of the time it was the prisoners who were forced to extract their own people from the chambers. This was just one of the many forms of punishment; there were many more and some were just as bad.
showers, and workshops, as well as a prison block (Bunker). The courtyard between the prison and the central kitchen was used for the summary execution of prisoners. An electrified barbed-wire fence, a ditch, and a wall with seven guard towers surrounded the camp (“Dachau Concentration Camp” 2)
Bodies were often thrown into huge ditches located east of the chambers. Containing nothing but filthy, scrawny, and hopeless bodies. Five thousand to seven thousand Jews arrived each day increases to about 12,000 a day, though thousands were dead on arrival. This camp was the the last camp whose sole purpose was “extermination”. It was only fifty miles from the large city of warsaw, which blows my mind that people will still fully confidently try to convince people that the camps never happened. It became known as Treblinka I when the death camp, Treblinka II, was built. The camp was laid out in an irregular rectangle, 400 m by 600 m, surrounded by barbed wire and anti- tank spanish hors...
"Tattoos and Numbers: The System of Identifying Prisoners at Auschwitz." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accessed on 15 Mar. 2011.
While brutal imprisonments were intended to work and starve detainees to death, killing camps, or concentration camps were constructed only with the end goal of slaughtering large quantities of individuals rapidly and productively. There were six distinctive elimination camps known as Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Maidanek. Detainees that were compelled to move to these camps were advised to strip to clean up. Rather than it being a shower, the detainees were wheedled into the gas chambers and were slaughtered promptly. At Chelmno, rather than gas chambers, the detainees were moved into gas vans. Auschwitz alone, being the biggest focus and eradication constructed, is evaluated to have had 1.1 million individuals
Having such large authority, Hitler persuaded the SS, police, SA, and the local civilian consultants to design and produce the first of many concentration camps located near Munich (Vasham). This building was used as a model for the other remaining 15,000 sites. These locations were constructed to conceal Jews, Homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill along with Communist, Socialist, German liberals, and anyone who was considered an enemy of the Reich (Vasham). In 1939 there were six main sites, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbeurg, Mauthausen, and, for women, Ravensreuck. Each of these places held circa 25,000 prisoners that were surrounded by filth and bounded by barb wire on fences. The labor camps w...
“Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body. “A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards.
The gas chambers were effective in executing swathes of prisoners at a time, and while the disposal of their corpses was not entirely considered good, it still created a machine that allowed the Nazis to achieve their mission with more
The Nazi soldiers arrested masses of male adult Jews and held them captive in camps for short periods of time. A death camp is a concentration camp designed with the intention of mass murder, using strategies such as gas chambers. Six death concentration camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.... ... middle of paper ...
When the Hangman first came to the town, he came ”smelling of gold and blood and flame”(Ogden 1). The gold represented “the twin goals of racial purity and spatial expansion” that both parties sought (History.com Staff). The blood represented the blood that would be shed in the story and Hitler’s goal of “‘the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany’”(History.com Staff). The flame represents the very definition of Holocaust as it comes” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar”(History.com Staff). The narrator expresses his emotions during the time “and innocent we were, with dread we passed those eyes of buckshot lead”(Ogden 1). In both cases, the victims knew that they were innocent but did not have a chance to prove it. The scaffold represented the power over all of the people just like Hitler did. “The wings of the scaffold opened wide till they covered the square from side to side”(Ogden 3) The scaffolds continued to grow until no sunlight shone through. The power that both Hitler and the scaffolds had over the people was unsurpassable. Similarly to how the narrator helped the Hangman, many people believe that ” the leaders of the Protestant churches—had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people.”(United States Holocaust Memorial
In these camps that these people were sent to, the Germans identified each respective group with a triangular patch sewn onto the people’s clothes. Each patch would have a color, denoting each person into their respective groups. There were also letters placed onto the patches which showed the country of origin of each person.
The book made it seem like he just walked through the camp, into the uniform barracks, and retrieved a uniform like it was no big deal. Again, if this were the 1940s, the Nazis would not allow this to happen, making the book even more unrealistic than it already was.