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Conditions of concentration camps
Persecution of the Jews in WW2
The concentration camps
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While the Germans and the rest of the world were focusing on World War I, many innocent people experiencing a different type of nature. They were subjected to being publicly humiliated, shaved and branded, and placed in tormenting concentration camps. Persecution and Emigration, Origins of the Holocaust, Fighting Back and Anne Frank are all big roles during this time period. No one will ever know the exact feeling of the trauma people were facing and how many people were actually killed.
During the time of the Holocaust, Jews were not the only victims of murder. Homosexuals, Communists, people with mental disabilities, Gypsies and Slavs, Russians and Poles. The killing started in 1941 to 1945. The Jews feared leaving and being separated from there families and being to the concentration camps. (Persecution and Emigration 5). They didn’t have a clue of what to expect that was going to happen to them. There were 22 main concentration camps and 6 extermination camps. The gas chambers was the most common way of mass murdering the Jews. Another way of killing them was the gassing trucks they were suffocated by the exhaust fumes. Also another method was the mass shooting. The people who were unable to work were directly sent to the gas chambers or shot. Those able to work were eventually sent also, but during the time they were alive they helped carry bodies to the crematoria or search for bodies valuables. In the extermination camps men were the first to be gassed. Women were taken to have their hair cut off before they were killed. (“The Killing Machine”). The estimated number of survivors of the Holocaust is 350,000. One survivor commonly known is Otto Frank, he was sent to the concentration camps along with his family but he surv...
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...s to be tormented and killed due to there race and what they believed in everyone is unique in there own way.
Works Cited
Downing, David. Fighting Back. Wisconsin: World Almanac Library, 2006.
Downing, David. Origins of the Holocaust. New York: Gareth Stevens, 2006.
Downing, David. Persecution and Emigration. Wisconsin: World Almanac Library, 2006.
“Holocaust Encyclopedia.” Introduction to the Holocaust. 2013. 4 April. 2014.
www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleld=10005143
Rosteck, Mary Kay, Linda Schmittroth. “Anne Frank.” People of the Holocaust. 1998 ed.
Rosteck, Mary Kay, Linda Schmittroth. People of the Holocaust. Detroit: An Imprint of
Gale, 1998.
“The Killing Machine.” Holocaust A Call to Conscience. 2009. 4 April. 2014
http://www.projectaladin.org/holocaust/en/history-of-the-holocaust-shoah/the-killing-machine/concentration-camps.html
Not even the most powerful Germans could keep up with the deaths of so many people, and to this day there is no single wartime document that contains the numbers of all the deaths during the Holocaust. Although people always look at the numbers of people that were directly killed throughout the Holocaust, there were so many more that were affected because of lost family. Assuming that 11 million people died in the Holocaust, and half of those people had a family of 3, 16.5 million people were affected by the Holocaust. Throughout the books and documentaries that we have watched, these key factors of hate and intolerance are overcome. The cause of the Holocaust was hate and intolerance, and many people fighting against it overcame this hate
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children" (Nelson Mandela). If this statement is considered true, then it's fair to say that during times of the Holocaust, the German society was at an all time low. Children during the Holocaust did not have a carefree childhood, like they should have, but instead were placed under strenuous conditions. They had to go through being separated from all family and friends, being chosen the first to go to, and in most cases a permanent loss of family members. The Holocaust was undoubtedly a horrific experience for everyone involved but for children it must have been traumatizing.
The Third Reich sought the removal of the Jews from Germany and eventually from the world. This removal came in two forms, first through emigration, then through extermination. In David Engel’s The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, he rationalizes that the annihilation of the Jews by the Germans was a result of how Jews were viewed by the leaders of the Third Reich-- as pathogens that threatened to destroy all humanity. By eliminating the existence of the Jews, the Third Reich believed that it would save the entire world from mortal danger. Through documents such as Franzi Epsteins’s, “Inside Auschwitz-A Memoir,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, one is able to see the struggle of the Jews from a first-hand account. Also, through Rudolf Hoess’s “Commandant of Auschwitz,” one is able to see the perspective of a commandant in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz: A History, Sybille Steinbacher effectively describes the concentration camp of Auschwitz, while Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz reflects on Rudolf Hoess’s power and control in Auschwitz as commandant. Through these four texts, one is able to see the effects that the Third Reich’s Final Solution had on the Jews and the commandants.
Over one million Jewish children died during the Holocaust. They were ripped out of their homes and taken away from their families, and stripped of their childhoods. Innocent lives were caught in a war that they were not able to stop. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he promised Germany that he would improve life their by getting rid of the one race that caused the problems, the Jews. Jews, including Jewish children, were sent to concentration camps, inspected, and if approved, were sent to work. All others would have been sent to be killed. Being sent to work did not ensure survival, children would be given very little food and water, and beaten severely, which caused their death. None of the children of the Holocaust will ever forget the experience they went through, they will always remember.
In the years after the Holocaust the survivors from the concentration camps tried to cope with the horrors of the camps and what they went through and their children tried to understand not only what happened to their parents. In the story of Maus, these horrors are written down by the son of a Holocaust survivor, Vladek. Maus is not only a story of the horrors of the concentration camps, but of a son, Artie, working through his issues with his father, Vladek. These issues are shown from beginning to end and in many instances show the complexity of the father-son relationship that was affected from the Holocaust. Maus not only shows these matters of contentions, but that the Holocaust survivors constantly put their children’s experiences to unreasonable standards of the parent’s Holocaust experiences.
The holocaust was a horrible time in Germany where millions of people were killed simply for not being Aryan. The group responsible for this was called the Nazis led by a man of the name Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s main target was the Jews, in fact the Nazis were responsible for the killing of 6 million Jews, which is known as one of the largest genocides ever. The way this was done was by taking the Jews to places called concentration camps where they would be kept, tortured and eventually killed by being put into gas chambers. The conditions of these camps were horrible. People had to sleep on top of each other and minimal food was supplied. The results of this was that people died by just being there because they caught a disease. Not only were the conditions bad but people were tortured, beaten and starved. The Nazis put a whole new meaning to the word cruelty. One of the cruelest things the Nazis did was use the Jews for experiments, where people were basically test dummies for Dr. Mengele, who was the head Nazi doctor and referred to as the “angel of death.”
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
When individuals think about the Holocaust, most place the responsibility of the terrible events on the perpetrators. However, bystanders played one of the largest roles in the Holocaust (Evans, Carrell) simply by staying safe for way too long (Florida Center) and the world wants to make sure it never happens again (Shriver Jr., Donald W).
“One of the most extraordinary aspects of Nazi genocide was the cold deliberate intention to kill children in numbers so great that there is no historical precedent for it.” (Lukas, 13 Kindle) About 1.5 million children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust—one million being killed because they were Jews (ushmm.org) The Germans had a clearly defined goal of killing the Jewish children so that there would be no remnants of their race to reproduce, resulting in extinction. Not only were the children that were victimized in the Holocaust persecuted and murdered, but they were all stripped of their childhood. Children were not allowed to be children—they had to, for their own survival, be adults. The oppression of children because of race was a direct result of Hitler’s cruel policies and beliefs. In order to stifle the Jewish race from growing, the children were the first to be slaughtered at extermination camps (ushmm.org).
To begin with the holocaust had a great impact in history even though it was a time of disaster, murder, and discrimination. It was a time in which Adolf Hitler,German politician and Nazi party leader, wanted all Jews suffering or dead. Adolf Hitler turned everyone against the Jews because he believed that they were to wealthy and too powerful so he wanted to eliminate all of them. The Jews went through a lot of suffering and pain. The German soldiers which took commands from their leader, Adolf Hitler, put some Jews to work and killed others. Many Jews didn't get to work they were killed instantly. All women were separated from the man and woman were mostly killed instantly only some got the opportunity to work. The some ways that the jews were killed is that they were put into gas chambers by tons or shot by soldiers. Jews were also dying by starvation dehydration soldiers would not give them enough food or water. They would only want those with blue eyes and blonde hair they discriminated all the others. Soldiers would not only kill the Jews but torture them for anything they did. The Jews would be transported from camp to camp walking even in the worst weather conditions which also many died from it.
Beginning in 1933, Hitler and his Nazi party targeted not only those of the Jewish religion but many other sets. Hitler was motivated by religion and nationalism to eradicate any threats to his state. It was Hitler’s ideology that his Aryan race was superior to any other. Hitler’s goal was to create a “master race” by eliminating the chance for “inferiors” to reproduce. Besides the Jews the other victims of the genocide include the Roma (Gypsies), African-Germans, the mentally disabled, handicapped, Poles, Slavs, Anti-Nazi political parties, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Homosexuals. In Hitler’s eyes all of these groups needed to be eliminated in order for his master race to be a success.
The Holocaust was the execution of the Jews and other people whom Hitler considered mediocre. About 12 million people were killed and about half of them were Jews. When Hitler became powerful and took control over Germany, everything changed. He was against Jews and wanted to wipe them out at once and his prejudice against Jews was very strong. Hitler enforced his soldier, The Nazis, to killing not only Jews but many other as well. The most crucial thing that they did was the medical experiments; doctors don’t care if they treated them right or not and most of the surgeries were performed without any anesthetic. Many of them are killed painfully because of the medical treatment were not right. There were three camps that they used ...
Regine Donner, a famous Holocaust survivor, once said, “I had to keep my Jewishness hidden, secret, and never to be revealed on penalty of death. I missed out on my childhood and the best of my adolescent years. I was robbed of my name, my religion, and my Zionist idealism” (“Hidden Children”). Jewish children went through a lot throughout the Holocaust- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Life was frightening and difficult for children who were in hiding during the rule of Adolf Hitler.
Who survived the holocaust? What are their lives like today? What has been the government's response towards those who survived after World War II? Have the survivors kept their faith? How has the survivors next generation been affected? The survivors of the holocaust were deeply effected by the trauma they encountered. This unforgettable experience influenced their lives, those around them, and even their descendants.
After Germany lost World War I, it was in a national state of humiliation. Their economy was in the drain, and they had their hands full paying for the reparations from the war. Then a man named Adolf Hitler rose to the position of Chancellor and realized his potential to inspire people to follow. Hitler promised the people of Germany a new age; an age of prosperity with the country back as a superpower in Europe. Hitler had a vision, and this vision was that not only the country be dominant in a political sense, but that his ‘perfect race’, the ‘Aryans,’ would be dominant in a cultural sense. His steps to achieving his goal came in the form of the Holocaust. The most well known victims of the Holocaust were of course, the Jews. However, approximately 11 million people were killed in the holocaust, and of those, there were only 6 million Jews killed. The other 5 million people were the Gypsies, Pols, Political Dissidents, Handicapped, Jehovah’s witnesses, Homosexuals and even those of African-German descent. Those who were believed to be enemies of the state were sent to camps where they were worked or starved to death.