Starvation. Mass shootings. Gas chambers. Beatings. Mass murder. In the early 1940s, perhaps the most brutal attrocities ever committed on a people in our world’s history took place. It was World War II. The Nazi Regime, led by Adolf Hitler, was waging war across Europe. Occupied Poland became the place where those prisoners and captives held by the Nazis were sent to be eliminated. From 1941 through 1945 a total of some 3.5 million Jews met their deaths in Nazi extermination camps. These “death camps” as they are often referred to had the single goal of eliminating the Jews while hiding these crimes under a shroud from the rest of the world. Unlike the “concentration camps” of the same time, where Jews were brainwashed and ordered to do labor for the Germans yet still often killed, the death camps were devised solely for the mass killings of prisoners. There was no discrimination. Men fit for work, women and children of all ages were not sorted and suffered the same fate. These events would be known as “the Final Solution” to the Jewish problem faced by the Nazis.
Captive Jews were held in areas called “ghettos” ultimately commanded by the Germans. Following through with the elimination of the Jews, the Nazis gave them fierce living conditions often housing dozens of people in small buildings. Food was administered in very small amounts. Those that did not starve to death were either shot or sent to camps. Some were sent to concentration camps. There were also labor camps. During some of these trips, prisoners would be told that they were being relocated. Many of these people instead arrived at the extermination camps never to be heard from again.
The Polish town known as Kulmhof, though more popularly known as Chelmno, was the first place where mass killings by gas took place as part of the “Final Solution.” It was established in December of 1941. The first man in charge of this operation was Herbert Lange. This “Sonderkommando” or special commander, was once in charge of a T4 euthanasia program in which he was the overseer of the murder of psychiatric patients in the town of Posen. He had control of about 150 assorted German security police and uniformed police. Twenty members had posts within the camp as well as many secondary units. There was also a group, called the Waldkommando, who operated in the surrounding forest to make sure no one could see what was happening inside.
Thousands upon thousands of innocent Jews, men, women, and children tortured; over one million people brutally murdered; families ripped apart from the seams, all within Auschwitz, a 40 square kilometer sized concentration camp run by Nazi Germany. Auschwitz is one of the most notorious concentration camps during WWII, where Jews were tortured and killed. Auschwitz was the most extreme concentration camp during World War Two because innumerable amounts of inhumane acts were performed there, over one million people were inexorably massacred, and it was the largest concentration camp of over two thousand across Europe.
Nearly all of the deportees who were sent to the centers were instantaneously guided to the gas chambers to die, except for a select few who were chosen to be sonderkommandos. Over two million Jews were murdered inside killing centers either by smothering with poison gas or by shooting with guns (Killing Centers ). The gas-van was a product of the Third Reich; it consisted of a van with a gas-tight cabin attached on its understructure used to kill victims by the motor-exhausts led into that cabin (The Development of the Gas-Van in the Murdering of the Jews). The Germans executed over 150,000 people at Chelmno between December 1941 and March 1943 and then again in June and July 1944 by means of gassing vans (Killing Centers ). The Germans also found the use of gas chambers to be more effective and usually killed thousands of people daily. Within minutes of being inside a gas chamber, pris...
In 1933, Heinrich Himmler, the Chief of Police in Munich at the time, conversed with officials of a abandoned gunpowder factory, later, Himmler traveled to this factory to see if it could hold prisoners. In that same year, the first elimination camp was opened. The building of Dachau, concentration camp, led to the construction of hundreds of other camps used to eliminate the Jews.
Jews way of living while in a concentration camp was a harsh time. They died of many different causes. For example: Starvation, Diseases, gas chamber, shot, burned to death, beat to death, or put to working hard labor. Some lived without the knowing of what was happening to their family members because they were at a different camp. For a fact, every jew lived in fear while they were locked up at a camp. They never knew when there time was to come. The more they showed fear the more harsh the Nazis
How would you feel if you were forced out of your home to go to a camp where you shall be incarcerated for an unknown amount of time in an unknown location. You have no idea what will happen to you and your family. Why were you forced into the camps? Because of your ethnicity or beliefs. Japanese internment camps and Holocaust concentration camps both left their hateful marks in the fabric of history. During World War II, the Holocaust concentration camps were located around Central or Eastern Europe while the Japanese internment camps were located in the Western United States. Both types of camps have interesting similarities. However, one must realize that despite this similarities, these camps were very different in many ways. Yet, one thing is certain. We must learn more about this dark time in history in order to prevent such acts of hatred and paranoia from ever happening again.
“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 Jews and other undesirables were forced by S.S. soldiers to leave their homes and nearly all of their possessions behind to board crowded trains to Auschwitz. Ironically most of the time they had to pay for the train rides that eventually led to their death.
The Nazis began to force Jews into designated areas known as ghettos. These ghettos were not just a place for the Jewish population to stay, but used as a starting point from which the Jews were then placed into concentration and death camps. When placed in these camps, many were killed immediately upon entering the camps by the gas chambers, ovens, or bullets. Some didn’t even make it to the camps, but were shot and dumped into mass graves by the German mobile killing squad called the Einsatzgruppen. Sadly, many of those sent ...
After World War II the world began to here accounts of the atrocities and crimes committed by the Nazi’s to the Jews and other enemies of the Nazis. The international community wanted answers and called for the persecution of the criminals that participated in the murder of millions throughout Europe. The SS was responsible for playing a leading role in the Holocaust for the involvement in the death of millions of innocent lives. Throughout, Europe concentration camps were established to detain Jews, political prisoners, POW’s and enemies of the Third Reich. The largest camp during World War II was Auschwitz under the command of SS Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess; Auschwitz emerged as the site for the largest mass murder in the history of the world. (The, 2005)
form of hard labor, for weeks or months. Auschwitz was the end of the line
Soon after Germany separated from Austria in March 1938, the Nazi soldiers arrested and imprisoned Jews in concentration camps all over Germany. Only eight months after annexation, the violent anti-jew Kristallnacht , also known as Night of the Broken Glass, pogroms took place. 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 exis...
At the end of WW2, millions had died while in the concentration camps. For five years, Nazi SS Soldiers were allowed to terrorize and kill millions of people. Most of the killing was conducted at Auschwitz. There were three camps specifically designed for a huge purpose under Auschwitz. With the new finding of Zyklon B, the extermination rate skyrocketed. Auschwitz alone was responsible for 1.1 million deaths, 960,000 of the 1.1 million were Jews. The Nazis inflicted such incredible pain for these helpless victims, before being murdered, they were brutally tortured and degraded. On January 22, 1945, the Nazi Concentration Camp, Auschwitz, was liberated by the Soviets.
These camps were known as killing centers or extermination camps. The Nazis first took them to these camps in mass arrest. Many of the Jewish people were shot dead and the rest were used for forced labor. For the first few years of the war many Jews that lived in Germany emigrated and fled the country hoping that they wouldn’t be caught. Approximately six million Jews died at the cause of the Nazis.
In 1933 the first concentration camps were formed almost immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and was control given of the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior Minister Hermann Goring. Used to torture captured enemies, these “camps” held about 45000 people until the 1933 when they were greatly due to the Reichstag fire in the same year. Only around 3000 prisoners remained in the camps when Heinrich Himmler took full control of the police and started using the camps to torture the “racially undesirable elements” such as prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, and many other people groups. In the World War 2 time period, the numbers of camps exploded to more than 300, as many of the “undesirable elements” were mass-incarcerated, generally without judicial process.