Throughout the history of mankind, there have been many meaningless wars fought by power-hungry tyrants seeking world domination. The ambition of these unruly rulers have brought bloodshed to many innocent people, and the one standing chief among these is Adolf Hitler. As the absolute dictator of an impoverished Germany after World War I, he used Jewish people as a scapegoat. Hitler, believing that his race was superior to all others, sent Jews, the elderly, and his political opponents, to the horrifying death/concentration camps. In these camps, Hitler exterminated approximately 11 million people, 6 million of them Jews. Those who can attest to the evils of these camps are the U.S. soldiers. After the invasion of Europe on D-Day, they discovered …show more content…
When the U.S. soldiers of Cannon Company found the first concentration camp on April 11, 1945, they were unprepared for what they were about to see. Those that had survived the torture looked like skeletons from starvation, were disease ridden, and could hardly even move. And now, although safe from the Nazi’s, they had to face years of recovery and physical therapy. An even more unforgettable sight was the amount of dead bodies laying about. Since death was so common place in the camps, there were corpses stacked up, one after the other, of people who had died of starvation or …show more content…
One soldier tells the story of a little girl that died in his arms. “there was a little girl in a fetal position. And I grabbed her by the ankle, pulled her out and wrapped her in my jacket, and I started running toward the aid station, because I sensed that there was life there. I heard a kind of a whimper. And I got about halfway to the aid station, and then felt the little body collapse. She died in my arms” (Hirsh 121). The soldier goes on to tell that this represented how so many young people were the innocent victims of the crimes of madmen. This is very agreeable and tells how horrible the holocaust really was, by showing they killed children by means of starvation, disease, and
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was 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. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
“If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.” (Quote from concentration) This quote was carved into the wall by a Jewish prisoner. Kaiserwald was one of many concentration camps used for the destruction of the Jewish race during the holocaust.
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.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
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.
Even when US troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, the stories still never made it to the front page of the paper and people still did not believe in the reliability of the stories (Leff 52). In 1943, a survey w...
"While fighting for victory the German soldier will observe the rules for chivalrous warfare. Cruelties and senseless destruction are below his standard" , or so the commandment printed in every German Soldiers paybook would have us believe. Yet during the Second World War thousands of Jews were victims of war crimes committed by Nazi's, whose actions subverted the code of conduct they claimed to uphold and contravened legislation outlined in the Geneva Convention. It is this legislature that has paved the way for the Jewish community and political leaders to attempt to redress the Nazi's violation, by prosecuting individuals allegedly responsible. Convicting Nazi criminals is an implicit declaration by post-World War II society that the Nazi regime's extermination of over five million Jews won't go unnoticed.
Only 7,000 emaciated survivors of a Nazi extermination process that killed an estimated six million Jews were found at Auschwitz” (Rice, Earle). Most of these deaths occurred towards the end of the war; however, there were still a lot of lives that had been miraculously spared. “According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners left in the camps in January 1945. It has been estimated that nearly half of the total number of concentration camp deaths between 1933 and 1945 occurred during the last year of the war” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The Holocaust was one of the most tragic events in the world’s history.
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.
Westerbork is a transit camp that more than 103.000 Jews were transferred from Westerbork to Auschwitz and Sobibor. Westerbork was located about 15km from the villages of Westerbork. In summer 1939, the camp Westerbork had been opened by Dutch. In July 1, 1942, the German authorities took control of Westerbork transit camp because it's officially a "transit camp." What depressed me was that the camp was situated about 15km from the village,Westerbork. What Westerbork transit camp meant was world war ll Nazi refugee.
Buchenwald Concentration camp was a labor camp that was open from July 1937 to April 1945. Buchenwald was opened in July of 1937 and was for male prisoners only. It is located on the Northern Slopes of Ettersburg, which is five miles from Weimer in East Central Germany. Buchenwald was a forced labor camp, prisoners were forced to work 12 - 14 hour days doing treacherous labor. Prisoners were forced to work in factories, in the German Equipt Works, and in workshops and in the camp's stone quarry. Prisoners received a scarce amount of food but when they did it was bread and/or soup, which gave the prisoners very few nutrients or energy to do these hard jobs which resulted in many deaths.
During the rule of Adolf Hitler, many children who were Jewish lived a very frightening and difficult life. They never were given the love and compassion that every child needs and deserves growing up. The Holocaust is a story that will continue to be shared till the end of time.
There was a special “concentration” camp established in March of 1942, located in the Lublin district of Poland (Telegraph). The prisoners in this special camp were very sly and devious. Even though they were separated from their families they were very tenacious people. Through all the treacherous and grueling pain they went through they never gave up hope. The prisoners at Sobibor were treated terribly in these ghastly conditions of the camp, able to fabricate classified plans, and elude this extermination camp.
Post-mortem photography was, and still is, seen as a psychologically unhealthy practice, even when such photographs are historical documentations. Photographs taken during the liberation of concentration camps in the 1940's happen to be some of the most controversial, yet they are crucial to remembering the great tradgedy. Some opponents against post-mortem photography believe that atrocity photographs taken from the Holocaust should be hidden from view as they do nothing to honor the memory of the victims. The photographs by these opponents are seen only as morbid, without any historical value. But despite post-mortem photography's unpopularity in the 20th century—and still today—it was an essential tool in the documentation of the Holocaust and its victims. Therefore, post-mortem photography is not only vital to remembering and educating about the disaster, but also to remembering the individuals which memorial photography attempts to preserve.