What are concentration camps? A concentration camp is a place where people are detained or confined with trial. Some camps were created for forced labor while others were death camps, the majority of camps. Those transported to the camp were gassed to death shortly after their arrival, those victims included more than one million children and those that survived the camps were forced on death marches in an attempt to avoid Allied liberation of the camps.
How did concentration camps and the rules begin?
Beginning in late 1941 the Germans started mass transports from the ghettos in Poland to the concentration camps started with people viewed as the least useful like sick people, old people, weak people, and the very young. The first mass gassings started at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, this was on March 17, 1942 and after that five more mass killing centers were built at camps in Poland like Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and the largest one, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 all the way to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, the most deportations took place during Summer and Fall of 1942, over 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.
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Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret, but the scale of killing made this pretty much impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi cruelty in Poland to the Allied governments, who were brutally criticized after the war for their failure to answer or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. Many Jews worked at the camps and many were killed, around 12,000 in a day
Poland was devastated when German forces invaded their country on September 1, 1939, marking the beginning of World War II. Still suffering from the turmoil of World War I, with Germany left in ruins, Hitler's government dreamt of an immense, new domain of "living space" in Eastern Europe; to acquire German dominance in Europe would call for war in the minds of German leaders (World War II in Europe). The Nazis believed the Germans were racially elite and found the Jews to be inferior to the German population. The Holocaust was the discrimination and the slaughter of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its associates (Introduction to the Holocaust). The Nazis instituted killing centers, also known as “extermination camps” or “death camps,” for being able to resourcefully take part in mass murder (Killing Centers: An Overview).
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.
Many medical experiments went on during the holocaust, mostly in concentration camps. These subjects included Jews, Gypsies, twins, and political prisoners. The experiments included many of these people never survived many were killed for further examination. The Jewish people got the full wrath of the injections, inhumane surgeries, and other experimentations. Twins were also desirable in these experiments to show a controlled group. Gypsies and political prisoners were experimented with, because they were there for the Germans disposal. Thousands of people died in these horrible experiments. These experiments were performed to show how the Jewish race was inferior to the Aryan race.
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.
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.
In March, 1942, the Jews of the Lublin Province of Poland are deported to the Belzec death camp.
In 1942 Roosevelt signed the Executive order 9066 which forced all Japanese-Americans to evacuate the West Coast. They were forced out no matter their loyalty or their citizenship. These Japanese-Americans were sent to Internment camps which were located in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. There were ten camps all-together and 120,000 people filled them (2009). The immigrants were deprived of their traditional respect when their children who were American-born were indorsed authority positions within the camps. In 1945 Japanese-American citizens with undisrupted loyalty were allowed to return to the West Coast, but not until 1946 was the last camp closed.
“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 Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Many Americans were afraid of another attack, so the state representatives pressured President Roosevelt to do something about the Japanese who were living in the United States at the time. President Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066 which allowed local military commanders to designate military areas as exclusion zones, from which any or all persons may be excluded. Twelve days later, this was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast. This included all of California and most of Oregon and Washington.
Concentration camps were made specifically for Jews, children, and old people. In the concentration camps, the Germans worked the Jews until death. The first concentration camp was built in January of 1933. Along with Hitler's appointment in January of 1933. These camps were only made in Germany. Jews were killed daily for things they did roll call sometimes took hours whether it was thirty below zero or a hundred degrees. If they fell behind because they fell or they tripped the Germans
The first concentration camps were set up in 1933. Hitler established the camps when he came into power for the purpose of isolating, punishing, torturing, and killing anyone suspected of opposition against his regime. In the early years of Hitler's reign, concentration camps were places that held people in protective custody. These people in protective custody included those who were both physically and mentally ill, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, Jews and anyone against the Nazi regime. By the end of 1933 there were at least fifty concentration camps throughout occupied Europe.
Westerbork was the main camp that the Germans used,Germans sent Jewish people to die in Poland, with other Jews. In any camp if you were not 15 or older you would be sent to the gas chambers to die. On 1942 until 1944, the Germans sent 97,776 Jews from Westerbork, 54,930 Jews to Auschwitz in 68 trains, 34,313 to Sobibor in 19 trains, 4,771 to the Theresienstadt ghetto to be killed in 7 trains, and 3,762 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 9 trains to die. On April the Germans left Westerbork and left 876 Jews behind by April 12, 1945 Canadian forces found the 876 Jewish inmates.
Ever wondered how life would have been during World War II. Well, Elie Wiesel was a young Jewish boy living in Transylvania, Romania. He lived with his father, mother, and 3 sisters. All of which were sent to concentration camps. They both lied about their ages so they could be together in the same camps. Throughout the book there were many relationships between father and son, some were very different from others. Almost all of them died. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel uses Tone, Characterization, and Foreshadowing to portray the effect of father and son had in concentration camps.
World War II was a time of deliberate hate among groups of innocent people who were used as scapegoats. Japanese-Americans were persecuted due to the fact that they looked like citizens of Japan, who had attacked the United States on December 7th, 1941 at the naval base, Pearl Harbor. This hatred toward the group was due to newspapers creating a scare for the American people, as well as the government restricting the rights of Japanese-Americans. The Japanese-Americans were mistreated during World War II for no other reason than being different. These men, women, and children were loathed by the American public for looking like the people of the Japanese army that had attacked the United States. These people were only hated by association, even though many had come to the United States to create a better life for their family.
Auschwitz was one of the many concentration camps that the Nazis established to torture and usually kill Jews and others who helped the Jews. There many innocent lives were lost and many people were tortured.