Jewish Prisoners In The Sub Camps example essay topic

Concentration Camps: A Comparative Analysis Genocide and mass killing is something that, unfortunately, can be seen in several instances throughout world history. Arguably, the most horrendous and at the same time, ingeniously planned genocide took place in Europe during World War II. The Holocaust, as it is known as today, was the systematic attempt by Adolf Hitler's German army to rid the world of several groups of people, most notably the Jewish, African American, and Homosexuals. One method used to contain groups of people is by placing them in camps. America did it to the Japanese population in what is known as their internment. However, the German's did it to their prisoners on a much greater scale by using concentration camps.

The camps, designed to hold and later serve as a ground for killing off populations of people were scattered all across Europe. Three of the most infamous concentration camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, and Buchenwald. While all three camps used different methods of imprisonment and torture, the one common thread was the ultimately unsuccessful goal of ridding the nation of primarily the Jewish people. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the worst of all concentration camps, became the killing center where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed. "After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine. By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning" (Muller, 102).

Nine out of ten murders were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and prisoners of all nationalities died in the gas chambers. "Between May 14 and July 8, 1944,437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 48 trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust" (Muller, 104). Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's largest concentration and extermination camp facility, was located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim, and was established by order of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler on 27 April 1940.

Private diaries of Goebbels and Himmler, as transposed in Primo Levi's "Survival in Aushwitz" which were unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of the Jews during a meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote, "With regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep... ". (Levi, 20).

At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot as well. "Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits" (Gilbert, 49). Lucie Adelsberger, a doctor who examined remains after the war describes the probable life of the children: "Like the adults, the kids were only a mere bag of bones, without muscles or fat, and the thin skin like pergament scrubbed through and through beyond the hard bones of the skeleton and ignited itself to ulcerated wounds. Abscesses covered the underfed body from the top to the bottom and thus deprived it from the last rest of energy. The mouth was deeply gnawed by noma-abscesses, hollowed out the jaw and perforated the cheeks like cancer.

Many decaying bodies were full of water because of the burning hunger; they swelled to shapeless bulks, which could not move anymore. Diarrhea, lasting for weeks, dissolved their resistant bodies until nothing remained... ". (Gilbert, 54).

So called camp doctors, especially the notorious Josef Mengele, would torture and inflict incredible suffering on Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others. Patients were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed to various other traumas. When a mother did not want to be separated from her thirteen-year-old daughter, and bit and scratched the face of the SS man who tried to force her to her assigned line, "Mengele drew his gun and shot both the woman and the child. As a blanket punishment, he sent to the gas chamber all people from that transport who had previously been selected for work, with the comment: Away with this shit!" (Posner, 165).

There were moments when Mengele came alive. There was excitement in his eyes, a tender touch in his hands. This was the moment when Josef Mengele, the geneticist, found a pair of twins. At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies, and these twins were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. In the case of the twins, he drew sketches of each twin, for comparison.

Mengele was almost fanatical about drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. Only a few survived. "Once, Mengele's assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Gypsy twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantaneously. Mengele began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins' bodies" (Posner, 172).

Mengele supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create Siamese twins. The hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been looked at multiple times. Often Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of children in an attempt to change their eye color. Mengele's special pathology lab was located next to the crematorium. "He made experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, transfusions of blood from one twin to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. He also used injections with lethal germs, performed sex change operations, removed organs and limbs, and made incestuous impregnation's" (Posner, 211).

Obviously, the treatment was horrifyingly inhumane and had a huge impact on the entire community. The few survivors from his experiments tell how as children in Auschwitz they were visited by a smiling 'Uncle Mengele' who brought them candy and clothes. Then he had them delivered to his medical laboratory either in trucks painted with the Red Cross emblem or in his own personal car to undergo his experiments. One twin recalls the death of his brother: "Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin.

Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt.

It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin... ". (Ponder, 231). In December 1942, Professor Carl Clauberg came to Auschwitz and started his own medical and experimental activities.

He injected chemical substances into wombs during his experiments. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. "The injections, producing horrible pain, inflamed ovaries, bursting spasms in the stomach, and bleeding sterilized them. The injections seriously damaged the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin" (Muller, 197).

Likewise at Auschwitz, Claubergs's colleague, Dr. Herta Oberhauser, killed children with "oil and evian injections, removed their limbs and vital organs, rubbed ground glass and sawdust into wounds... ". (Muller, 198). After WWII, in October of 1946, the Nuremberg Medical Trial began, lasting until August of 1947. Twenty-tree German physicians and scientists were accused of performing "vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camps inmates and other living human subjects between 1933 and 1945. Josef Mengele was not amongst the accused" (Posner, 303).

Fifteen defendants were found guilty, and eight were acquitted. Of the 15, seven were given the death penalty and eight imprisoned. Herta Oberhauser, the doctor who had rubbed crushed glass into the wounds of her subjects, received a 20-year sentence but was released in April 1952 and became a family doctor at Stock see in Germany. Her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1958. Carl Clauberg was put to trial in the Soviet Union and sentenced to 25 years in prison. 7 years later, he was pardoned under a returnee arrangement between Bonn and Moscow, after which he decided to return to his home in West Germany.

While most would then lead a quiet life and stay under the radar, Clauberg did the opposite. Upon returning to West Germany he held a press conference and boasted of his scientific work at Auschwitz. Survivor groups protested and Clauberg was finally arrested again in 1955. He died in August of 1957, shortly before his second trial was set to begin. Oscar Schindler, the remarkable man who outwitted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other during WWII did so from Auschwitz.

By a mistake, 300 Schindler-women were routed on a train to the camp. Certain death waited. A Schindler survivor, Anna Duk lauer Perl, later recalled, "I knew something had gone terribly wrong. They cut our hair real short and sent us to the shower.

Our only hope was that Schindler would find us" (Gilbert, 64). Anna and the other Schindler-women were being herded off toward the showers. They did not know whether this was going to be water or gas. Then they heard a voice, "What are you doing with these people? These are my people" (Gilbert, 66). Schindler had come to rescue them, bribing the Nazis to retrieve the women on his list and bring them back.

The women were released - the only shipment out of Auschwitz during WWII. Rudolph Hess, the first command of Auschwitz, described the concentration camp as the "largest human examination camp of all times" (Levi, 10). Auschwitz became a symbol for the Holocaust. The Gestapo (German secret police) brought in the first prisoners June 14, 1940. They were 728 Poles from Tar now. These first prisoners where followed by thousands of Jews from whole Europe - only a few survived.

"The amount of prisoners varied usually between 13,000 and 16,000. In 1942 there were over 20,000. Prisoners were accommodated in blocks (they had to live in basements and lofts, too). The whole camp was secured with a double power line of barbwire fence, which should prevent escapes of prisoners" (Levi, 29). Directly over the entrance gate was a sign, which said, "Arbeit macht frei" - "work makes you free.".. if only that were the case. Dachau was another concentration camp that was used in a regular basis during World War II.

The Dachau concentration camp was opened on March 22, 1933 in a former gunpowder factory. "The first prisoners were 200 members of the Communist and Social Democrats political parties who were arrested after the Reichstag (German Congressional building) was deliberately set on fire on the night of February 27, 1933" (Buechner, 21). Some of the first prisoners were members of the Congress, who were suspected of plotting to overthrow Hitler who had just taken office as the German Chancellor on January 30, 1933. They were at first held in Landsberg prison, which was the same prison where Hitler served time after his attempt to take over the government on November 9, 1923. Dachau is recognized as the first official concentration camp in Germany, but there were other camps opened before Dachau. "According to the Nazi records, the total number of registered inmates was 206,206.

According to the US Seventh Army report, there were 221,930 inmates brought to the camp between 1933 and April 26, 1945 plus an additional 7,000 who were brought to the camp in the last three weeks before it was liberated" (Buechner, 44). These prisoners had been evacuated from other camps and were not registered when they arrived at Dachau. The precise number of Jewish deaths at Dachau is unknown. This is a fact that is true for most concentration camps. "According to the Nazi camp records, there were a total of 31,951-recorded deaths from all causes at Dachau, which included people of all religions and ethnic groups" (Buechner, 45).

Dachau was primarily a camp for political prisoners, common criminals and religious dissidents. The majority of the prisoners who died in the camp were Catholic. "It was the policy of the Nazis to send the Jews first to ghettos and then to extermination camps in Poland, not to concentration camps in Germany. When the death camps in Poland were closed between June 1944 and January 1945, the surviving Jews were transferred to camps in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, including some who were brought to Dachau and then sent to the sub-camps of the main Dachau camp" (Buechner, 83).

In the final days of the war, Jewish prisoners in the sub camps were brought to the Dachau main camp, along with Jewish prisoners evacuated from Buchenwald. Unlike Auschwitz, although people died in the Dachau camp, including some Jews, Holocaust historians do not refer to Dachau as a death camp because Jews were not sent there for the express purpose of being murdered. Another number which is staggeringly lower than Auschwitz is the number of people forced into experiments. "Approximately 150 prisoners were forced to participate in experiments conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rasc her for the German Air Force. About half of them died as a result. The Nazis claimed that the subjects were chosen from the German criminals or the Russian Communist Commissars in the camp who had been condemned to death" (Buechner, 167).

Another difference between Dachau and Auschwitz was that incoming inmates at Dachau were not tattooed. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the only camp where prisoners were tattooed. However, prisoners who were transferred to Dachau after the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was closed already had a tattoo when they arrived. Another difference between Dachau and Auschwitz is the direct treatment of inmates in regards to food and nourishment. The prisoners at Dachau were not deprived of food out of orders from Hitler.

The bottom line was that food was hard to come by all over Europe during the war and the food that was available was rationed for civilians. In the early days of the camp, before the war, the Dachau prisoners were well fed. Prisoners who worked especially hard received up to four meals a day, including the traditional German second breakfast. "During the last days of the war, "when railroad lines were being bombed, the transportation system broke down and it was hard to get food to the camp" (Buechner, 192). Nevertheless, the prisoners were fed right up to the day of liberation and the majority of the survivors were in reasonably good health. While it seems wrong to classify certain camps as being better to live in than others, it can be said that prisoners at Dachau had a better chance of survival than those at a camp like Auschwitz.

Buchenwald, another concentration camp seems to once again be different than any other camp. Buchenwald was located in Weimar, Germany and was established in 1937. Its estimated number of victims is more than 56,000 people. However, that number does not include the 13,000 prisoners transferred to Auschwitz and / or other extermination camps. Buchenwald was divided into three parts: the "large camp", which housed prisoners with some seniority; the "small camp", where prisoners were kept in quarantine; and the "tent camp", set up for Polish prisoners sent there after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Besides these three parts were the administration compound, the SS barracks, and the camp factories.

"During the war years Buchenwald was expanded into a vast complex of more than a hundred satellite factories, mines and workshops spread across a large portion of Germany. The most important of these was probably the Dora underground plant, which produced V-2 missiles" (Dann, 8). Like in many other concentration camps, the population of Buchenwald increased dramatically: "in July 1937, there were 1,000 inmates in the camp. The population increased to 5,382 on September 1, 1939 and to 8,634 inmates by the end of September 1939 (because of the invasion of Poland).

By December 1943, the population of the camp had reached 37,319. There were 63,084 prisoners in Buchenwald in December 1944, and the population reached 80,436 in late March 1945" (Dann, 20). The prisoners built the camp. During the entire summer of 1937, the SS forced the prisoners to use their "free time" to carry huge stones from the quarry to the camp. Those who had the misfortune to carry stones that were too small in the eyes of the SS were immediately killed. Later, dozen of prisoners were chained to huge four-wheel carts and had to pull enormous loads to the camp while forced to sing by the SS.

The SS used to call those prisoners the "Singing Horses". The first commandant of Buchenwald was SS officer Koch. Koch and his wife, Ilse Koch, were famous for their murderous qualities. "Koch was a thief, a drunkard and a gambler.

In 1941, he was transferred to Majdanek and replaced by SS Colonel Poster. Later, Koch was accused of fraud and thievery and was arrested by the SS, and executed in Auschwitz" (Borowski, 58). The official goal of Buchenwald was the destruction of the prisoners by work. Thousands of prisoners were murdered in Buchenwald by work, torture, beatings, or simply starvation and lack of hygiene. One of the worst criminals of Buchenwald was certainly Martin Sommer, who "worked" in the bunker - the high security prison of the camp. "Thousands of inmates, especially Soviet POWs, were murdered in the infirmary by lethal injections, whereas others were the victim of medical experiments, especially many who were contaminated by the typhus bacillus" (Borowski, 100).

Another way to kill prisoners was used in the stable. "The prisoners had to enter a fake infirmary room and place themselves under a height gauge. At this time, an SS man killed them with a revolver by shooting through a small hole placed at the height of the prisoner's neck" (Borowski, 100). The noise of those executions was masked by a radio at maximum volume. There were many ways to exterminate prisoners by work in Buchenwald.

Thousands of prisoners died during the construction of the road leading from the foot of the Ettersberg to the entry of the camp. "This road was called 'Blood Street' by the prisoners" (Gilbert, 342). Despite the abominable living conditions and the SS terror, a powerful underground organization was created in the last years of the activity of the camp. Numerous prisoners sentenced to death by the SS were hidden in the camp.

This was made possible by the overcrowding of Buchenwald. Buchenwald is considered amongst the most violent of all camps during World War II. The following is an extract from the aforementioned Nuremberg Trial about life in Buchenwald: Mr. Dubost (French prosecutor): Could you please tell us about the tattooed skin? Witness Bachalowsky: Yes. Mr. Dubost: Please tell us what you know.

Witness Bachalowsky: In Buchenwald, human tattooed skin was placed in Block 2. This block was called the "pathological block". Mr. Dubost: Could you tell us if there was much tattooed skin in this block? Witness Bachalowsky: There was always human skin there. I can't tell you exactly how much there was because there was a lot of traffic in this block. There was not only tattooed skin but also tanned human skin without tattoos.

Mr. Dubost: Does this mean that they skinned prisoners? Witness Bachalowsky: They skinned prisoners, and then they tanned the skin. Mr. Dubost: Could you give us more details about that? Witness Bachalowsky: I saw the SS leaving Block 2 with human skin in their arms.

Some comrades who worked in this block told me the SS received orders for human skin, and that tanned skin were given to the guards and visitors. Human skin was also used to make book covers. Mr. Dubost: We have been told here that the former commandant, Koch, was punished for that. Witness Bachalowsky: I don't know about that case, I was not in the camp at this time. Mr. Dubost: So, were there human tattooed and tanned skins in the camp after Koch left? Witness Bachalowsky: There was always skin.

When the Americans liberated the camp, they still found tattooed and tanned skin... Buchenwald was treacherous. More proof of this comes from the testimony of Ludwig Schein brunn, survivor of Buchenwald "As of September 21, 1939, I was obliged to carry corpses in Buchenwald. I did that for 2 and a half years.

During the winter of 1939, they erected a tent camp near the actual crematorium, where more than 40 prisoners died every day, from cold and starvation. As well, the SS adjutants Blank and Hinkelmann poisoned many of them. The prisoners received a half-liter of light soup and one bread for 8 inmates. It happened once that two prisoners were carrying the corpse of one of their comrades, hoping to receive a bigger bread ration.

Blank and Hinkelmann often threw the food in the mud, so the prisoners had to kneel to get it while Blank and Hinkelmann beat them with sticks and whips". Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz were three of the many concentration camps used by the German Nazi Army in World War II. While the goal was to exterminate the world of the Jewish population, along with other groups, it must be noted that they failed. Granted, millions of people were killed and this tragic event is something that can never be forgotten, but the fact remains, from this came knowledge and strength. Auschwitz, perhaps the deadliest of all the camps was where most of the famed experiments on inmates took place.

Dachau, while not deemed a "death camp" was still a place where slavery-like treatment took place. Finally there was Buchenwald, a combination of the other two camps. While also a work camp, Buchenwald was also an extermination camp where thousands of people were put to death. No one will ever forget what the prisoners endured in these camps and the many others, but one thing is for certain, in addition to not forgetting, the world cannot let events like this continue to take place.

Bibliography

Dann, Sam. Dachau 29 April 1945: The Rainbow Liberation Memoirs, NYU Press, New York, 1986.
Muller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Oxford Press, London, 1999.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Aushwitz, Paperback Books, Chicago, 1995.
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Penguin Classics, New York, 1992.
Posner, Gerald. Mengele: The Complete Story, Random House, New York, 2000.
Mill, Liana. Smoke Over Birkenau, Hardcover Books Press, Texas, 1994.
Buechner, Howard. Dachau: The Hour of the Avenger: An Eyewitness Account, NYU Press, New York, 1986.
Gilbert, Martin. The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors, Paperback Press, 1998.