Known Concentration Camp During The Holocaust example essay topic

Six million. This is a large number by anyone's account, whether it be dollars, days, or human lives. How could one measure the significance of six million lives, it would be impossible to. 'The intentional annihilation of six million people has affected the world in ways that we will never know, maybe the person who could have discovered the cure for Cancer or AIDS died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. ' (Remembrance, 1) Six million people is fully one fifth of one per-cent of the world's population.

This may not sound like a huge number, but it is. Six million lives, gone. Whole families, wiped out. All this in the span of only five short years.

These five years are now known as the holocaust. These five years were possibly the worst in human history, to consider the effects of this event and learn to never repeat it is important. The holocaust was the principle part of Adolf Hitler's master plan to have the white Aryan race dominate the world. All other life was unimportant. It was to be used as either slavery, or be exterminated. (Auschwitz) Most minorities were counted as the peoples that must be wiped out, but primarily Jews.

The holocaust was not only Jews however. An estimated 5.5 million other Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, mental defects, socialists, communists, and any other groups that did not fit into his vision of the master race were murdered in the same concentration camps in the same manor as the Jews. The main difference between Hitler's killing of the Jews, and these cases, is that there was no intention to kill all of them, or cause a genocide, as was true with the Jews (Landau 117). Whether or not Hitler would have killed them all given the proper time is an interesting question, however there is not sufficient evidence on which to base an answer to it. Almost all of the killing during the holocaust was done in prison like facilities called concentration camps.

These large camps were guarded my German SS officers who were told to kill any inmates they deemed necessary. The largest, and perhaps most well known concentration camp during the holocaust was located in north Poland in the small town ofZasole. There were actually two camps to be built here. The first was built right after Poland was annexed into the Axis Empire in 1939. This camp held only ten thousand people.

It was named Auschwitz. Two years later, a second camp was built approximately one and one half miles from the original camp. This is what is now generally referred to as Auschwitz as it was much larger and had many times the number of kills as the original. It was named Birkenau (McVay 2). Later the camps were grouped together and collectively called Auschwitz-Birkenau. The majority of killings in the concentration camps, especially in Auschwitz, were done in gas chambers.

German SS officer B"ok describes a gassing at Auschwitz. 'There was a sign 'to disinfection'. He said 'you see, they are bringing children now'. They opened the door, threw the children in and closed the door.

There was a terrible cry. A member of the SS climbed on the roof. The people went on crying for about ten minutes. Then the prisoners opened the doors.

Everything was in disorder and contorted. Heat was given off. the bodies were loaded on a rough wagon and taken to a ditch. The next batch were already undressing in the huts. After that I didn " took at my wife for four weeks.

' (McVay, 2-3) The first gas chamber was built at Auschwitz I, it was small as it was only an experiment, but it proved much more effective than the Nazi's could have ever dreamed. On September 3, 1941, six hundred soviet POWs and about 250 other prisoners were filed into a gas chamber where they were exposed to a rat poisoning called Zyclon B. After this experiment, four newer and much larger gas chambers were built at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These were similar to the original, only much larger, and they included large crematoria on them. The crematoria were sickeningly efficient. As the death count first started going up, the Nazis would burn the bodies, about four or five at a time and record the results such as how fast they burnt and how much coke was used to burn them, etc. After awhile the Germans knew exactly how to burn the bodies for maximum efficiency.

They had it down to a science; one healthy body, one unhealthy body, and two children. You leave them on for a specified time and then take them off and let them burn the rest of the way on their own. It was theoretically possible to burn twelve thousand bodies each and every day, but the cremation level fell very short of this number. Eventually, later in the holocaust, the Nazis just piled bodies up in huge pits and burnt them. The pits had indentations at either end where the human fat would drain down into. To keep the pits burning, the stokers poured oil, alcohol, and boiling fat onto the bodies.

It is said that in Auschwitz that it snowed 365 days a year. Even in the summer when it was hot it snowed. It snowed what remained of human beings... ashes. When the address of the cremated person's family was known, they would be sent the following letter: Our doctors did all in their power to save the precious life entrusted to them, but their efforts were in vain. Your husband (or some other relative) succumbed to pneumonia (or some other illness). After we performed the last rites for the deceased, we had his / her remains cremated; but we kept the ashes.

If you should wish to have your relative " sashes, please remit the sum of 150 marks and we will send them to you without delay. When the family would pay the 150 marks, the guards would dip into the pile of ashes accumulated and randomly scoop up a box full. They would then send them to the mourning family (Whissen 133) Death was the rule at the Nazi Concentration camps. There were a great many deaths from the punishment and torture they gave out.

The most common forms of punishment were caning, starvation, and whipping Some of the more sinister methods included making the prisoner stand in the sun for hours, or standing completely naked in freezing temperatures. Also running for half an hour carrying a forty pound stone past lines of guards who would take turns beating you as you went by. (Whissen 42-43) There was also a specialized punishment area called the 'punishment block. ' In this area, known as the dungeon, it was completely dark and built in a way that prisoners could neither lay down, or stand up. While in here, your sentence was a daily minimum of twenty-five lashes a day, and the occupant received no food. These lashes sometimes left six inch wounds on either half of the buttocks, in other words, the two halves were nothing but one big wound (Whissen 43).

Sometimes the person being whipped would have to count the lashes out loud. If he or she made a mistake, the guards would start again at one until the prisoner got it right. Sometimes after being beaten the prisoners would go insane. In one case a prisoner asked another to 'accompany him to a caf'e and ball.

' This particular prisoner vomited and urinated blood (Whissen 45). In addition to the punishment, there were also a great many medical experiments that occurred at the prison camps. They would test certain new drugs, gasses, etc. on guinea pigs and log the effects. The guinea pigs were of course humans (Whissen 85).

The Germans built facilities for the sole purpose of experimentation. In Auschwitz they built a gas chamber specifically to test a new asphyxiating gas. One of the most horrific things about these experiments was that real companies actually performed them, for example, the Bayer company once bought 150 Jewish women to do tests on hormones outside of Auschwitz. Executions outside of the gas chambers were very random, very spontaneous, and very bloody. On the night of September 1, 1944, about 300 internees were killed and thrown into a cellar. At the end of it, the level of blood on the floor was over ten inches deep.

Every once in a while, the guards at camps would say 'There are too many Jews here,' and would haul off a few hundred to be killed overnight. This would be done by either strangling them, or bashing their heads in. They would then be hauled off to the ovens. (Whissen 95-96) Joseph Tyl, professor, priest, and holocaust survivor describes a day when he had to load wagons with bodies. While I was carrying the first body, all of a sudden a Kapowho was sitting at a table shouted 'Hey, her heart just fell out!' I looked down and saw that the body I was carrying was that of a lovely young girl whose chest had been cut open and whose heart indeed fallen out. It was the first time I had ever seen a human heart.

I picked it up and tossed it into the van along with the body. Then Went to get another corpse. This one had been shot in the back of the head -- as was the case with most of the bodies -- and the blood was still pouring out. Mr. Tyl goes on to describe how he also put the body of a girl he used to notice around the camp. 'I dragged her by the legs to get her on the van, but I shrank back with horror, for all the thigh muscles had been cut away to the bone. The van held 624 bodies; it came back twice.

' (Whissen 96) When liberation day finally came, the Germans made an effort to hide the atrocities that had taken place. They blew up the gas chambers to try and keep it alla secret. On January 18, 1945, the camps received news of the German defeat and were ordered to prepare for evacuation. The guards were furious. They killed anyone that got near them.

The would leave, only to return hours later to kill a few more people. They would set fire to buildings and shoot any prisoners that attempted to escape. To make it through all the torture, the beatings, the horrible acts, only to be killed hours before liberation (Whissen 137-140). There is quite a bit of variance as to just how many Jews were killed during the holocaust. The numbers range anywhere from about four million to six million or even higher. No one knows for certain as Nazi's hardly kept good records on these sort of things.

It is actually estimated that anywhere from one million to two million Jews died at Auschwitz alone. (McVay II) There are not many holocaust survivors left, and those who did survive are by now very old. It is easy to know if someone has come out of it. Most of them have tattoos on their forearm or wrist that identifies them as having served in one of the many camps during the holocaust.

Another sad thing about the holocaust is that some people that have survived, had made it through the hell and torment, some of those that were rich before, now have no money. They put it away in Swiss banks, known for their integrity, before they we retaken off to prison camps and now can't get to their money because it has been locked away, and the banks have lost the people's account numbers, or the people themselves had lost their own account numbers. So there is literally millions of dollars worth of money that should be in the hands of Jews around the world, but instead is locked up in a bank, where it will probably remain forever. Some people deny that the holocaust ever even happened.

They will argue that it was all a bunch of propaganda and exaggerations, a large Jewish hoax. They will argue that the concentration camps may have kept Jews, but did not kill them in the manors, or the quantity described by the Jews. Until the 1970's holocaust denial in the US was mainly the province of racists and extremist groups. (Lip stadt 65) These views however are completely unfounded. There is enough evidence to say without a doubt that the holocaust did in fact happen, and that no words could possibly describe it. The holocaust must not be forgotten, and it has not been.

The Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Ha shoah is a day when everyone, Jewish or not should remember what happened to the Jews over fifty years ago. A more recent holocaust related thing was in 1993 when Steven Spielberg released the movie 'Schindler's List. ' This movie is about a man named Oscar Schindler, a money swindler and womanizer. He owned a small baking wear company, and hired Jews to work at his plant, thus saving them from the horrors of the concentration camps.

Later he opens a shell factory, and makes unusable shells so they can not be used against innocent people. Then near the end he spends his entire savings on buying back over one thousand Jews from a concentration camp (Spielberg). This movie was a realistic view of what the holocaust was really like and offered people a first hand look at the atrocities that occurred. The holocaust was a truly deep-set blood stain on the ground that is mankind and his existence on earth. I twas probably the single largest mass genocide in the history of mankind, and certainly shows the worst side of human nature. I believe that this was one of the worst times in history, and if we don't learn from it, we will be doomed to repeat it.