Cesar Gonzalez
11 October 2018
Holocaust
The Holocaust was a planned program to exterminate all Jews. This action was carried out by Hitler and all his allies in the Nazi army during World War II. About 6 million Jews were killed, and others opposed to Hitler’s rules which were about 11 to 17 million.The holocaust was a devastation to many Jews and destroyed a lot of lives. Children were being gas some got sent to work, Jewish suffered of starvation and cruelness.
Hitler believed Jews were a threat to the community, his laws was a discrimination to Jews. Hitler also denied Germans Jews their civil rights. “In 1933, the regime established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others classified as dangerous.” (Highlighted event: Book Burning, May 10, 1933) Hitler’s biggest concentration camp was built around the 1940s which was known as Auschwitz located in the south of Poland.
“ The German SS systematically killed at least 960,000 of the 1.1-1.3 million Jews deported to the camp. Other victims included approximately 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and at least 10,000 from other nationalities. More people died at Auschwitz than at any other Nazi concentration camp and probably than at any death camp in history (George Arnett 2015).” The fates of Jewish and non-Jewish children were categorized in the following ways 1.Children were killed when they arrived in killing centers 2. Children were killed immediately after birth or in institutions 3. Children borned in ghettos and camps who survived were hidden by prisoners 4.Children over the age of 12 who were used as laborers and medical experiments. “ The Germans and their collaborators killed as many as 1.5 million children. This number included over a million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, German children with physical and mental disabilities living in institutions, Polish children, and children residing in the occupied Soviet Union.”
When Jews were loaded into the trains entering the gates of Auschwitz they were being taken to the gas chambers, they were told that they being placed in new labor camp but this was one of the many lies that were told to them. The gas chambers looked like any other building it was hard to imagine what was the real truth inside them,as Jews entered the gas chambers they were told that they were going to take a bath but in reality they were getting murder alive. About 900 were being gas at a time in, crematories were built because the gas chambers were to small and crematories would hold more victims.
During this period of time the concentrations camps also did medical experiments on the prisoners, they wanted to see if they were able to survive frozen water and air pressure. Josef Mengele also did experiments on twins to seek ways on increasing German population by breeding families that would produce twins. During this examination “tissue samples were taken from the kidneys, prostate, and testicles. Several semen samples were forcefully taken over two days. After this three weeks of tortuous medical examinations they were taken to the dissection laboratory. Using two doctors, each twin was simultaneously given an injection in the heart, taking their lives. They were dissected and their organs were sent to the Institute of Biological Racial and Evolutionary Research Berlin.”
In conclusion in “1944–1945, the Allied armies liberated the concentration camps. Tragically, deaths in the camps continued for several weeks after liberation. Some prisoners had already become too weak to survive. 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.”
Citations:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/concentration-camps-1942-45
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/auschwitz-short-history-liberation-concentration-camp-holocaust
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust