During World War II, many concentration camps were established and being used in several areas. An immense amount of citizens were murdered (Merriam) and put to work in these camps. The people in these camps were not free. They were worked to death by the Nazis. The Germans had no tolerance for any of them and stripped them of their belongings and put them to work immediately.
Neema Khan Final Paper Essay # 3 05/23/2012 History The term Holocaust refers to the murder of millions Jewish men, women and children as a result of the national policy of Nazi Germany to murder all Jews. The Holocaust represents the transformation of historic anti- Semitism and sporadic, undisciplined mob violence into a relentless, systematic, nationally organized hate and murder machines. The Holocaust also refers to the period from January 30, 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, to May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended. After the invasion of Poland in 1939 the Germans established ghettos in many Polish cities, where Jews were confined. This is how the “Holocaust” started.
The Germans were very evil and they managed to make several things to torture the Jews. One kind of torture was hitting them. Many times the Germans or the Kapos whipped the prisoners with no mercy. They also make some Jews go to the crematorium. This action was a torture for the ones that had to get in the crematorium and for the ones that were outside.
So the only way to fix this problem was to start a system of eradication of Jews. This was the cause of the Holocaust. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. He hated Jewish people, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and twins. He wanted to direct German aggression off the government and used those groups of people as scapegoats, causing one of the greatest tragedies in history.
Schindlerjuden An act of mass destruction, a loss of life; the Holocaust was the mass murder of the Jewish community under the regime of Nazi Germany. The Holocaust first began in 1933 under the power of Adolf Hitler, and eventually ended in 1945 when Nazi Germany was defeated by the allied powers. The term “Holocaust” originates from the Greek term “holokauston”, meaning, “sacrificed by fire”. The Nazis didn’t just focus on the full destruction of Jews, they also narrowed in on the other minorities such as the homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and the disabled. An estimated 11 million died under the rule of Hitler, 6 million of those were Jews, and 1.1 million were children.
Before instituting the Final Solution, the Nazi government had abolished Jews’ rights destroyed and confiscated their property, and confined them in concentration camps.” (The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy). The holocaust was a terrible time in history in which millions of lives were lost in order to try to further Adolph Hitler’s goal to have a “master race” of people.
These camps were called concentration camps because the prisoners “were physically ‘concentrated’ in one location” (Nazi Camps, 2010, p. 1). The SS Forces ran these camps. These camps would be used for either slave labor in nearby factories or for death camps for the extermination of the “undesirable” (Inside a Nazi Death Camp, 1944, 2004, p. 1). These inferior people would later include the disabled, mentally retarded, homosexuals, Gypsies, and members of the Communist and Socialist groups. Concentration camps were built for the prisoners to perform hard labor and be provided little food.
Holocaust is a Greek word, meaning “sacrifice by fire”. The Holocaust came as a result of Hitler’s Nazi party and their racial intolerance, and quest for a pure blood line in Germany. It was part of Hitler’s final solution and involved the collection of Jews and other racial inferiors by German soldiers. The racial inferiors were sent to concentration camps after their collection; where they were forced to labour and in most cases eventually murdered (Berenbaum, 1998). In some cases, these camps were known as “extermination” or “death” camps and the Jews were killed in purpose built gas chambers and their bodies burnt in large ovens.
Prisoners arrived to camps in unsanitary trains and when they got there, their fate was soon decided. “When the groups were in formation, it was time for the selection… the task of the selection officer was to determine who would die and who would be kept alive—for a while at least—to work” (Lace 24). The selection determined who would live and die. If they did live, they would be put to hard work in the camps. In addition, life in the camps was dreadful and the prisoners were treated very poorly.
Not only was in for Jews they placed homosexuals, criminals of war, and political prisoners, and Jehovah's Witnesses. This camp killed about one million one hundred thousand people. They hand a system at this camp, they would send most of them to the left and some to the right. The people going to the left were unknowingly walking into a death trap, the Nazis would not tell the victims this to prevent them fighting back. Instead the nazis told them that they were going to be sent to work but first they had to take a shower, so the Jews were lead into this huge shower room with fake shower head and were told to strip their clothes.