Dr. Nyiszli wanted to make it clear that the Nazis were willing to kill men, women, and children not only because there intense hatred for Jews but also for research that was conducted through dissecting the human corpses. Children were killed just for pure research. The main causes of death at Auschwitz were either the gas chambers, a lethal injection of chloroform, or a bullet to the back of the head. The unlucky ones were the ones that were not killed right away because they either died from starvation or fatigue. “Don’t save him, you’ll only be prolonging agony” (108).
Of the few things I knew about the Holocaust, I knew that Auschwitz was a place of death that few left. One of the lines I remember most in Night was Elie’s description of the smell of the air. “In the air, the smell of burning flesh.” This very simple yet powerful description made me cringe when I first read it. I still try to avoid that line when I read over it, so I don’t get the image it instills in your mind. Once they arrived in Birkenau, they were told to sort into lines.
In 1922 the island was used for the location of a mental hospital which was where a doctor experimented on his patients by torturing them with hammers and chisels until killing them. It is said that the doctor threw himself from the bell tower of the island after reportedly hearing the screams and moans of the plague victims as well as his own victims. Since then the island has been completely shut closed for tourists wanting to see where thousands of plague victims lay to rest. “The Black Death” will in doubt be remembered as one the most agonizing and painful plagues ever to occur in history causing millions of deaths. It is said that there was not enough people left alive during the plague to bury the numerous amount of dead victims.
* They include the kapos in Auschwitz who bullied and brutalized their fellow inmates, the Special Squads who performed the physical labor of the gas chambers and crematoria, the clerks and helpers and camp administrators and ghetto bosses. * Their motives varied widely * Some were heroes playing a dangerous game of double agency. And some only thought they were heroes. * Primo Levi's essay, "The gray Zone," about the Sonderkommando - Jews who ushered prisoners into the changing rooms, hosed blood and feces from the gas chambers and shuttled corpses into the ovens. Aiding the death machine bought them extra months of life with unheard of privileges, including permission to scavenge the food and belongings of the dead.
They were punished for many things, and were used for "medical experiments". If you were to weak to work, you were "selected" to be shot. In 1942, instead of being shot, they were transferred to "euthanasia" killing centres, or they were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Also, some of the prisoners were murdered by lethal injection. In the summer of 1942, medical experiments started to be conducted on Ravenbrück prisoners.
Prisoners were forced to participate in hard labor and were given small rations. The living conditions were extreme, and the use of torture was prominent. Within a number of camps, Nazi doctors used prisoners to administer medical experiments, often times resulting in death or extreme illness. Concentration camps were initially created to work, starve, and torture prisoners to death, but it wasn’t long before extermination camps were created for the sole purpose of killing prisoners quickly, efficiently, and in large numbers. While in control, the Nazis built six extermination camps: Treblinka, Aushwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek.
There were over six million Jews that were murdered during the Holocaust. Toward the end of the war prisoners that were in the concentration camps were liberated, this attempt to free the prisoners continued until May 7, 1945 which was the day the Germans surrendered without a fight. The crimes that were committed during the Holocaust had a permanent effect on the Jewish population, even till today. The Holocaust was caused by Hitler Germany needed an enemy that could be blamed for everything bad that had happened to it after WW1 and the Jews were a perfect target.. The Holocaust happened because Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jewish race.
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.
The Jewish culture was taken out of the society by taking them to concentration camp where they would be murdered. People knew about these camps all around the world, yet nobody stepped up tp do anything about it. Until the allied forces were successful in defeating Germany the concentration camps kept killing. I believe other cultures were practicing typical ethnocentrism as well. Most of the world were Christian and looked down on the Jews.
Even though Birkenau and Muahthausen had differences, they both are historically some of the worst concentration camps of the Holocaust. At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. “…Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time