Holocaust Conditions

918 Words4 Pages
Conditions and Death in the Concentration Camps In the holocaust, there were many different techniques used to kill the Jews. As the killing techniques went on, Hitler and his accomplices began to contradict the fastest and cleanest ways to kill more Jews each day. Guidelines were made for soldiers to know whom to put in the gas chambers, and whom should be working hard labour. Gas chambers, ovens, and simply shooting at people, starvation, and working people to death, were all techniques used to exterminate Jews in concentration camps all throughout the holocaust. Gas Chambers People who were too weak to work, or sick were sent to the gas chambers. Poison gas was used just as the gas that the Germans made in the World War One, to…show more content…
Over 1.25 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz from the gas chambers alone. On November 15, 1939, 1100 people were murdered in the first mass gassing. In 1940, tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered in gas chambers. In the years that followed, millions more would die in gas chambers. The specific number of victims murdered in "Operation Euthanasia" is not known, but it is believed to be somewhere between 71,088 to over 100,000. In so-called "Euthanasia Operations,” Nazis murdered patients with psychiatric or hereditary diseases in large numbers. Psychiatric patients in Germany were sent to six institutions, where they were deprived of their lives in gas chambers. In his plan delivered on 3rd August, 1941, at St Lambert's Church in Münster, Bishop von Galen of Münster intensely condemned this cruel operation in public. Quoting the fifth commandment, "Thou shall not kill", he said it was sinful to kill innocent people on account of their unproductiveness. By the influence of this brave plan, Hitler had to order the closure of the institutions, though the "Euthanasia Operation” itself was secretly…show more content…
In 1944, at Chelmno, mass cremation and burial of corpses began. Many of these burial pits are still visible today. In a further effort to cover up evidence, the Germans dismantled the gas chambers of Sobibor and Treblinka. Yet, they were unable to work quickly enough to destroy all of the gas chambers at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The remains of the gas chambers and crematoriums are visible, but in poor condition. These remnants serve as evidence of the atrocities that occurred in these death camps. Gas chambers were just one of the methods the Nazis used to exterminate 11 million people. Many of these structures may have been destroyed, but the mass murder committed in them will never be
Open Document