The Holocaust started with Kristallnacht, which is “the Night of Broken Glass.” This occurred on November 7th, 1938. Over 7,000 Jewish shops were vandalized, synagogues were destroyed, and at least 91 people died. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps, but were released eventually. From 1933 to 1945, Jews were sent to concentration camps, these were used as a way to exterminate the Jewish population. In the beginning of the Holocaust, many people were sent to labor camps but died of infections or from working so much.
The Holocaust was one of the worst events to ever happen to mankind. It was started by the Fuhrer of Germany, Adolf Hitler, who thought that the Aryan race was superior to every other race. He had a massive hatred for the Jewish race and decided to try and exterminate every living Jewish person. He killed around two-thirds of all the European Jews (Byers 10). World War II was going on at the same time as the Holocaust.
Concentration camps were multifaceted and complex camps that had no regard for human life and played an important role during the Holocaust. Concentration camps ignored the rights of those subject to incarceration, and often were starved, tortured, overworked and murdered. Living conditions were poor, unsanitary and harsh. People were given little to no food and were forced to work. The camps were described as “a dehumanizing existence that involved a struggle for survival against a system designed to annihilate them.” Prisoners were forced to exist in conditions described as “dehumanizing” believing that the camps took away their human rights.
Third, wherever Germany in Eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen were created to murder Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Finally, Jews and Romani were ordered to be live in overcrowded ghettos, there they were then transported by freight train to extermination camps. Extermination camps were camps that were built by Nazi Germany, during the World War II, that were designed to kill millions of people by gassing and extreme work under terrible living conditions. The Nazis were not alone in this effort. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supported the genocide by presenting birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry took away Jewish property; German businesses fired Jewish workers and took away stock that belonged to the Jews.
For every act of defiance and murder of a Nazi solider, a Jew and his family would be executed, sometimes even whole villages of Jews. The armed resistance can be divided into three separate categories; ghetto revolts, resistance within the concentration camps and partisan warfare. The vast majority of Jews that participated in any type of these resistances were caught and executed. The main four obstacles to an arm resistance for the Jews were their weapon supply being close to nothing, most Polish and other non-Jews were unwilling to provide arms to them, when arms could be obtained it was at great cost or by theft, they had no intelligence on Nazi activity and the fear of the local population aiding the Nazis in rounding up the Jews. It was always clear that no matter how hard they fought or by whatever means they resisted with arms, they did not have a real chance to stopping the
Auschwitz The Auschwitz camp was located in a province of present-day Poland. It consisted of several satellite camps. In each of these camps the prisoners were treated as slaves to work in the German Nazi Industrial factories. They worked in appalling conditions, for example, without clothes, without proper equipment, poorly fed and without medical care. Many of them worked to death or died of starvation.
It evolved around 1933 and 1945. The Holocaust was a time of discrimination against Jews. They were taken away from their communities and humiliated in front of everyone, then they were sent to camps were they were made to work hard, have hardly any food and they were being treated as if they were not human beings. At the end of the Second World War, six million Jews had been killed and one and half million were children. But not just the Jews were involved in the Holocaust.
In 15 hours over 7,500 Jewish-owned stores were destroyed and 100 Jews were killed. The rest were arrested and imprisoned in camps. Nearly half of the Jews of Germany emigrated out of Germany, but for those who couldn't had to go through the roughest times of their lifes. "I saw the fire engines standing in front of a building and in the back of this building was the Orthodox synagogue," This are some of the words that Hanne Hirsch Liebmann a witness to Kristallnacht had said with such fear and anger towards
Some of the most well-known are Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Buchenwald, Neuengamme and Majdanek. Jews, other racial minorities and people who were considered enemies of Hitler’s regime were deported to these camps and forced to work in horrendous living conditions. Thousands of inmates died of starvation, overwork, exposure to the elements, epidemics and disease. Those who were unfit for labour including women, children, the elderly and the sick were immediately gassed and their bodies either cremated or dumped into mass
“Children mourned as they watched their relatives and neighbors lined up into thee gas chambers, and watching the corpses pile up into a fire fueled by their own fat.” This is the daily life of the prisoners in the death camps during the Holocaust from 1933 – 1945. For the first time in history Jews were singled out for total annihilation. The Nazis used death camps to torture and kill Jews during the Holocaust. Jews suffered greatly in death camps by gas chambers, starvation, and hard labor. Although there seemed like no way out of death camps, a few rebellions took place in some famous death camps.