No one could ever determine the importance of six million lives, it would be impossible to. The intentional extermination of six million people has affected the world in ways that we will never know, maybe the person who could have discovered the cure for Cancer or AIDS died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. (Fischel, 78). Six million people is fully one fifth of the world’s population. This may not sound like a huge number, but it is. Six million lives all gone. Whole families were wiped out.
The Holocaust illustrated many societal conditions in history. Therefore, it is important that we study the effects that the Holocaust had on the concentration camp prisoners. The holocaust was the principle part of Adolf Hitler’s master plan to have the white Aryan race dominate the world. All other life was unimportant. It was to be used as either slavery, or be exterminated. Most minorities were counted as the people that must be wiped out, but primarily Jews. The holocaust was not only Jews however.
An estimated 5. illion other Slaves, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental defects, socialists, communists, and any other groups that did not fit into his vision of the master race were murdered in the same concentration camps in the same way as the Jews. The main difference between Hitler’s killing of the Jews, and these cases, is that there was no intention to kill all of them, or cause a genocide, as was true with the Jews (Fischel, 117). Would have Hitler killed them all if he had enough time is an interesting question, however there is not enough evidence to base an answer on it.
Almost all of the killing during the holocaust was done in prison like facilities called concentration camps. These large camps were guarded my German SS officers who were told to kill any inmates they thought necessary. The largest, and perhaps most well known concentration camp during the holocaust was located in north Poland in the small town of Zasole. There were actually two camps to be built here. The first was built right after Poland was made into the Axis Empire in 1939. This camp held only ten thousand people. It was named Auschwitz. Two years later, a second camp was built about one and one half miles from the original camp.
This camp was much bigger and had as many kills as the original and its was named Birkenau. Later, the camps were put together and called Auschwitz-Birkenau (Fischel, 125). Most of the killings in the concentration camps, especially in Auschwitz, were done in gas chambers. German SS officer Bock describes a gassing at Auschwitz saying “There was a sign to disinfection. He said you see, they are bringing children now. They opened the door, threw the children in and closed the door. There was a terrible cry. A member of the SS climbed on the roof. The people went on crying for about ten minutes.
Then the prisoners opened the doors. Heat was coming from the bodies and they were placed on a rough wagon and taken to a ditch. The next group was already undressing in the huts. (Fischel, 128). The first gas chamber was built at Auschwitz I, it was small because it was only an experiment, but it came out better than the Nazi’s could have ever imagined. On September 3, 1941, six hundred soviet POWs and about 250 other prisoners were placed into a gas chamber where they were exposed to a rat poisoning called Zyclon B. After this experiment, four newer and much larger gas chambers were built at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. These were similar to the original, only much larger, and they included large crematoria in them. As the death count first started going up, the Nazis would burn the bodies, about four or five at a time and write down the results as how fast they would burn and how much coke was used to burn them. After a while the Germans knew exactly how to burn the bodies. They figure they would burn one healthy body, one unhealthy body, and two children. It was really possible to burn twelve thousand bodies each and every day, but they never got to this number.
Eventually, later in the holocaust, the Nazis just piled bodies up in huge pits and burned them. The pits had indentations at each end where the human fat would drain down. To keep the pits burning, the stokers poured oil, alcohol, and boiling fat on the bodies. In Auschwitz it snowed 365 days a year. Even in the summer when it was hot it snowed. The snow was ashes from the human beings. When they found out the address of the cremated person’s family they would be sent a letter. The letter would say that the doctors tried everything in their power to try and save the life of the person.
They would tell the family that the person had died of some disease. If they wanted their ashes, they would then have to pay 150 marks. When the family would pay the 150 marks, the guards would dip into the pile of ashes and randomly scoop up a box full. They would then send them to the family (Laqueur, 133). Death was the rule at the Nazi Concentration camps. There were many deaths from the punishment and torture they gave out. The most common forms of punishment were caning, starvation, and whipping. Some of the more harsh methods included making the prisoner stand in the sun for hours, or standing completely naked in freezing temperatures.
Also, they would have to run for a half an hour carrying a forty pound stone past a whole bunch of guards who would take turns beating them as they went by (Shwartz). There was also a special punishment place called the “punishment block. ” In this area, known as the dungeon, it was completely dark and built so that prisoners couldnt even lay down or stand up. While in here, your sentence was at least twenty-five lashes a day and you would get no food. These lashes sometimes left six-inch wounds on either half of the buttocks, in other words, the two halves were nothing but one big wound (Shwartz).
Sometimes the person being whipped would have to count the lashes out loud. If he or she made a mistake, the guards would start again at one until the prisoner got it right. Sometimes after being beaten the prisoners would go insane. In one case a prisoner asked another to “accompany him to a caf and ball. ” This particular prisoner vomited and urinated blood (Fischel, 134). In addition to the punishment, there were also many medical experiments that occurred at the prison camps. They would test certain new drugs and gasses on the humans and see the effects. Humans were treated like guinea pigs.
The Germans built facilities to experiment. In Auschwitz they built a gas chamber only to test a new gas. One of the most horrible things about these experiments was that real companies actually did them. For example, the Bayer Company once bought 150 Jewish women to do tests on hormones outside of Auschwitz (Lazare, 97). Executions outside of the gas chambers didnt happen a lot, but when it did it was very bloody. On September 1, 1944, about 300 internees were killed and thrown into a cellar. At the end of it, the level of blood on the floor was over ten inches deep.
Every once in a while, the guards at camps would say There are too many Jews here and would have a few hundred to be killed overnight. This would be done by choking them, or smashing their heads in. They would then be moved to the ovens (Laqueur, 135). When freedom day finally came, the Germans made an effort to hide the killings that had taken place. They blew up the gas chambers to try and keep it all a secret. On January 18, 1945 the camps got news of the German defeat and were ordered to get ready to evacuate. The guards were furious. They killed anyone that got near them.
They would leave, but then come back hours later to kill a few more people. They would set fire to buildings and shoot any prisoners that tried to escape. It was sad that most people that made it through all the torture were usually killed hours before they were going to be sent free (Laqueur, 137-140). We really dont know exactly how many Jews were killed during the holocaust, but we do know that the numbers range anywhere from about four million to six million or even higher. No one knows for sure as Nazi’s hardly kept good records on these sort of things.
It is actually estimated that anywhere from one million to two million Jews died at only at Auschwitz (Laqueur, 148) There are not many holocaust survivors left, and those who did survive are now very old. It is easy to know if someone has come out of it. Most of them have tattoos on their wrist that shows that they served in one of the many camps during the holocaust (Lazare, 150) Another sad thing about the holocaust is that some people that have survived and were rich before, now have no money. They put it away in Swiss banks before they went to prison camps and now can’t get to their money because it has been locked away.
Another reason why they get their money is because the banks have lost the people’s account numbers or the people have lost their own account numbers. So there are millions of dollars that should be in the hands of Jews around the world, but instead is locked up in a bank, where it will probably stay (Fischel, 165). Some people deny that the holocaust ever even happened. They will argue that it was all a bunch of exaggerations or that it was a large Jewish joke. They will say that the concentration camps may have kept Jews, but did not kill them in the way that the Jews describe.
Though, there is enough evidence to say that the holocaust did in fact happen, and that no words could possibly describe it (Laqueur, 141). The holocaust must not be forgotten, and it has not been. The Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah is a day when everyone, Jewish or not should remember what happened to the Jews over fifty years ago. A more recent holocaust related thing was in 1993 when Steven Spielberg released the movie “Schindler’s List. ” This movie is about a man named Oscar Schindler, a money stealer and womanizer.
He owned a small baking company, and hired Jews to work at his plant saying that this would save them from going to the concentration camps. Then near the end he spends his entire savings on buying back over one thousand Jews from a concentration camp (PBS). This movie showed me what the holocaust was really like and all of the things that had happened. The holocaust was a horrible time in which many people were killed. It was the worst thing anyone could have gone through. I believe that this was one of the worst times in history and if we don’t learn from it, we will be doomed to repeat it.