Concentration Camps During The Holocaust

The Holocaust is simply one of the most terrible and horrific crimes against humanity of all time.It stripped so many innocent people of their rights as human beings and put them through some of the most awful and indescribable things that most people could not even begin to imagine. Adolf Hitler tried to create a pure Aryan race, so he decided that all jews, mentally ill, gypsies, and also non supporters of Nazi ideas, should be eliminated from the German population.He carried out his goal by using a very systematic plan. One of his main methods of "doing away" with these people was through the use of concentration camps. In a meeting in January 1941 Hitler, along with some of his top officials decided on a plan that was called the "final
The first concentration camp was set up in 1933. In the earlier days of the Holocaust concentration camps were places that held people in protective custody. Victims for protective custody included those who were both physically and mentally ill, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, Jews and anyone against the Nazis. By the end of 1933 there were at least fifty concentration camps throughout occupied Europe. At first, the camps were controlled by the Gestapo (police), but by 1934 the S.S were ordered to control the camps.Concentration camps were set up for different purposes. Some were for forced labor, others for medical experiments and, later on, for death and extermination. There were also transition camps were set up as holding places for prisoners going to death camps. The camps were set up along railroad lines, so that the prisoners would be close to the camp that they were going to be sent
These camps used gas from the shower heads to murder the prisoners. A seventh death camp, Mauthausen, used a method that killed the prisoners by the use of over working them and by starving them.The largest death camp out of these was Auschwitz. It was located in Poland. It was established by Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940. At first, it was small because it was a work camp for Polish and Soviet prisoners of war, but then it later became a death camp in 1941. Auschwitz was divided into three areas: , Auschwitz 2 was called Birkenau and it was the death camp with forty different gas chambers and the last one was Auschwitz 3 and it was a slave labor camp. The daily meals in Auschwitz were watery soup, it was given out once a day, with a small piece of bread. Everyone in the camp was so malnourished that if a drop of soup spilled prisoners would rush from all sides to see if they could get some of the soup. Because of the bad sanitary conditions, the inadequate diet, the hard labor and other torturous conditions in Auschwitz, most people died after a few months of being in the camp. The few people who managed to stay alive longer were the ones who were assigned better jobs. The prisoners slept on three shelves of wooden slabs. They had to stand for hours in the mud during roll call,which was taken twice a day.Many Jews and non Jews tried to escape from Auschwitz.