Dachau Concentration Camp

World War II brought up many ethical issues. One of these was the ethical treatment of prisoners. As the Allied forces pushed into Nazi territory and came upon the concentration camps, the true horrors of World War II were seen. Dachau Concentration Camp in Southeast Germany, was the first of the concentration camps built by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei , commonly referred to as the Nazi party. At the camp, the prisoners were forced to do hard labor and were unjustly executed. The ethical problem that this situation poses is that the Nazi party made the camp prisoners less than human. They removed all basic rights, referred to the prisoners by numbers, and demeaned them in every way possible. Dachau Concentration Camp was a place of misery and cruelty, where the Nazi party did not care for ethical standards, and the prisoners were vastly mistreated. The mistreat of prisoners under the Nazi regime is not uncommon. They established numerous camps and prisons where prisoners were subjected to cruel and subhuman circumstances. Dachau was built to hold six thousand people with two hundred living in each of the barracks. However, before the war was over there were over two hundred thousand people in the camp with two thousand living in each barrack (Timeline 1933-1945). As the war intensified so did the cruelty in the camp. The living conditions in the camp grew worse as the number of people grew. The prisoners were no longer only political prisoners. They were Jewish, Jehovah 's Witnesses, Polish, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, emigrants, Catholic priests, and Soviet Union soldiers. Dachau was never used as an extermination camp but it did have incinerators for disposing of the dead. The work that the prisoners were forced to do was so labor intensive that many of them died there. It is estimated that forty-one thousand five hundred people died there. Although the Nazi party only reported thirty one thousand nine hundred fifty one people to

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