Holocaust Concentration Camp

Baaqir Salaam
October 10, 2013
English 3A
Killing Centers And Concentration Camps; The Institutions of Nazi Germany

In killing centers across Germany approximately six million Jews were killed, and even more were imprisoned in the work camps. To understand what killing centers and concentration camps were it is beneficial to think about what it was like to be inside of one. In killing centers there wasn 't much to see. The Jews or Africans or whoever was deemed unworthy of living by the Germans were shoved into a small room; some were told it was a shower and other were just pushed in. These were the gas chambers in places such as Chelmno, Auschwitz, or Lublin. Concentration camps however were a little different. These places put several
This is what the Jews had to endure for over a decade during the Holocaust. There were several tortures in the concentration camps. One was the actual train ride to get to the camps. The victims were shoved onto a train and crammed until no more would fit and if there were any left they would be shot. The long hours of standing and no food or water took its toll on the victims and some died in the actual train. The doctors would also perform various medical experiments on the people imprison there. There was also a movement in the hospitals where doctors were encouraged to kill off any people with a mental or physical disability. In the women camps the prisoners were raped or sometimes the aesthetically pleasing Jews were kept in cages as some kind of sick pet. Sometimes they were bound by their hands or their feet and tortured and otherwise cruel and unusual punishment. The death marches were also a very intense style of punishment and selection. The SS soldiers and guards marched the prisoners to another camp or place. They were shot if they fell or lagged behind. Hence the fact that most of these tortures often ended in murders if just more proof that the Nazis had several murderous
The Germans had literally no reason to kill the way they did. They were just looking for someone to blame after the First World War, and Hitler gave them that. During the Holocaust approximately six million European Jews were killed and about eleven million total people were killed. The Germans had several tools in their toolbox to accomplish their task. They had gassing trucks. The victims were shoved into a hermetically sealed truck and then because the air was sealed off and the people inside suffocated. With the gassing trucks there were gassing chambers also. The chambers were used to annihilate several million people during the Holocaust era. In some places the chambers ran on exhaust fumes like the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Zyklon B gas was used in Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another way that the guards would kill were mass shootings. They would either make the prisoners dig their own grave and then shoot them into it, or dig a large hole in the ground and shoot the victims into as somewhat of a mass burial. Even the deportations would be punctuated with threats of death as shown in “The Last Morning” by Bernard Gotfryd when it says, “I noticed a poster reminding all inhabitants of the ghetto to deliver every sick or infirm member of their families to the only ghetto hospital. Noncompliance called for the death penalty,” (Gotfryd, 99). These horrendous actions were