Research Paper the Holocaust

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Research Paper

The Holocaust

Samantha Vunovic

ENG-102-110

Professor Neuburger

25 March 2011



Vunovic 2

Before the Nazi¶s took over and Hitler came to power, Jews lived normal lives and were

no different than anyone else. During the time when the Nazis

came to power in Germany in 1933, Jews were living all over

Europe. There was close to nine million Jews. By the end of the

war, two out of every three Jews would be dead, and European

Jewish life was be changed forever. Jews were like any other

culture; they were farmers, factory hands, seamstresses, tailors,

accountants, doctors, teachers, and small-business owners. Some

of the Jewish families were wealthy, but many more were poor.

Many children ended their schooling early to work but many others looked forward to continuing

their education at the university level. By the time the Nazi¶s took power in the 1930¶s, the

everyday lives of the Jews no longer mattered. The all became the same, victims.

Germany lost the war during World War 1. Research done by Seymour Russel states that

after Germany lost the war, the Treaty of Versailles was passed. This treaty reduced the area of

the German Empire by one tenth. This treaty also had other rules to follow. Germany was forced

to admit that it was guilty of starting the war. Also, the German government was forbidden to

raise an army of more than a hundred thousand men, or to build any large weapons of war. Worst

of all the treaty made Germany pay the Allies enormous amounts of money to compensate for

the suffering caused by the war (Rossel). Adolf Hitler was one of the most well known people

during the Holocaust. According to the website www2.dsu.nodak.edu, Hitler was born on April

20, 1889 in the small Austrian village of Braunau Am Inn (Meier). Hitler served in World War 1

and when the war was lost, Hitler tried to find people to blame for the wars loss. Hitler decided

the Jews were to be blamed for Germany¶s loss. In 1919, Hitler joined a group called the German

Jews along the streets of Paris before the war.http://bit.ly/fkAnfG



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Workers' Party. Hitler became one of seven committee

members who headed the party. They held meetings to

compare the present government¶s weaknesses to the

Government before World War 1 and to discuss the

"enemy", the Jews. According to historyplace.com, Hitler

gained power in politics quickly. Hitler became leader of the Nazi

Party in 1921 and over time the number of members soared. In

January of 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany (The Rise). From this day on, the

Jews lives changed forever.

After Hitler was established the new Chancellor of Germany, the first concentration

camps were created. The US Holocaust Museum¶s website gives a concentration camp timeline

for the camps during the Holocaust. These first concentration camps were used for political

opponents and social deviants. Prisoners were held here and were forced to work. After World

War II broke out, more prisoners were targeted and the functions of these camps expanded. After

the beginning of the war, the concentration camps turned to

a new extreme. These camps also became sites for the mass

murder of small targeted groups declared dangerous for

political or racial reasons, according to the Nazi¶s. For

example, in 1941 hundreds of Dutch Jews were rounded up

during a strike and sent away to a camp. Within a few days,

all of these Jews were reported dead (Holocaust

Encyclopedia). Concentration camps started become more and

more vast, sub camps were being set up. At the camps, many Jews and other nationalities were

Hitler becomes Chancellor of

Germanyhttp://bit.ly/3U4NMd

Political Prisoners arriving at a concentrationcamp in Oranienburg

http://bit.ly/aWh3Er



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killed. About.com has a great chart of many camps during the Holocaust and statistics about

each. There were many camps and sub camps, but there are 5 main camps; Auschwitz, Belzec,

Dachua, Majdanek, and Sobibor (Concentration).

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become known as the deadliest and largest concentration camp

that existed during the Holocaust. The website Auschwitz.org declares that Auschwitz was

established in 1940 in Oswiecim, a polish city in Germany that became known as Auschwitz

(Auschwitz). It is said that Auschwitz camp was built here because it was a central intersection

of roads and railways. The camp was surrounded by

large electric barbed wire fences that were being

guarded by soldiers. In March 1942, trains began to

arrive everyday carrying hundreds, even thousands of

Jews. The majority of the Jewish men, women and

children sent to Auschwitz were sent to their deaths in

the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after they

arrived. People here didn¶t just die from gas

chambers and gun shots. Over fifty percent of prisoners died as a result of starvation, labor,

stress caused by the terror that raged in the camp, executions, the terrible living conditions,

disease, epidemics, punishment, torture, and criminal medical experiments. Prisoners were

stripped and removed of all their belongings whenever they arrived. They were removed from

their families and sent to different parts of camp, having different tortures in store for them. The

living conditions were terrible (Holocaust Survivors). A Holocaust survivor tells his story of

what it was like living in the camp,

The front enterance of Auschwitz-Birkenauconcentration camp.htt ://bit.l /KsclV



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"Everyone worked so hard, got beaten up«and came back to the camp -- the exhaustion

alone pushed him to the bunk to lie down and sleep throughout the night and get enough

strength so that s/he might be able to do that again tomorrow. «In the morning, sixty

percent of the six people [in the bunk] did not wake up. The other forty percent went over

the pockets of the dead people to find a piece of bread. I remember that I searched a dead

body in the bunk and I found a piece of bread. That piece of bread was crawling with lice

and you shook them off the bread and put it in your mouth and ate it. Taking a shower

was not an option. To get out in the morning, to walk toward the barrack where there is

water, running water and you didn't want to walk through mud. If you walked through the

mud you probably lost a shoe and then you had to go barefoot. So it would be damned if I

do and damned if I don't. Those were the conditions."

iSurvived.org describes Auschwitz by saying, ³We say and write "Auschwitz," but we actually

mean a torture center, a terror that we cannot possibly conceive, the essence of evil and horror.´

(Holocaust Survivors).

The second camp on the top five list is Belzec,

also known as the Belzec Death Camp. According to the

research done by the Holocaust Education & Archive

Research Team, Belzec was located in South Eastern

Poland, near the remote village of Belzec on the Lublin ±

Lvov railway line. This camp was relatively smaller and

was surrounded by chicken wire and bobbed wire. What

went on at this camp was to be kept a secret from the outside

world. Everything in the camp was covered with camouflage to avoid aerial observation. There

Gipsies in Belzec before being sent to the gaschamber.

http://bit.ly/ffsjfw



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was five watch towers, four on each corner of the camp and one directly in the middle that

overlooked the ³the sluice´, the camouflaged barbed wire pathway to the gas chambers. Belzec

was divided into two sections. Camp 1 was the reception area and Camp 2 was the extermination

area. Camp 2 was made up of gas chambers and burial pits (The Belzec). During the first phase

of its operations, from mid-March 1942 to mid-May 1942, there were three gas chambers. The

gas chambers were lined with tin and had two airtight doors; one of the doors was for entry and

one through which corpses were removed. A diesel engine was put outside of the gas chamber

and was piped into the chamber. Once the gas chambers were filled and the doors shut, the

killing process took up to 30 minutes. Bodies were removed once they were dead and put in the

burial pit. In mid-June, construction began on a brick and concrete building housing six gas

chambers. This enabled the SS to kill up to 1,200 Jews at a time. According to jewishgen.org, it

is estimated that about 600,000 Jews were murdered at Belzec and thousands of Gypsies (Belzec;

Poland).

Another concentration camp set up in Germany was called Dachua. The Jewish Virtual

Library describes the basics of Dachua. Dachua was established in March of 1933. The camp

was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of

Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria (Dachua). Dachua was

originally established for political enemies who were used for labor work. After the Kristallnacht

however, Jews started being imported here by the thousands. The Dachau camp was a training

center for SS concentration camp guards, and this camp¶s organization and routine became the

model for all Nazi¶s concentration camps. Dachua was divided into two sections. One section

was the camp area and the other section was the crematoria area. The camp area consisted of 32

barracks, including one reserved for medical experiments. In 1942, a separate crematorium area



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was constructed next to the main camp. It included the old

crematorium and the new crematorium, Barrack X, with a gas

chamber. In Dachau, German physicians performed medical

experiments on prisoners. Much of the information about the

Dachau medical experiments comes from the testimony of

Walter Neff who was a prisoner in Dachau, according to

research done by an author on scrapbookpages.com. Neff

worked for Dr. Sigmund Rascher and continued to work for him

after Dachua was shut down. During Neff¶s trial, he says ³Ten

of these prisoners were volunteers and most of the other

prisoners, with the eception of 40, had been condemned to

death by German courts.The other 40 subjects were Russian

prisoners of war that were brought to Dachua because they

were believed to be communists commissars´. March 1942

until August 1942, Dr. Rascher and Neff performed high

altitude experiments. They claimed that these experiments

were done in an effort to save the lives of German pilots

(Medical). Other experiments done by a range of ³doctors´ on Dachua prisoners included

freezing experiments, malaria experiments, mustard gas experiments, sulphanilamide

experiments, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments, sea

water experiments, sterilization experiments, spotted fever experiments, poison experiments, and

incendiary bomb experiments. In the last months of the war, the conditions at Dachau became

even worse. The Jewish virtual library also states that ³the number of prisoners in Dachau

Prisoner subjected to high

altitude experimenthttp://bit.ly/eLNDE7

A victim of Nazi medical experiments tomake seawater potable

http://bit.ly/i2kYEx



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between 1933 and 1945 exceeded 188,000. The number of prisoners who died in the camp

between January 1940 and May 1945 was at least 28,000. It is unlikely that the total number of

victims who died in Dachau will ever be known´ (Dachau).

Another well known camp from the Holocaust is Majdanek. Cympm.com reports facts

about the Majdanek concentration camp. Majdanek was a concentration and extermination camp

on the south-east border of the town Lublin in Poland. The first transport coming into Majdanek

consisted of five thousand Soviet prisoners of war. After all of these prisoners perished,

transports were made up mainly of Polish Jews. In the fall of 1942, the camp was converted into

a death camp for Jews. Most were imported first from Slovakia, Protectorate of Bohemia,

Moravia, then came many from rural Poland, the Netherlands, and many from Greece. These

were followed by seventy-four thousand Polish Jews from the Warsaw, Bialystok, and Lublin

areas. In the center of the camp, ten fields were planned. These fields were surrounded by

electric barbed wire and watchtowers. Each field contained 20 barracks for prisoners and two

barracks for necessary equipment. Many prisoners were killed in the gas chambers. The victims'

belongings who were gassed were sold. The bodies were burned in a crematory. Prisoners who

didn't die by starvation or gas chambers died from exhaustion, illness, being shot, or often were

hung. The biggest mass murder in Majdanek happened

on November 3rd

, 1943 during what is known as the

"Aktion Erntefest", which can be translated to´ Harvest

Festival´. Approximately 42,000 Jews were shot this

day. German workers of the camps started to get nervous

and decided to eliminate all the Jews in one day. Jews

were first separated from the other prisoners, and then theyHill of ashes in Majdanek

http://bit.ly/eNl736



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were then taken in groups to nearby trenches and shot. Music was played through loud speakers

to drown out the noise of the mass shooting. The Soviet Army liberated Majdanek on July 24,

1944. Before the Germans abandoned the camp, the staff tried to destroy evidence. They

destroyed documents, set fire to the buildings and the crematorium. But because of their hurry,

they forgot to destroy the gas chambers and other large parts of the prisoners' barracks.

The last concentration camp listed is Sobibor. The Sobibor Death Camp was one of the

Nazis' best kept secrets. Sobibor camp was located in a small village called Sobibor, hence where

its name comes from, in the Lublin district of eastern Poland. Sobibor was chosen because of its

general isolation as well as its proximity to a railway. Construction on the camp began in March

1942. By mid-April 1942, the gas chambers were ready and tested by using 250 Jews from the

Krychow labor camp as guinea pigs. Victims to Sobibor started arriving by foot, cart, loft, and

train. A survivor of the Sobibor death camp describes his experience of entering the camp,

³The camp gate opened wide before us. The prolonged whistle of the locomotive

heralded our arrival. After a few moments we found ourselves within the camp

compound. Smartly uniformed German officers met us. They rushed about before the

closed freight cars and rained orders on the black-garbed Ukrainians. These stood like a

flock of ravens searching for prey, ready to do their despicable work. Suddenly everyone

grew silent and the order crashed like thunder, "Open them up!"

Whenever the prisoners were unloaded, the Nazi¶s determined who was fit enough for work and

who was too ill. Workers were sent to work in the Vorlager, Lager I, Lager II, and Lager III.

These different work places were basically the same, just different jobs were assigned. Workers

outside of Lager II did work that consisted of making gold trinkets, boots, clothing, cleaning

cars, or feeding horses. Others worked at jobs dealing with the death process; sorting clothes,



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unloading and cleaning the trains, cutting wood for the pyres, burning personal artifacts, cutting

the women's hair, etc. There is not much known about

the prisoners who worked in Lager III, they were kept

permanently separated from all others in the camp.

The prisoners who worked in Lager III worked with

the extermination process. They removed the bodies

from the gas chambers, searched the bodies for

valuables, and then buried them. Those that were not

selected for work during the initial selection process

stayed in the lines. Along this walkway, houses were set up with names like "the Merry Flea"

and "the Swallow's Nest," that had gardens with planted flowers, and they saw signs that pointed

to "showers" and "canteen´ to help deceive the unsuspecting victims. They made it seem too

peaceful for murder. Next, the prisoners were told to leave all their belongings and were also told

they had to have their hair cut off. After this, they were told they were going to the showers,

which were really the gas chambers. Prisoners were killed off fast and easy, as all of them were

sent to the gas chambers. They bodies were all burned to hide the evidence. It is estimated that

250,000 people were killed at Sobibor.

Nazi¶s kept the concentration camps a secret as best that they could, but eventually they

were found and liberated. As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against

Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners.

Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, Germans panicked and tried to hide

and burn down as much evidence as they could. The soviets went through and liberated camps

one by one until Germany¶s surrender. The soviets who liberated these concentration and death

View of the Sobibor death camp

http://bit.ly/f7SbSD





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Works Cited

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/h/>.

"Belzec; Poland." N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/BelzecEng.html>.

"Concentration and Death Camps." About.com, n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blchart.htm>.

"Dachau" J ewish Virtual Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/dachau.html>.

"Extermination camp Majdanek." N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.cympm.com/majdanek.html>.

Holocaust Encyclopedia. ushmm.org, n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005475>.

"Holocaust Survivors and Rememberence Project." N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://isurvived.org/AUSCHWITZ_TheCamp.html>.

Meier, David A. "Adolf Hitler's Rise to Power." . Dickinson State University, 2000. Web. 30

Mar. 2011. <http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/dmeier/Holocaust/hitler.html>.

"Medical Experiments at Dachau." N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.scrapbookpages.com/dachauscrapbook/experiments.html>.

Rossel, Seymour. "Holocaust; An End to Innocence." N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.rossel.net/Holocaust01.htm>.

"The Belzec Death Camp." Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. H.E.A.R.T.org,

n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011. <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/belzec.html>.

The Rise Of Adolf Hitler . thehistoryplace.com, n.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2011.

<http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler />.

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