Nazi Camps

Do you have chores you have to do? They’re nothing compared to the prisoners jobs. They could walk up to twenty miles just to get to their work. When they got to their work they are lead by their Kapo or leader. Some people were chosen to work carrying corpses from gas chambers to crematoriums. The jobs could also be “clean” or free of dead bodies such as: shoveling dirt, making roads, carrying fifty pound bags hundreds of yards to a cement mixer, or shoveling snow with improper clothes in -0 temperatures.

If they were a plumber, they could help in building the crematoriums. The worst job I think is digging your own graves.

The final solution is not the end but the beginning. It has many meanings but overall it means the final solution is to start the mass murder of Jews. It was also known as “Liquidation,” “Finished Off,” “Special Treatment,” and “Elimination.” Hitler was obsessed with Jews. He thought they were responsible for Germany’s economic depression. He was born from Jewish blood. Talk went around for twenty years until something really happened.

When you wake up on the wrong side of the bed it means you’ll have a bad day. In the camps when you wake up you take role call (which could take several hours,) next they would march several hours to their work. The marches could be miles long. At the job site they would work for several painstaking hours. Finally they would go eat and sleep, if they were lucky, not gassed in between.

Do you like sleeping in your nice warm bed? In the camps the beds, if you could call them beds were usually made straw. The beds had three to five people in each one.

People didn’t have blankets or proper protection from the cold. The prisoners would use their food dish for pillows so they wouldn’t get stolen.

When you put your clothes away you may moan and groan. At least you have clothes. When they get their clothes it didn’t matter what size you got, they were clothes. If they froze or fainted they might get stripped from their clothes by other prisoners.

One survivor recalled that a soldier said to him, “You don’t have an identity, you have a number, you’re nothing but a number. Another survivor said, “If you made it to a camp alive, you would die from work, if you lived from work you died from starvation, if you still had life in you, you would die from the gas chambers.”

The number of camps was massive. From 1933-1945 twenty thousand camps were built for several of reasons. First prisoners would go to forced labor camps in which they worked until they died or got weak. Those that were too weak or old went to transit camps. Transit camps were built to move prisoners from work camps to death camps where they died for sure. At the end of 1942, sixteen large camps remained with thousands of smaller ones. At the end of the war six thousand camps remained in Poland.

Death, suffering starvation, exhaustion, gas chambers, medical tests, and chemical exposer, all were forms of an ethnic cleansing called the Holocaust. Around 11,000,000 people were killed from those things in Nazi camps. On average six thousand people were gassed a day. Thats 186,000 people a month.

Most victims were Jews. Other victims were Socialists, Social Democrats, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witness, Blacks, and Homosexuals. They were victims because they were blamed for being Christ killers and other things. Another thing is helping someone escape.

It started as a speech and ended as a war. Overall I started to see that the Holocaust was really that bad. My brother had a Holocaust survivor talk at his school and now I wish I went to. He learned a lot just from the talk. I didn’t think it was that important. Now that I might get to see one I am glad I did this unit. It was so cruel and I’m glad it ended before all of the Jews were killed and everything was destroyed.