The Holocaust

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in the history of mankind. It was the ‘final solution’ for Germany’s plan to make the world pure, starting with their own country. Hitler, Germany’s dictator at the time, believed that some day, the Nazis would rule the world in the future, and when that happens, he wanted everyone that lived under his rule to be pure. He hated Jews because many had dark hair, even though he had dark hair himself, and because the Jews were to blame for Jesus’s death. He wouldn’t let anything stop him from his intentions, the murdering of millions and millions of Jews, gypsies, mentally and physically impaired people, twins, dwarves, and other various religious and ethnic groups.

Hitler took these people from their homes off to places called concentration camps. These camps were places of labor for the captured people. Other people were executed by high powered rifles, firing squads using machine guns, toxic gas chambers, and medical experimentation. As for the concentration campers, they rarely ate, slept, or had a chance to go to the bathroom. All they did was work, starve, and undergo the constant punishment of Hitler’s rage.

One of the most devastating concentration camps was the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This camp has become the symbol of The Holocaust. 1,200,000 died in the Auschwitz camp, including 890,000 Jews. 905,000 of the 1,200,000 that died were killed. The rest died from disease, starvation, and bad living conditions. The prisoners that died would be put into giant ovens called crematoriums to be disposed of. Prisoners that were unfit to work were immediately put to death, people that were fit to work, were brought to a warehouse where they would make things like rubber. Auschwitz is set into three main camps. The first one was where prisoners were tried and almost always sentenced to death. The second camp’s purpose was to completely eliminate all the prisoners that enter its gates. The third camp used the prisoners as slaves for doing hard labor, including cleaning up other dead bodies.

Germans would invade a small Polish village. They would round up families out of their homes and would load them on trucks. From there they are brought to a railroad yard. The Germans would put them into a box car, and lock them inside without food or water. They would be put on a 12 hour miserable train ride to Auschwitz. When entering the camp, there is a sign on the gate that says, “Work will make you free” This gave prisoners hope of becoming free as long as they worked hard. But, this was a false sign to only keep new arrivals from fearing death. Then, German soldiers would line up the women and children in one line, and men in another line. They were then marched towards the gas chambers. While the lines marched past, German officers would select what men would be slave labor, medical experiments, or put to death. The majority would continue to the gas chambers. When arrived at the chambers, they would undress, and be put into a room, promised warm showers. But, instead of water coming from the shower-like heads, poisonous gas was pumped into the room, killing everyone. Then, German workers or more likely captured slaves would cut the hair off the corpses’ heads and take out any precious metal fillings in their teeth, where the hair would be made into hair cloth, and the fillings be melted and shipped to Berlin. Then, they would be taken to the crematoriums, where the bodies would be disposed of. This process could take 20,000 lives a day in the camp.

It is hard to understand how human beings can do this to other human beings. And we have to make sure that nothing like this is ever allowed to happen again.