The Holocaust

To truly understand about the horror of the concentration camps, it is necessary to know about the Holocaust and the events leading up to it. Since the Holocaust is a long and detailed event that we couldn’t cover in this presentation I will provide a basic background. The Holocaust was a tragic event in history. Over 11 million lives were lost because of cruel racial prejudice. During world wartwo, the Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler, encouraged prejudice against Jews and other “undesirables”, or those not of the “Aryan” race. The Nazis developed “The Final Solution”, a plan to get rid of all the Jews. They decided the most efficient way of doing this was to set up camps to exterminate them so they would not pass on their genes and disrupt the Nazis’ quest for the perfect race. TheNazis also set up ghettos, where Jews would live in the most horrible conditions. Jewish children soon could not go to schools with the other German children. Jewish businesses were forced to close, Jewish temples were burned and vandalized. Though the Nazis did not achieve their goal, they managed to kill millions of Jews and others in a display of cruel, sadistic, inhumane acts.
The Holocaust isthe name given to the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies etc. by the Nazis during World War Two. During the Holocaust, factories of death, such as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka, were built to ensure that the mass murders were carried out.
Hitler had made it perfectly clear in "Mein Kampf" what he thought of the so-called "untermenschen" (the sub-humans) but to most people,these were the thoughts of a madman and not ones to be taken seriously.
However, during "Krystalnacht" in 1938 the Nazis had shown their desire to persecute the Jews and in the war Hitler had the opportunity to carry out his plan to rid Nazi-occupied Europe of all undesirables (from his point of view) and he concentrated his efforts in Eastern Europe. After the attack on Russia, murder squadsfrom the SS moved behind the army and systematically wiped out towns and villages containing Russian people (the same people who had welcomed the German Army into Russia as liberators against the Russian leader Stalin).
However, the process was slow and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was concerned that the men doing the evil deed were becoming demoralised shooting innocent civilians and helooked for another solution. The lead to the Final Solution decided at the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942 when it was ordered that all Jews in Europe be killed in extermination camps. With due speed, German industrialists were required to design and produce ovens and gas chambers that would enable the mass murders to be carried out quickly and cleanly without involving German personnel toomuch.
The most infamous camps were at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Here Jews, Eastern Europeans (many of whom were also Jewish), gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped were brought and murdered.
For many years there has been an accepted figure for the number of Jews murdered - six million. As a result of recently found evidence, this figure is now being upgradedand some historians have put the figure as high as 7 to 8 million. To this day mass graves are still foundin Russia of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (SS) and so the final figure may never be truly known. The gypsy community claims that 50% of all gypsies in Europe (21,000 out of 23,000 at Auschwitz, for example) were murdered while the number of handicapped people murdered is not really known.As the war came to a close the Nazis destroyed many of the records they held but the survivors of the extermination camps have given us an accurate portrayal of what ‘life’
was like in these hell-holes. The death camps were seen as factories which had to make profits such as extracting the gold teeth from the victims and selling it and the camp commanders exchanged ideas on how to make their...