Auschwitz Essay

According to “I’m Telling the Story” by Magdalena Klein, the prisoners were not given proper clothing. She writes “In rags, soiled, infested with lice” (Klein, stanza 2) and “Unclad frail feet were trudging in the snow” (Klein, stanza 4). The Nazi’s not only neglect to give the prisoners proper clothing, they also force them to walk barefoot through the snow! This problem is still present in the world today, not with the Nazis, but tyrannical governments still do this. In short, Nazi prisoners were not treated with the respect that is due to every human being, and suffered greatly because of it.

The command area surrounded the prisoner camp. Nine guard towers, ditches, tall concrete walls, and electrified barbed wire encircled the whole camp. A maintenance building and living quarters for 200 SS trainees and 200 camp guards were positioned near to the camps

Birkenau was supposed to be able to hold over 125,000 prisoners, and was also the site where most of the executions took place. Inmates were used for most of the manual labor. Later on in that year the Soviet prisoners arrived as 3,000 were sent to be executed, another 12,000 died from other causes, and only 1,000 remained and were to do forced labor (Laqueur and Tydor 34,35).

Auschwitz was one of the most infamous and largest concentration camp known during World War II. It was located in the southwestern part of Poland commanded by Rudolf Höss. Auschwitz was first opened on June 14, 1940, much later than most of the other camps. It was in Auschwitz that the lives of so many were taken by methods of the gas chamber, crematoriums, and even from starvation and disease. These methods took "several hundreds and sometimes more than a thousand" lives a day. The majority of the lives killed were those of Jews although Gypsies, Yugoslavs, Poles, and many others of different ethnic backgrounds as well. The things most known about Auschwitz are the process people went through when entering the camp and

The camp was a somewhat segregated place. There happened to be five specific “camps” for

In 1940 Auschwitz was established in the suburbs of Oswiecim. Oswiecim is a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Auschwitz was established because there were too many Polish people in the local prisons. In 1942 Auschwitz became a death camp and it was the largest known. (http://auschwitz.org/, n.d.) The camp was expanded throughout its existence, this resulted in Auschwitz consisting of three camps. The three camps were Main Camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. Main Camp was known as Auschwitz I, Birkenau was known as Auschwitz II, and Monowitz was known as Auschwitz III. (Preisler, n.d.) Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. “Historians and analysts estimate the number of people murdered at Auschwitz somewhere between 2.1 million

Of all of the death camps built by the Nazis during World War II, none was larger or more destructive than the terrifying Auschwitz camp. Auschwitz was built by the Nazis in 1940, in Oswiecim, Poland, and was composed of three main parts. Auschwitz I was built in June 1940 and was intended to hold and kill Polish political prisoners. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which opened October 1941, was larger and could contain over 100,000 inmates. Auschwitz III-Monowitz provided slave labor for a plant close by. In addition, there were many sub-camps. The most important camp at Auschwitz designed for the extermination of many people was Birkenau; numerous gas chambers and crematoria were established there, mainly to murder and incinerate Jews as

Camp life changed the prisoner’s life as a person by having them do jobs that the Kommandos didn't want to do. At the camps the prisoners experienced starvation and harsh conditions. They changed as a person by having hope in some situations and then losing hope at times. Some of the time they had to be up at five in the morning and run. When they changed to other camps they had to take baths in petrol and hot showers to become disinfected. After that they ceased to be men.

being forced to ride in horse stalls like similar to slaves. Most families being torn apart and put into separate camps, thinking to never see them again. The prisoners could live there up to 4 years, including the children.

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

Auschwitz was made up of three camps including Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II -Birkenau, and Auschwitz III -Monowitz. Auschwitz I and Monowitz were labor camps where the SS forced prisoners to do strenuous amounts of work. Birkenau was notoriously known as the main extermination camp and held the biggest number of Auschwitz prisoners by far. Germans have claimed these camps were made for three reasons. To overpower the enemy, give the SS free labor forces, and to have a site to kill people that went against their dictator’s regime.

Some might think that Auschwitz is the first concentration camp but, it’s not Auschwitz is just the most popular one. The first concentration camp to be operated was a camp named Dachau. Dachau opened on March 22nd, 1933 it was meant to hold mostly German Communists or just political opponents of the Nazis. Later, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (or Gypsies) , homosexuals and few Jews were transferred into Dachau. In the first year of it opening it held 4,800 prisoners. It was not a death camp, but 40,000-200,000 people were murdered, some died of disease and starvation. Dachau has many things to talk about, like how many/ what kind of people Dachau had and what they did to them, how it was run, and the history of Dachau.

The select others, usually consisting of stronger-looking young males and teenagers, would then be searched, stripped of their possessions, disinfected of any germs or disease, have their heads shaved, and be given tattered clothing (Hunt 865). These victims were subjected to living like abused, wild animals. As described in the novel, The Tragedy of Nazi Germany, “Camp inmates were degraded and debased to a subhuman level…They were scarecrows with match-stick thin limbs. Their shaven heads were hangdog and dirty, their skins scaly and scabby with sores and starvation,” (Phillips 185). Inmates were malnourished, for they were given the smallest scraps of food only to suffice for energy to produce labor; lack of clothing and food during the harsh conditions of the winter caused many to fall ill and die of disease; they were punished for the simplest mistakes, and these punishments consisted of “cruel beatings and torture which often killed the weakened emaciated bodies,” (Phillips 185). After World War II, these horrifying conditions had resulted in the deaths of approximately six million Jews, and about five million other minority groups within Europe (Hunt 865).

¬¬As for the prisoners strict schedule, their day started at 4:30 during the summer and 5:30 in winter. Each day they were woken up by a gong; they first cleaned their small living quarters and drank their coffee or tea. Next, they would line-up outside in rows of ten for roll-call. Everyone had to be present for roll-call, even the dead. Inmates would support the dead until the counting was over. If anyone was missing, they would all have to stand there until every last person was accounted for; during bad weather this could be especially painful for the inmates. But in February 1944, roll-call was cut from the schedule because it took too much time away from their labor. After roll-call, it was time to work. As they walked to their work station, the camp orchestra was forced to play cheerful music. Each day consisted of a minimum of 11 hours of work, with a one hour break for their afternoon meal. Sunday was the only day they had “off”; on this day they would clean the barracks and take their weekly shower. Before the sun went down, they would return to their barracks; those who had died or had been killed were carried by fellow inmates. At 7:00, a second roll-call was taken. They then received their bread and water rations. Two or three hours after their evening meal it was time for

     The Holocaust is one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity. "Hitler, in an attempt to establish the pure Aryan race, decided that all mentally ill, gypsies, non supporters of Nazism, and Jews were to be eliminated from the German population. He proceeded to reach his goal in a systematic scheme." (Bauer, 58) One of his main methods of exterminating these ‘undesirables' was through the use of concentration and death camps. In January of 1941, Adolf Hitler and his top officials decided to make their 'final solution' a reality. Their goal was to eliminate the Jews and the ‘unpure' from the entire population. Auschwitz was the largest