Concentration Camps During The Holocaust: Bergen-Belsen

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.

There has been many stories on how cruel the victims of the Holocaust were treated, especially in the concentration camps. The Auschwitz concentration camps, out of many other camps is where this all occurred.The victims were abused and put through forced labor, it was physically and mentally hard for them to live in the camps knowing in the matter of days they will die. The prisoners in the camps were forced to work, the sick and disabled prisoners were killed as they were seen as “useless” since they were not capable of working. The labor consisted of digging ditches, leveling the ground, laying roads, and constructing new blocks and buildings for a tough 11-14 hours a day. During the tiring and inevitable hours of working, the prisoners had small rations of food.The meals were

Have you ever heard of the nasty, disgusting, and horrible conditions that jews had to suffer with in concentration camps during the Holocaust? Lice and fleas are a big part of conditions in concentration camps, another horrible condition in the camps are diseases and sanitation, lastly another awful condition in concentration camps is mass murder and starvation. Many people died in concentration camps during the Holocaust because of the environment the jews had to live in and deal with, and many families were split and torn apart because loved ones of theirs had died because of the horrible conditions in the camps.

World War II was a terrible, chaotic war with many deaths. Innocent people were killed, only because they were a different race. During World War II, the Germans/Nazis absolutely hated the Jews for no good reason. There were prisons built to torture and use Jews for forced labor. Those prisons were called concentration camps. In World War II, three of these concentration camps were same of the largest ones created and were called the Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the Dachau. The Auschwitz had three main camps and was located 37 miles of Krakow, the Buchenwald was constructed in 1937 about five miles northwest of Weimar, and the Dachau was one of the first camps created and has an incident that leads to many deaths.

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.

The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp could be both a good, and bad place to be. The camp had mainly held Jewish people, and other political prisoners. Many prisoners would come from other camps, but few would go, alive that is.

Auschwitz concentration camp, also known as Auschwitz- Birkenau, was Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp (Berenbaum, Auschwitz). The camp was created because Hitler became “convinced that his “Jewish problem” would be solved only with the elimination of every Jew in his domain, along with artists, educators, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped and others deemed unfit for survival in Nazi Germany” (Auschwitz, History.com). Auschwitz was located in southern Poland near the industrial town of Oswiecim (Berenbaum, Auschwitz). Hitler’s team was known as the Secret Service (SS), which included soldiers who patrolled the streets and the men who ran the camps (Uwe Boll, Auschwitz). Auschwitz consisted of

Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka are just a few of the names that evoke nightmares of the Holocaust. The death and suffering at concentration camps like these were greater than any before endured. Elie Wiesel had been one of the most devout Jewish children prior to the start of the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust created a void in the souls of many of those that survived, one of which was Elie. During his experience in the concentration camps, Elie waited for God to intervene and save his people. When God did not intervene Elie began to doubt God and His mercy. He began to accuse God of cruelty against the Jewish people. After the Holocaust was over, Elie had to reevaluate the role of God in his life. He could be forgiving of God and

During the holocaust, the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. The capricious, or impulsive, Nazi soldiers did many horrendous things to innocent Jewish people. They treated them as if they were animals rather than human beings. Personal identities were nonexistent for them. Jews were seen as invalid and insignificant.

They were told they were going to take a shower, but they took them to gas chambers. Little did they know is that they would never come out of there alive. There were labor camps where the prisoners worked day and night to keep themselves alive. If they didnt work, they wouldve been shot by the German officers. There was horrible medical treatment, if any for some of the prisoners. THe way they were treated was horrible and inhumain. This should be resisted in any way in the future.

The Holocaust was inhuman. “The IMT defined crimes against humanity as ' murder,extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds'” (Trials). Murder, extermination, persecutions all occurred during the Holocaust. Nonetheless the Nazis tried to hide what was going on in Germany. After Soviet Union's attack in eastern Belarus, the Germans began moving all the prisoners in every concentration camp in Europe. The Nazi did not want the public, especially the Allies, to know the stories in these camps. They viewed these prisoners as labors and bargain chips (Death Marches) and treated those poor men and women's lives as dust under their feet. They kept the prisoners alive only because they were “hostages”, and Germans needed those labors to work for them in order to continue fighting the war; in short, the prisoners were still useful to the Nazis. Fortunately, no matter how hard the Germans tried to cover up their crimes, the Allies found enough evidence for the trial after World War II. After the Allied troops captured the concentration camps, the survivors testified and provided evidence for British officials to use on the trials of Nazi war criminals (Testimony). The Allies sentenced the criminals guilty, executed many of the high ranking Nazi officers, and officially ended the bloody chaos.

Just imagine if yourself, friends or family were sent away to a concentration camp. How would that make you feel? I would feel sad and scared for my family or for myself. It’s an awful thing to think about. Concentration camps were meant to starve and work prisoners to their death. In concentration camps, many prisoners were tortured and soon thereafter, died. There were many concentration camps and a lot of horrible things happened. Such as the number of people dying, and poor treatment of prisoners. Adolf Hitler made this all happen.

Where as in the German camps, the prisoners were more independent. The prisoners were allowed free time and had their own bunks to themselves. They had to do little to no work at the camps, and it was considered just a holding place. The only forms of punishment was if the prisoners were to try to escape or got violent. The prisoners could

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

Concentration camps was a horrible place to be at Jews from Germany were victims, they recall the torture that they were put through in camps. These camps had scar many innocent Jews due to the race they were because they were not German. Adolf Hitler created a full German army called the Nazi. The Nazi army would go house by house to hunt down for Jews no matter what they had to do. Hitler had demanded to eliminate all the Jews in Germany and in the near future for him to in-crease on the elimination, if anybody who did not have any sort of Jew blood they were okay to be free.