preview

The Bergen-Belsen Camp

Satisfactory Essays

There were about 900 concentration camps created by Nazi’s throughout the course of 1933-1945. The main ones were Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Theresienstadt, & Buchenwald. The Auschwitz camp complex was the largest concentration camp. It included three main camps. 1,095,000 Jews were in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and 960,000 of them were killed. The Germans isolated all the camps and sub-camps from the outside world and surrounded them with barbed wire fencing. All contact with the outside world was forbidden. Auschwitz could hold more than 150,000 inmates at any given time. It was established by the Nazi's in 1940 and was in use until its Allied liberation in 1945. The Nazis marked all the …show more content…

Over the course of its existence, the Bergen-Belsen camp complex held Jews, POWs, political prisoners, Gypsies, criminals, and homosexuals. POW stands for prisoner of war. At the beginning of December 1944, there was around 15,000 prisoners in Bergen Belson, and in February 1945 the number of prisoners was 22,000. As prisoners evacuated from the east continued to arrive, the camp population increased 60,000 by April 15, 1945. Food rations throughout Bergen-Belsen continued to shrink. Prisoners would sometimes go without food for days. The Dachau concentration camp was established in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist (Nazi) government. In Dachau, as in other Nazi camps, German physicians performed medical experiments on prisoners, including high-altitude experiments using a decompression chamber, tuberculosis experiments, hypothermia experiments, and experiments testing new medications. The number of prisoners who died in the camp and the subcamps between January 1940 and May 1945 was roughly 28,000 …show more content…

The camp was divided into three parts, the reception area, the living area, and the killing area. The living area contained housing for German staff and the guard unit. One section contained barracks that housed those Jewish prisoners selected from incoming transports to provide forced labor to support the camp’s function, mass murder. Samuel Willenberg, the last of only 67 survivors of the Treblinka extermination camp, passed away in Israel on February 21, 2016, at the age of 93. Willenberg was brought to Treblinka in 1942 at age 19, and survived because he was strong and told the guards that he was a

Get Access