During World War Two both axis and allied powers had prisoners of war. The axis powers were more brutal and abusive then the allies. Prisoners were put in prisons called concentration camps. Prisoners would be packed into building called barracks and many slept in the same space with thin blankets. There were no mattresses and just wood to sleep on. People slept in bunks that were two to three beds high. Prisoners would get few hours of sleep and beds would crash on top of each other in people's sleep due to them being built fast and cheap. The barrack were cold and were heated only by a small coal
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 Auschwitz camp used its prisoners for forced labor. The Nazis treated the Jews poorly and as of they were nothing. Ushmm.org states “Jewish women who had been assigned to forced labor in a nearby armaments factory”. Between the years 1940-45 out of 1.3 million Jews, 1.1 million died. All of those innocent people died only because their race was hated by one very powerful, but very convincing man. After a year of the camp existing, the SS and the police cleared about forty square meters for the camp. They had all of this cleared by forced labor from the Jews. The Nazis were very cruel to the Jews and for a certain amount of time this camp was used as a killing center. Those cold- hearted people killed men, women, and innocent
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.
In Yoshiko Uchida’s, Desert Exile, she claims, “ Each stall was now numbered, and ours was number 40. That the stalls should have been called “apartments” was a euphemism so ludicrous it was comical” (Uchida 248). Uchida explains her experience in an internment camp, the families were told they would be living in apartments, when, in fact, they would be leaving in old animal barns. Japanese Americans were shipped to the desert, herded into barns to live and forced to wait in lines to eat. Ultimately, these prisoners were treated less than human and more like animals. Although this treatment of the Japanese Americans in the Internment camps was horrible, the conditions in the concentration camps were unpleasant, in Warren’s book, she explains, “Rumors about the war, rumors about upcoming “selections,” when SS officers would weed out the weakest prisoners and ship them off somewhere” (Warren 73). In the same way the prisoners in the Internment camps were treated like animals, the prisoners in the Concentration camps had it way worse . They were so weak they would be picked off to be sent somewhere else, most likely to be killed. Similarly the prisoners in the Concentration camps had it really bad, they barely had a living place like the Japanese prisoners did. They acquire way less, sometimes no food in the Concentration camps but the Japanese people received dessert at one point. Both camps had their ways of being negligent and miserable than the other. All in all the Concentration camps were way worse than the Internment camps, and they both had very inhuman
Often situated in cold and remote regions, they housed millions of prisoners, especially in the late 1930s. Conditions were inhumane and death rates were high for the prisoners. They were still heavily used after 1945 though fell into disuse after Stalin’s death.
All throughout history, Prison war camps Sorta became a thing of the norm . Whether it is in Nazi ,Germany during World War II or The United States during the civil war. Both packed and riddled with disease, both brutal, no doubt, but one more than the other.
In concentration camps, they slept on concrete bunk beds as well as wooden bunk beds that were meant to hold 52 horses, they had no heat, the ceilings were damp and leaky, the prisoners only got 1,300 calories a day, that’s 500 less calories than what the average human should have, they had to work about 10 hours each day. In internment camps, they were located in areas where there's harsh weather, they had schools and medical care in the camps, the japanese were payed to work at the camps, but many people did die from the poor amount of health care or the intenses stress they were put under while being in the camps. They had there own animal stalls that was almost like their home. The prisoners i n the camps were almost treated as slaves, making FDR and Hitler feel like they had more power.
To begin, concentration camps did not originate in World War II. In fact, this idea for a camp was invented by soldiers and generals in other wars that occurred not too many years before The Holocaust. The first concentration was brought up by general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau in the Cuban insurrection against Spain in 1896. Concentration camps were also used in the Philippine-American war in the first decade of the 1900’s. The concentration camps in these wars just mentioned were used mainly for labor and penal. However, armies weren’t as big on execution as the Nazi’s were. The Nazi’s bumped up the idea of concentration camps to turn it
In World War 2, Germany was using the labor of prisoners which is permitted by the third Geneva Convention. The fact that they were making them work in the worst of conditions known to man and furthermore, not keeping them healthy, both in body and in mind was by definition- a war crime.
In the book Night written by Elie Wiesel, dehumanization is a large part of the lives of Jews in concentration camps. Night is a memoir capturing the memories of Eliezer Wiesel’s of his eight months of living in a concentration camp when he is fifteen years old. There, Wiesel along with the rest of the prisoners, are tortured everyday, being dehumanized physically, mentally, and spiritually until they are unrecognizable. Physically, inmates in concentration camps are brutalized like animals.
When World War II ended, concentration camps that the Nazis had used for imprisonment of many victims of the war and the Nazi regime, which had supposedly been abolished, were now converted by the Soviet powers. They were used for active Nazis and those who opposed the communism regime
No one is more vulnerable during wartime than prisoners of war (POW 's). They are at the mercy of an enemy who they had been trying to kill and defeat up until the moment of their capture. During previous wars, this rather precarious situation was handled with a certain amount of professionalism and dignity on the part of captors. The two world wars in Europe are cases in which POW 's were given a fair amount of food, clothing, and the ability to write and receive letters in most cases. However, the war in the Pacific involving the United States and the Japanese involved a great deal of abuse and substandard treatment of POW 's resulting in a death rate of about 40% compared to only 1% in the European theater. The Soviet Union also did
Before concentration camp Auschwitz and other countries used concentration camps. The countries used the concentration camps as a prison and a punishment. For instances in Spain 1947 the king wanted the republican prisoners of the war to be put into their concentration camps. The “ Spanish Holocaust “ was happening while World War 2 was going on. Another example is, Great Britain also used the idea of concentration camp in World War 1.
Life for WWI prisoners sucked because they would have to stay months or years in captivity because they were caught on enemies territory or just being stupid and walked over there to get caught. Germany who caught the enemies people would have a job like farming, mining, logging, or the railroad to spend their time while their locked up from the war. Which I would think it would be better than actually being in the war. Some prisoners were experiencing depression and wanted to probably kill themselves to get out of the harsh environment. The English camp had it pretty rough because they had a lot of people ad didn't know what to do with them because they were gonna be there for months or even year. The English were in parades 3 times a day
During the wars in the United States, the prisoners who got sent to jail was treated differently by the gender. After world war II ends a thousand of prisoners ended up in mills, farm fields etc. 4000,000 prisoners were shipped to United States from 1942 through 1945 because of that 400 POW were built, in the south and in the great plains and in the midwest. The prisoners campuses were filling up, also had an labor shortage in farms and factories.