Horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, Concentration Camps Exposed 1945

I have been very interested in the Holocaust ever since I have read fictional stories on it, such as Daniel’s Story, Number the Stars, and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Although the horror of the Holocaust often frightens me, it also interests me. I think that people should be educated on subjects like this, so that another terrible and horrifying situation like this doesn’t occur again.

The story of the Holocaust is much more complex than what many people think it to be. The Holocaust began with people believing that their was one master race, which was German. Adolf Hitler and many others encouraged people to think that Germans were superior to Jews, (also to people who were different from the German such as gypsies, homosexuals, people with mental disabilities, and habitual criminals) and that in order to make Germany great, Jews had to be eliminated from all population.

A concentration camp was a prison where “enemies to the German nation” were held. By the end of World War II, there were more than one hundred camps in existence. There were six major death camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmo, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Some other major concentration camps were: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora-Nordhausen, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Maidanek, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Naeungamme, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, and Terezin.

Life in a concentration camp was one so hard, that many of us today cannot even imagine. People arrived at concentration camps by overly-crowded cattle cars. This is when the”selection” took place. Those that were strong and able to work were sent to the left. Those that were not able to work, such as children, elderly people, and some women were sent to the right. The people on the right (the ones to weak to work) were immediately sent to the gas chambers to be killed. Their bodies were burned, and the ashes were buried. The people on the left, that were able to work, were made to do jobs, many unbelievable. Some people were made to bury the bodies of other Jews. Others were made to sort through the items that prisoners had to give up.

What Soviet and American troops saw when they went to camps to liberate them was unbelievable. They saw mass graves, with thousands of corpses in. They saw the result of medical experiments, such as shrunken heads and mutilated bodies of twins. They saw people so thin, ill, and weak, that they were unable to move. They saw the gas chambers and crematorium used to kill prisoners and then burn their dead bodies to cover it up.

In doing this project, I have learned many things, both gruesome and interesting. I learned about the medical experiment carried out to create the perfect, dominant race. Six million people were killed in concentration camps alone, not including the infants that were not recorded and others that died of disease and starvation that were not known. This was the result of people’s selfishness and self righteous beliefs. In doing this project, I feel very fortunate that I didn’t have to live through something as terrible as this, but I also feel sad for all of the people that were unfortunate enough to live during this time, and were killed and separated from their families. I hope and pray that another terrible ordeal such as this never occurs again.