Holocaust 6 Essay, Research Paper

The Holocaust

Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.

In January of 1933, Adolf Hitler, who was part of the Right Wing National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazis, became Chancellor of Germany. Chancellor was the highest and most powerful position in all of Germany, and this gave Hitler the control of everything and everyone in Germany, after that nothing would ever be the same. Hitler wanted a pure Aryan State, a country that had a superior race to the rest of the world. This meant that he would have to kill all of the people who stood in the way of his purification. This was called a cleansing of Germany. Hitler had most of the Jews, Romani (Gypsies), Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, the anti-social, communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jehovah Witnesses, and the mentally and physically handicapped people whom were holding back the advancement of the Aryan s executed, this was called Aryanization .

Knowing who was and who was not a Jew was one of the problems that faced the Germans at beginning of the Holocaust. You were considered a Jew if you had three or four Jewish grandparents who were Jews, even if you weren t a part of the Jewish community. You were known as a Mishlinge or half-breed if you had one Jewish grandparent, and you were considered a half-Jew if you were part of the Jewish community or married to a Jew. All these people were known collectively as non-Aryans.

People often wonder why no one put a stop to the elimination of the Jewish people; but most people did not know what happened in Germany and the rest of Europe until the end of the war. If they did know about it they chose not to believe that it existed and thought that it was only a bunch of lies. Aryan s knew that if they tried to help or stop the Nazis that they would be next to be sent to the concentration camps. Most of the world was oblivious to the persecution of the Jews. It was the fact that the people who knew about it chose to ignore it because it seemed untrue that anyone that was created by God could do anything so inhumane. In an interview with Margaret Moore, who was in her twenties and living in Canada during WW II, she recalled not hearing about the Holocaust until after the war was over and the camps had already been liberated. This could have been because of the lack of media involvement; unlike today or it could be that our government chose to ignore a problem that had affected billions of people in the world. It is a known fact that many people did not have clue what was going on in Germany and her Third Reich.

Many Jews started to flee Germany and were immigrating to other countries. Many countries did not want all the refugees so they put restrictions on the number of refugees that they let in. If the countries had been more receptive to the refugees fleeing Germany there would not have been such a large number of people killed and the Holocaust might never have happened. Yet if some people did not open their homes and hearts to some of the Jewish families, Hitler s dream would have been realised and the Jews of Europe and then perhaps the world, would have been wiped out.

One of the first steps of cleansing was the mass murder of many Jews who were falsely considered insane. They would disguise gas chambers as showers and tell the Jews that they were to take their clothes off and get ready to have a shower so that they could get cleaned up for when they saw the doctor. What they did not know was they would never get to see the doctor but that they would be gassed and sent to their death.

Hitler came up with a more efficient way of killing off the weak and the people that were of no use to him without causing a major stir among watching countries:

Dr. [Hermann] Pfannmuller approached one of the fifteen cots which flanked the central passage to the right and left We have here children aged from one to five, he pontificated. All these creatures represent for me a National Socialist [Nazi] living burdens a burden for our nation . In this sense, the Fuhrer s [Hitler] action to free the national community from this overburdening is quiet simply a national deed, whose greatness non-medical men will be able to assess after a period of years if not decades. We do not carry out the action with poison, injections, or other measures which can be recognised…for then the foreign press and certain circles in Paris or London would only have new opportunities for propaganda against us . No, our method is much simpler. With these words he pulled a child out of his cot. While his fat, gross man display the whimpering skeletal little person like a hare which he had just caught, he coolly remarked: Naturally we don t stop their food straight away. That would cause too much fuss. We gradually reduce their portions. Nature then takes care of the rest . This one won t last more than two or three days. (Lace, 1998, page 12)

This just goes to show how inhuman and disgusting the Germans really were. They were always scheming and thinking of every possible angle to cover, from what people in France and Britain were thinking all the way down to what the people on their way to death were thinking. They would often get people to write post cards to their families to tell them that they were all right and that they were fine and the conditions were good, just so when it came time for them to go to the camps they had a false sense of hope. Most often these people were minutes away from their last breath.

The Concentration camps were a place that the SS or the Schutzstaffel or protective units took the non-Aryans to be detained. They were built like a prison; with barbed wires, high walls, armed guards and a military like order. People were sent there to work, they were then worked to death. They were under fed, over worked, and had little or no sleep. The SS often gave the people useless physical labour made to tax their bodies and souls. Their chances of survival in these camps all depended on the their will to live no matter the conditions, many people did not have this will to survive.

The Extermination camps, also known as death camps, were later created as a faster and more effective way of killing a massive number of Jews. They would all be shipped there in cargo trains or big trucks stacked full of people. They would be crammed in the boxcars so tightly that they would be standing on top of one another. There were times when the people would take off their shoes so that they would not hurt anyone. Once they got to the camps they all had to line up, they were each carefully studied by the selection officers, they were told to go either to the left or to the right. If they went to the left then they were sent to the gas chambers; to the right was work. They would judge you on your sex, age, health and strength. Women and children under the age of sixteen were automatically sent to the gas chambers or sent off to be experimented on by Dr. Josef Mengele the Angel of Death as he was also known as, and the healthy and strong men were sent to work. The people who were sent to the gas chamber were told to take off their clothes and get ready for a shower so that they would be clean and ready for work.

The most notorious camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, built in April 1940, it was the largest extermination camp, the camp alone killed an estimated 1.5 million to 4 million Jews, around one-third of all the Jews to die during the Holocaust. The camp scientifically planned and executed the act of genocide. Auschwitz was under direct command of Heinrich Himmler; it originally housed political prisoners from the occupied Poland. In August of 1942, they built a new camp, Auschwitz II, this was built for the women. Each camp consisted of four chambers that resembled showers and four crematoria used to incinerate the dead bodies. There were forty satellite camps that were established around Auschwitz, they were all forced labour camps that were collectively known as Auschwitz III and Jews were daily transport from there to Auschwitz. Once they got to Auschwitz you were separated into three groups.

The first group went straight to the gas chambers and with in hours they were dead. At the Auschwitz-Birkrnau camp up to 200,000 people per day were gassed. The gas they used was a form of cyanided called Zyklon-B which was a pesticide manufactured by people in other forced labour camps, ironically they were constructing the gun that was about to kill them. The second group was sent to industrial factories were they were forced into slave labour. There were 405,000 prisoners recorded as labourers from 1940-1945, and 340,000 perished through execution, beatings, starvation, and sickness. Some did survive thanks to the help of German Industrialists such as Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,000 Polish Jews by diverting them from Auschwitz. The third group was mostly twins and dwarfs who underwent medical experiments at the hands of the Angel of Death.

6,000 SS members worked at Auschwitz. In October of 1944 a group of Sonderkommands, work teams, destroyed the gas chambers at Birkenau by planting bombs. They were soon discovered and sent to immediate death. Auschwitz was liberated January 27, 1945, 7,600 prisoners survived but not before 58,000 had been evacuated by the Nazis, they were sent on a final death march.

After the camps were liberated at the end of the war, everything was not all roses as everyone had hoped for. Many people who had survived the Holocaust did not make it after the camps were liberated; many people did not have enough strength to survive any longer. Many were dying from disease and malnutrition.

It is scary to think that a group of people, led by one person and his propaganda could cause so much trouble. All this trouble was caused because he did not like a group of people he felt that he was superior to them. It is also scary to think that so many people believed that he was right and that they truly could get rid of all the Jews and non-Aryans. In my opinion it is disgusting that people could actually have thoughts like that, it just proves that he are not as great as we think we are and maybe we are not the smartest and most intelligent creature on the earth. We have to stop blaming others for something that we are not or for something that we did, it s just not right.

During the Holocaust six million Jews died whether from the extermination camps, malnutrition, disease, being executed or by medical experimentation. In 1933, before WW II there were approximately nine million Jews living in twenty-one European countries, which Germany would soon occupy. At the end of WW II six million Jews had died. A jolting sixty six percent of all Jews died that means two out of every three Jews died because of Adolf Hitler and his followers. Jews were not the only ones to be persecuted hundreds of Gypsies, Poles, Slavs and other ethnic groups, along with homosexuals and other insuperior races were also persecuted.

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