Life Essay, Research Paper

Death seemed to guard all exits. This motto defined the fate of the millions of Europeans between 1941 and 1945. As the Nazi Germany gained control of one country after another in World War 2, the killing of Jews, Gypsies, Slaves, Poles, Homosexuals, and more began. The Nazi s built concentration camps to enforce unspeakable treatment and murder upon the Europeans.

As World War 2 began, Hitler ordered to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients that were labeled incurable. They were taken to institutions in Germany and Austria where gas chambers were used to kill them. After the public protested in 1941 the nazi leaders still went on with this plane but in secret. Killing even babies with lethal injection, pills, and forced starvation. This was the Euthanasia program. It contained all the elements required for a mass murder. That mass murder accured during World War two.

In 1940, Germany forces continued their conquest through Europe. Easily defeating Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, And France. On June 22, 1941 the German army invaded the Soviet Union. When I asked my grandma if she knew what was going around in Europe she told me, Ewa, my parents were so scared, because the Nazis were all over Europe, imprisoning Jews, Poles, and more. It didn t matter if you were rich, poor, Jewish or not. The nazi had control and they took who ever they wanted. I myself was a young girl, not a Jew, but young and strong. In Nazi words a good, healthy worker. In the village where I lived, the (sotys) in English like the mayor of the village had to send young teenagers, kids to Germany. I was picked to go. I worked on a farm. The thought of me leaving my parents, my home, scared me to the point of becoming ill. My parents and all of the other parents didn t know what would happen to us. Some many stories went around our village of what the Nazis were doing to the Europeans.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, communists, and more were killed in a mass execution. Members of Einsatzgruppen who followed in the Nazi invasion army carried out these murders throughout the Soviet Union. I asked my grandma if she ever seen a Nazi kill some one she told me this, I have seen Nazi soldiers murder some Polish Jews in Poland. When I was at the work farm I seen soldiers hit, kick, spit, and take away workers. I haven t witnessed a worker get killed in front of me, but they did get killed.

During the war, ghettoes, transit camps, concentration camps, and forced labor camps were being built to imprison more Europeans. Following the invasion of Poland, three million Polish Jews were forced into about four hundred newly established ghettoes. Large numbers of Jews where also deported from other cities and countries including Germany and the rest of Europe. In the ghettos the Jews were confined in sealed ghettos where starvation, overcrowding, exposure to cold, and diseases killed tens of thousands people including Jews. The Jews in the ghetto made an effort to maintain their cultural and religious lives. But many died trying. The ghettos also provided a forced labor for the Germans who worked on the road gangs, in construction, or other hard labor related to the German war effort. They died from exhaustion and from maltreatment. Suffering was always to have priority over production. (Bauer)That is what the German believed with the rest of the things.

It was the Nazi policy to use their prisoners to the utmost and make them as little of a drain on the national economy as possible. (Bauer) The Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and more arrived in railroad freight cars and passenger trains, where no water was given, people were all cramped up, no ever to move, no where to go to the bathroom. People becoming sick, dying in the chats, when the weather conditions changed to freezing, no heat was turned on, no blankets were given. After arriving at the camp man were separated from women and children. They were forced to undress and hand over all their possessions. Then they were taken to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. Either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B was used to kill them. The little group that was selected for the forced labor eventually died of brutality, medical experiments, malnutrition. Before and in some cases after the people were murdered or gasses, the selected minority had to pull out gold teeth out of the mouths of people, cut their hair, take away all their possessions, their clothing, eyeglasses, jewelry, and more.