Holocaust

Just the mere mention of the word Holocaust can create very vivid images of suffering, cruelty and especially death. Almost everyone has seen some images of people horded into cages, ribs protruding, piled on one another at some point in time. The Holocaust is known as one of the darkest periods in history. It's crazy to think that one man's warped ideals to build a perfect race could provoke an entire country to allow this travesty to have happened. Although many of us know small amounts of information about the Holocaust most of us have been left in the dark.

To understand what the holocaust was we must first understand why it happened. In 1934 a man named Adolf Hitler came to power, only one day after the former chancellor of Germany had died. He assumed all presidential power and became the supreme leader of an entire country in a single day. Hitler was a powerful speaker and a very influential man who convinced the people of Germany that the Jewish people were poisoning not only their country, but the entire world. He called for the extermination of all Jews which in turn would free the German people and eventually lead to a perfect race of people, the Aryan people. He and his followers, the Nazis quickly began to organize a machine of death and that’s when the concentration camps were built.

Concentration camps were built as an easy means of killing mass amounts of Jewish people at a time. Trains full of Jews were shipped all over Germany to a series of concentration camps. There were roughly 27 main concentration camps located throughout Germany and neighboring countries. Nearly all of these camps were built in between 1937 and 1943. These concentration camps were large holding cells for thousands upon thousands of Jews waiting to be executed. About half of these camps were large desolate areas surrounded by thick, electrical barbed wire fences. The prisoners stayed in buildings that served as bunks. The conditions in the bunk areas were horrific. Prisoners slept in claustrophobic areas with little or no padding to lie on. Most of these barracks resemble nothing more than chicken coops. One survivor describes life in the barracks as “one of the most horrible things a human being could experience.” Disease, lice and human waste were just a portion of the things these people had to deal with. Forced labor was another part of life in the camps. Able bodied men and oftentimes children were forced to work on constructing new death camps for the Nazis until they became too weak from malnourishment, at which point they were immediately killed. Men and women were usually separated upon arrival. Most of the women were thought to be useless to the Nazis and therefore were immediately executed by various means. It gives me an eerie feeling to look at photos of the liquidation of the ghettos. To explain, when a ghetto was liquidize it was basically cleared out. The Jewish people were rounded up like a herd of sheep and shoved into boxcars on trains. It’s crazy to think that these people were ultimately walking right into their own deaths. Executions were carried out in many ways but many people died on their way to the camps.