Antoher way in which the Final solution was to be carried out was via labour and death camps, as I have already mentioned, the death camps are much more infamous than there labour camp counter parts, for instance it would be very unusual to see an overview of the Holocaust without seeing Auschwitz or Treblinka mentioned in the same paragraph. The camps were not only for Jews though they were for anyone that Hitler thought to be inferior to the Aryan race, such as Blacks, Gypsies, the Disabled and other minority groups like homosexuals.
The two types of camps would appear almost identical to the naked eye, Prisoners arrived in exactly the same way, in crowded cattle wagons, many people would die just on the journey to the camps, because of lack of air, food, water, overheating and general cramped conditions, some records have as many as 700 people in one cart, some of the trips would be five hours long. So it becomes easy to imagine the conditions on the trips alone. Although the two camps looked identical for anyone who knew anything about them they were vastly different. Concentration camps were set up just to force people to work, these camps were not set up to kill people specifically but due to the conditions and the Nazi’s treatment of them many hundreds of thousands of people did die nonetheless, in concentration camps you would be forced to wear a striped uniform and armbands or labels to identify them as prisoners. Death camps however were set up as killing factories; you went in one end as a functioning human and would probably come out the other as ash floating in the air.
There were four major Death camps in the beginning with two more added in the later years, camps used almost only gassing as the form of execution, the three main ways of doing this were, gas vans, where the exhaust of the van would be fed back in and as the Nazi’s drove you around pretending to take you somewhere else you would slowly be gassed, there was Stationary Carbon Monoxide (CO) poisoning, and the most well known way, Zyklon B (prussic acid). All of these methods (bar perhaps gas vans) were highly efficient, carbon monoxide poisoning would be very easy to carry out as it is tasteless, colourless and odourless, you really would not know what was going on until it was too late. Zyklon B would turn from pellets to a lethal gas on contact with air; this wasn’t so invisible, it was slightly blue in colour according to eye witnesses and had a slight bitter almond scent to it according to the very few who survived. Zyklon B’s original use was as a vermin poison; perhaps the Nazi’s perception of the Jews as Rats was why it was chosen. To give you some idea of the scale and efficiency of the Death camps I have made a table to try and help to explain it.
The conditions in the camps were appaleing, the average rations for a prisoner was one piece of bread and one glass of water a day. Eating that day in day out would very soon take effect on your health and you would very quickly be suffering from extreme dehydration, malnutrition which would lead to many health problems such as anaemia, kidney failure, hundreds of vitamin deficiency related illnesses (scurvy, rickets, brittle bones, etc.) extreme weight loss and server fatigue, that is if you were one of the few “lucky” enough to survive long enough to suffer from these. General treatment in the camps was not pleasant either, if you were deemed unfit to work you would most likely be killed, women and girls had their heads shaved and were tattooed with numbers so they could be logged. Hygiene was very poor as well; if you were lucky enough to get soap then it would probably have been made from one of you deceased camp mates, as the Nazis often recycled the human fat from people who were executed into bars of soap.
Some people in the camps would be used for horrific experiments by a few doctors, the most infamous, and cruel is Dr. Josef Mengele. He was born on the 16th of March 1911, he joined the Nazi party before gaining his doctorate degree but after he had he soon joined the medical corps of the Waffen SS. He then later became the resident doctor at Auschwitz; he carried out horrific experiments on twins, dwarfs, giants and other “abnormal” people. He gained the nickname “the angel of death” and was responsible for the choices of who lived and who died at the women’s camps. Victims were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death. were
exposed to experimental surgeries performed without anaesthesia, transfusions of blood from one to another, isolation endurance, reaction to various stimuli. The doctors made injections with lethal germs, sex change operations, removal of organs and limbs. At Auschwitz Josef Mengele did a number of medical experiments, using twins. These twins as young as five years of age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies dissected. Mengele injected chemicals into the eyes of the children in an attempt to change their eye colour. He carried out twin-to-twin transfusions, stitched twins together, castrated or sterilized twins. Many twins had limbs and organs removed in macabre surgical procedures, performed without using an aesthetic. He gained the children’s trust by calling himself “uncle Mengele” and bringing them sweets, a very welcome treat in a death camp as you can imagine, and the children’s minds far too innocent and naïve to see through his plan. Sometime in 1945 he fled Auschwitz and managed to evade capture for the rest of his life, he is believed to have died in Brazil on the 7th of February 1979. During his life though tests were carried out on him and he was found to be psychologically sane, cultured man who would at night tuck his own children safely into bed.
The Nazis had started using the death camps because they had realised that places like the ghettos were not permanent solutions to “the Jewish question” and in the ghettos themselves word had started to spread that this was not where they were to stay, this was not the Nazi’s final solution. As groups in the ghettos started to realise that the death camps were real and that they were not some work of fiction then they started to attempt to fight back and rebel. There were many rebellions throughout the years spanning from 1942 until the end of the war. There are hundreds of examples to choose from, some much smaller than others but amongst some that stand out are, Nieswiez (Nesvizh), Lithuania, 22nd July 1942, 5000 Jews involved. In this uprising Jews managed to smuggle in a machine gun and some pistols into the ghettos. When German and Lithuanian forces came into the ghetto the Jews opened fire and also set fire to the ghetto. Twenty five Jews managed to escape into the forest nearby and operated as partisans, another good example of an uprising is Lachowice, Ukraine 19th October, 1942; in this rebellion the Germans entering the Ghetto were attacked with guns and knives, one knife managed to slit the throat of the German commander, 4 Jews managed to escape and act as partisans.
But by far the largest and most well known uprising was in the large ghetto of Warsaw in Poland in 1944. It was a sixty three day struggle to try and liberate the ghetto. At the time the liberation of Warsaw seemed to be within touching distance, and it probably should have been the first city to be liberated in the war but due to political misjudgements it was not. General 'Bor' Komorowski, commander of the Polish Underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), started the beginning of the uprising in Warsaw against the German occupying forces at 'W-hour'; 5:00 p.m. on August 1, 1944. The uprising was expected to last about a week. The defendants, however, were unaware that the Germans had decided to defend 'fortress' Warsaw and to counter-attack Red Army forces to the east of the city. The fighters numbered 40,000, 10% of the ghettos whole population, among these were 4,000 women, and the whole underground army only had enough weapons for 2,500 people. They were facing German troops 15,000 strong (which were to grow to 30,000) armed with tanks, planes, and large amounts of artillery. The RAF and Polish air force tried to help the ghetto by flying in ammunitions and supplies, but it was difficult to get them to land inside areas still controlled by the insurgents. Slowly the Defendants were pushed back by the German army, and the advancing Soviets failed to help even though they had already taken part of the city, some say they were under orders from Stalin to leave the Germans to finish of the resistance so that they would not loose many men. On the 2nd of October 1944 the Resistance Army was forced to surrender to the German Army, it is thought that around eighteen thousand members of the polish army were killed and over six thousand more seriously wounded, also around 150,000 civilians were killed during the uprising.
But despite all this, the death camps, the mistreatment, the ghettos the human spirit remained and it was the one thing that the Nazis could not take from the Jews, they could take their material possessions even their lives, but not their religion or will to live. To show this here is an extract from an interview with a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Warsaw.
“Ernest: "[A student asked me] how come, after all these things you went through, why do you still want to be a Jew?"
Interviewer: "What did you respond?"
Ernest: "I think that camp life has strengthened me and I am much more of a Jew today than I was before."
So in conclusion the genocide was ultimately the Nazi’s final solution to the Jewish problem, and even though they did ultimately fail I think if it was not for the strength of the Jewish people whilst still in the camps and ghettos, their willingness to stand up for what the believed in and fight for what they though was right then it is quite possible that the Nazi’s would have succeeded, and there would not be any decedents of Jews from any Nazi occupied lands. It is also apparent from this section that some of the most infamous people of the Nazi party like Mengele were just normal people when they were not in the camps, and had a sickening ability to forget what they had done during the day and care for their families just the way the relatives of the people they had killed that day would have.
