During the second world war, Hitler needed a place to take the Jews, and his enemies, to get them out of his way. He walled off remote areas of some 400 places to create a series of Ghettos all around Germany and the newly conquered Poland and France. The conditions in these ghettos were abysmal. Food was rationed dramatically to a point where the people couldn’t survive on the amount they were being given. Human waste was thrown onto the streets along with the garbage. Lice, rats and diseases seemed everywhere, lurking around each corner. Young children and babies could be seen starving in the streets alone as they had lost their parents and family. Nearly every house was deprived of heating and running water yet there weren’t even enough houses for each family. As overcrowding started to take place, around 50 people could share one house at a time. Yet Hitler found more and more Jews every day. Ghettos were full and the people inside were finding it easier to escape as the danger that they could also revolt swept the country. Hitler needed to exterminate these adults and children. And quickly. The ‘final solution’ was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews. The Nazis used the vague term ‘final solution’ to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world. Using The SS to shoot randomly in Ghettos to try and stop overcrowding was no longer working. Something quicker and cheaper needed to be invented that could wipe out the Jewish population forever. A meeting was started at Wannsee by Reinhard Heydrich to discuss the matter. In the months following the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi regime continued to carry out their plans for the ‘Final Solution.’ Jews were deported, transported by trains or trucks to six camps, all located in occupied Poland: Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin. The Nazis called these six camps extermination camps. Most of the deportees were immediately murdered in large groups by poisonous gas. The Nazis changed to gassing as their preferred method of mass murder because they saw it as cleaner and more efficient than shooting. Gassing also spared the killers the emotional stress many of The SS had felt shooting people face to face. The killing centres were in isolated areas, fairly well hidden from public view. They were located near major railroad lines, allowing trains to transport hundreds of thousands of people to the killing sites. Many of the victims were deported from nearby ghettos, some as early as December 1941, even before the Wannsee meeting. The SS began in earnest to empty the ghettos. However, in the summer of 1942 more than two million Jews were taken out of the ghettos. By the summer of 1944, few ghettos remained in eastern Europe.
Auschwitz was the largest camp established by the Germans. It was a complex of camps, including a concentration, extermination, and forced-labor camp. It was located near Cracow Poland. A sign over the entrance to the camp read ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which meant ‘work makes one free.’ It turned out that the opposite was true. Labour became another form of genocide that the Nazis called ‘extermination through work.’ Each day was a struggle for survival under unbearable conditions for those who were not sent instantly to the gas chambers. Cruel medical experiments were conducted at Auschwitz. Men, women, and children were used as subjects. physician Dr. Josef carried out painful and traumatic experiments on dwarfs and twins, including young children. The aim of some experiments was to find better medical treatments for German soldiers and airmen. Other experiments were aimed at improving methods of sterilizing people the Nazis considered inferior. Many people died during the experiments. Others were killed after the ‘research’ was completed and their organs removed for further study. Rape and awful beatings were common amongst the Aushwitz victims. Most prisoners at Auschwitz survived only a few weeks or months. Those who were too ill or too weak to work were condemned to death in the gas chambers. Some committed suicide by throwing themselves against the electric wires. Others resembled walking corpses, broken in body and spirit.
From these terrible times in history we should learn from them that it should never happen again. It is a constant reminder of what can happen if we don’t look out for one another. It teaches us to value our freedom and our democracy. To learn more about our fellow countries so we can help them when they need us. It teaches us how cruel and evil mankind can be. We need to save hundreds of people that are suffering the same fate as the Jews and gypsies did over 50 years ago. If we raise awareness then hopefully we can cause an uprising if anything like it will happen again. People always learn from their mistakes.
By Bethan Siddons 9K1
