to pull at one another's beards. This was often followed by acts of brutality,
by sever beatings and by executions. Special SS "operational groups" carried
these out after the army had captured the town. One example is on the 3rd
September 1939 one of the SS groups entered Wieruszow on arrival they captured
20 Jews took them to the market place and lined them up for execution. A little
girl came running up to her father and wished to say good bye, but the SS
soldiers captured her and ordered her to open her mouth then shot her through
it. They then killed the twenty men. In Berlin on the 21st of September SS
General Reinhard Heydrich he told several commanders that his plan for Poland
was to clear large areas of western Poland completely of Jews and elsewhere Jews
to be confined in special areas of cities and towns. All Jews would then have
to live in this area which would be called a 'ghetto'. Barbed wire, brick walls
and armed guards would then surround these areas. All of these ghettos had to
be placed over a railway so that in the future other measures could be
accomplished. When the Jews were kicked out of there homes they lost the
majority of their possessions and there lively hoods. Tens of thousands of Jews
were also expelled from Germany into Poland. The deportees were sent in locked
passenger trains under SS armed guard. Germans took their homes and property.
Many children froze to death on the journey. Adolf Eichmenn met the deportees
on arrival and told them: "There are no apartments and no houses - if you build
your homes you will have a roof over your head. There is no water. The wells
are full of epidemics. There's cholera, dysentery, and typhus. If you dig for
water, you'll have water." German soldiers then opened their luggage and took
whatever they wanted. Jews were forced to live in these ghettos for 3 years each
year the death rate getting higher mostly from starvation.
>
> In 1941 we saw the Einsatzgrupen. There Job was to follow the German armies
through the USSR and once the German army had finished with the town they would
kill all of the Jewish families. The one problem with the Einsatzgrupen was
there killing method they would either hang people by piano wire or do mass
shooting into a freshly dug pit which they would have probably made the Jewish
folk dig first. In October 1941 the killing squads in the east had completed
four months of uninterrupted killing. Himmler, Hitler and the SS decided that
no blood need to be shed in German streets instead they decided any Jews in
Germany would be deported to the east: either to ghettos, on polish soil where
they would be left to starve and suffer with the local population, or to killing
sites further east.
>
> On the 20th January 1942 thirteen senior Nazi and German officials met at a
secluded lake side villa on the shore of Wannsee, a few miles from Berlin. The
aim of the meeting was to come up with a final solution about the Jewish
population. Their final decision was to use a new method of mass murder by gas.
This solution was to go into effect immediately. The Jews were deported more in
this year then any other they were deported to four different death camps these
were: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. In each of these camps almost
every deportee was murdered. A fragment in each death camp was kept alive as
slave labour, to sort the clothes of the victims and to service the SS
facilities. The rest were sent from the railway sidings to their deaths in the
gas chambers. In the summer of 1942 the concentration camp Auschwitz which had
until then been a place where Poles had been held and killed was turned by the
SS into another Death camp the largest of them all. At Auschwitz they
experimented using different forms of gas and different ways of murder. For the
next two and a half years Auschwitz became the most brutal of all camps and
killed the majority of arrivals imediattly. If the doctor on site(even though
he never cured any Jewish people) thought that a Jewish person was capable of
hard labour they would be tattooed with a number and sent to the barracks.
>
> Over these brief years we can see the way the Nazis killed the Jews these
methods got worse and worse as the years went on. These different methods
changed because the Nazis had to think of cheap but quick ways of getting rid of
mass amounts of people. Hence why they came up with the idea of using Zykon B
gas to kill the Jews in the end.
