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Explore the harrowing reality of the Holocaust through the concentration and extermination camps, where millions of prisoners were killed through mistreatment, disease, and systematic extermination. Discover the atrocities committed during this dark period of history.
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The Holocaust The Final Solution
Concentration Camps • In these camps, millions of prisoners were killed through mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. • The majority of these camps were located in occupied Poland; Why: Millions of Jews lived in this area. • In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying overalls with colored badges according to their categorization: red triangles for Communists and other political prisoners, green triangles for common criminals, pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, black for Gypsies and asocials, and yellow for Jews.
Concentration Camps • Prisoners were often transported using rail freight cars. • Due to the conditions in the cars, many died before they reached their destination. • The prisoners were confined to the rail cars, often for days or weeks, without food or water. Many died of dehydration in the intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter.
Concentration Camps • Prior to and during the early years of WWII, concentration camps were used for forced labor to manufacture war materials for the Germ. military. • However, towards the end of the war, these camps were used to conduct horrific medical experiments including: freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfonamide, sea water, sterilization, typhus, poison, and incendiary bombs. • The camps were liberated by the Allies between 1943 and 1945, often too late to save the prisoners remaining. For example, when the UK entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, 60,000 prisoners were found alive, but 10,000 died within a week of liberation due to typhus and malnutrition.
Experience of a Liberator • Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which … The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms … He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life. • BBC’s Richard Dimbleby.
Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp, Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. 80th Infantry Division on May 5, 1945.
Extermination Camps • Extermination camps were built after the Wannsee Conference as part of the “Final Solution” for Jews. • They were built to conduct the systematic killing of millions of people: Gas chambers (exhaust and Zyklon B) • Victims’ bodies were usually cremated or buried in mass graves. • The groups of people that the Nazis sought to exterminate were primarily the Jews of Europe and Gypsies (Roma). • The majority of prisoners brought to extermination camps were not expected to survive more than 24 hours beyond arrival.
Extermination Camps • Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau): about 1,100,000 • Up to 8,000 people were gassed every day by the spring of 1944. • Chełmno: about 152,000 • Bełżec: about 434,500 • Majdanek: 78,000 • Sobibór: about 167,000 • Treblinka: at least 700,000 • Maly Trostenets: at least 65,000 • This gives a total of over 2.5 million, of which over 80% were Jews. These camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed by the entire Nazi Holocaust, including almost the whole Jewish population of Poland.
Selection" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.
The Cover-up and the Death Marches • By mid-1944, The Final Solution had mostly run its course: The Jewish communities w/in reach of the Nazis had been exterminated. • However, with the advancing Allied fronts, the Nazis began their cover-up: • The gas chambers were dismantled • The crematoria were dynamited • Mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated • Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed.
The Cover-up and the Death Marches • The cover-up also included forcedmarches of surviving Jews back to Germ: • Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these marches. • The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers.
Jewish Resistance • During WWII, the Nazis tried to keep both the killings and the death camps secret. • Why: Don’t want to decrease Germ. public opinion of the Nazis; don’t want to increase the resolve of the Allies. • The Nazis were so successful in their cover-up that even the Euro. Jews were unaware of what was going to happen to them. • However, once people began to find out (liquidation of the ghettos), Jewish and non-Jewish resistance groups began to form.
Jewish Resistance • There are many examples of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. • The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was followed by the rising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates succeeded in escaping from the camp after overpowering the guards. • Two weeks later, there was a rising in the Bialystok ghetto. • In September, there was a short-lived rising in the Vilnius ghetto.
Jewish Resistance • In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. Most of the participants in these risings were killed, but some managed to escape and joined partisan units. • On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after. • An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. The Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the Western Desert Campaign.
Jewish Resistance • For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. • A major factor hindering Jewish resistance both inside and outside of the ghettos was the widespread lack of support for the Jews. • Anti-Semitic Euros in occupied areas helped the Nazis hunt down Jews, and pro-Nazi govs., such as those of Fr., Italy, and Hungary, sent tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps.1 • Most people in occupied areas did nothing to help the Jews for fear of punishment, however, there were small numbers of people who would provide helps to Jews and other persecuted people.
Notice posted in the Polish town of Częstochowa, warning of the death penalty for hiding, feeding, or selling food to Jews and for Jews found outside the Jewish ghetto without a permit. (Dated 24 September 1942).
Jewish Resistance • In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit." • – Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy
Why Did the Allies Not Do Anything Sooner? • During the Holocaust, evidence and news of the mistreatment of Jews and other groups of people had reached the outside world, but little action was taken to help them. • Why: Allied govs. believed that fighting the war and defeating the Nazis was the only way they could help those suffering from Nazi injustices. • It would only be until after WWII when the full horrors of the Holocaust were known; justice would be served through the Nuremburg Trials.
The Nuremburg Trials • The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. • The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949, at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
The Nuremburg Trials • The Trials were divided into 2 sections: • The first (Nov. 20, 1945 – Oct. 1, 1946): Trial of the Major War Criminals which tried 24 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany. • The second: Trial of Lesser War Criminals, included the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial. • The 2 major reasons for holding the trials in Nuremburg were: • It was located in the Am./Fr. zone of occupation • The Palace of Justice was spacious and largely undamaged (one of the few that had remained largely intact through extensive Allied bombing of Germany). A large prison was also part of the complex.
