Research Paper

Our human brain is unable to envisage the atrocities that a human hand can do to others. Murders, homicides, and massacres, have become the normal to us. However, nothing can ever compare to what one single person did to two million innocent and defenseless people. The controversial, Adolf Hitler, instructed for concentration camps to be established all over Germany and soon to the territories the Nazi took control of.

FORCED LABOUR CAMPS   

Concentration camps are mostly viewed as places where Jew’s, among with other groups, were immediately put to death. Camps such as the Sachsenhausen Camp were not established as a death camp, but a camp which forced the prisoners to perform forced labour under extremely harsh living conditions. A Holocaust survivor, Edward Alder, recalls “If anyone would have told me at that time that I can run 40 kilometers a day, I'd say you're crazy. But I did. Day after day after day” (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Adler, 1992, Transcript). Adler had shovel a mining car with dirt and then bring it back across the field, for ten hours a day, without a break. “Many prisoners would die in Sachsenhausen due to exhaustion, starvation, exposure, abuse, and lack of medical care” (USHMM, 2013, ¶3). Although, the Sachsenhausen camp was established as a labour camp, by 1943 a gas chamber was built. Also, Nazi soldiers shot the prisoners whenever they felt like doing so. In total, roughly about 30-35,000 died in this camp (Berman, 2014).

EXTERMINATION CAMPS

    Other camps did not force labour to the prisoners. Camps, such as, “Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka-- altered the nature and course of the concentration camp development” (Bartrop, 2000, p.15). These were known as extermination camps. Once the prisoners arrived at these camps, they were stripped naked. Defenseless they were guided up a road and the last thing they saw was the place where they would be killed. The innocent poor people had no idea what awaited them. Here, the only way a prisoner could be killed, would be by entering a gas chamber. Everybody was killed at once in a gas chamber, with no mercy.Within these camps, no distinction was made between men, women and children.

    All gas chambers, in any concentration or extermination camp, had the same goal: efficiently murder millions of people. “These mass murders took place in specially-designed gas chambers,  which employed crystallized hydrogen cyanide which on contact with air oxidized to become hydrocyanic (or prussic) acid gas.” (Bartrop, 2000, p.18). Once the prisoner was inside the gas chamber, there was no way out. You step in, and never step out. Many would say, how could a person in its right mind not notice that something was going on and tried as hard to get out of their claws? The answer was simple, if the prisoner knew where they were headed and did nothing, that was because they were in denial or had just given up. On the other hand, there were other prisoners who when they arrived at the extermination camps, had no idea what was going on. Some prisoners of the Sonderkommandos, were chosen to lie to the incoming prisoners. These Jewish male prisoners, told the prisoners while they were undressing “that they were going to be bathed and deloused, and that they must leave their clothing neatly together, and, above all, remember where they put them, so that they would be able to find them quickly after the delousing” (Berenbaum, 1997, p.182). Most of the prisoners actually believed the Sonderkommandos, because they were people from their own race. The prisoners had complete trust in these men and therefore calmed down and did as they said, directly into their death. The prisoners who were closer to the air shaft died immediately, but others suffered a suffocation death but it was rather quick.

That was the harsh truth that soldiers had to confront everyday of their lives. A commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Höss, recalls an a young woman and her way to the gas chambers. He describes it as follows:

A young woman stands out in my mind. While constantly running back and forth, she helped undress the little children at her side and she caught my attention by her agitated behavior and her appearance. She did not look Jewish at all. At this point the children were no longer with her. Staying until the end with several other children, she kept speaking softly and calming those who weren’t finished undressing. She then went into the bunker with the last group. In the doorway she stopped and said, “I knew from the beginning that we were destined to to be gassed at Auschwitz. I got through the selection of those who were chosen to work by taking children in my hands. I wanted to experience the process fully conscious and accurately. I hope it will be quick. Farewell!” (Berenbaum, 1997, p.185)

There were soldiers who actually did not enjoy killing people. This commandant recalls what he would rather forget. This young woman stands out in his mind, meaning he still thinks about this and will never stop having this pop up in his brain. These did not have any other choice but to do what the official in a higher range than them order them to do. If the did not then it was just like the rest of them.

When this point in world history ended many officials felt the way Commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, other extermination camps, Franz Stangl felt. He declared in an interview, “In reality, I share the guilt.....Because my guilt.....my guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt. I should have died. That was my guilt” (Stangl, Berenbaum, 1997, p.200). Indeed, they knew killing about two million innocent people made them guilty and they could not do anything to stop reminding themselves every morning for the rest of their lives.

There are few survivors from these concentration camps. It is a shame that human beings had to go through such torture. There are so many unanswered questions still to this day. How can the Nazi armies live with themselves for killing so many innocent people? Due from these concentration camps, survivors today will tell their tragedies that had happened to them so other  people can relive the story too.