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Concentration Camps

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Early Camps (1933-38)

, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners-German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats-as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses , homosexuals concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.

After Germany's annexation [Anschluss] of in March 1938, Austrian political prisoners came into the Nazi concentration camp system. Following the violent Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms in November 1938, Nazi officials conducted mass arrests of adult male Jews throughout the country, the first time Jews were arrested en masse precisely because they were Jews. Over 30,000 German Jews were incarcerated in the , Buchenwald , and concentration camps in Germany, initially until each could provide proof of their ability to emigrate. Sachsenhausen

Types of Camps

Many people refer to all of the Nazi incarceration sites during the Holocaust as concentration camps. The term concentration camp is used very loosely to describe places of incarceration and murder under the Nazi regime, however, not all sites established by the Nazis were concentration camps. Nazi-established sites include:

Concentration camps: For the detention of civilians seen as real or perceived "enemies of the Reich."

Forced-labor camps: In forced-labor camps, the Nazi regime brutally exploited the labor of prisoners for economic gain and to meet labor shortages. Prisoners lacked proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest.

Transit camps: Transit camps functioned as temporary holding facilities for Jews awaiting deportation. These camps were usually the last stop before deportations to a killing center.

Prisoner-of-war camps: For Allied prisoners of war, including Poles and Soviet soldiers.

Killing centers: Established primarily or exclusively for the assembly-line style murder of large numbers of people immediately upon arrival to the site. There were 5 killing centers for the murder primarily of Jews. The term is also used to describe "euthanasia" sites for the murder of disabled patients.

Other types of incarceration sites numbered in the tens of thousands. These included but were not limited to early camps; "euthanasia" facilities for the murder of disabled patients; Gestapo, SS and German justice detention centers; so-called "Gypsy" camps, and Germanization facilities.

Concentration Camps

Concentration camps are often inaccurately compared to a prison in modern society. But concentration camps, unlike prisons, were independent of any judicial review. Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:

1. To incarcerate real and perceived "enemies of the state." These persons were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.

2. To eliminate individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals by murder, away from the public and judicial review.

3. To exploit forced labor of the prisoner population. This purpose grew out of a labor shortage.

The First Concentration Camp

The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime. The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau, established in March 1933, near Munich.

In many of the concentration camps, the Nazi SS either installed or had plans to install gas chambers to assist in their daily business of killing prisoners who were too weak or sick to work. Before the widespread use of gassing in the concentration camps, weak, ill and exhausted prisoners selected by camp physicians were murdered at "euthanasia" (T4) facilities from 1941-1943 in a secret program called 14f13. Gas chambers were also to kill small targeted groups of individuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate (Polish resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, etc.). This was the purpose of the installation of gas chambers, for example, at Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Auschwitz I, Ravensbrück, Lublin/Majdanek, etc.

Camp Structure
All concentration camps were structured in the same way. Each had an internal camp staff that consisted of five sections:

1. Commandant's Headquarters (consisting of the commandant and his staff)

2. A protective detention office run by a Security Police officer who maintained prisoner records in terms of arrival, discharge, discipline and death and who received his instructions from the Reich Central Office for Security

3. Commander of the Protective Detention Camp

4. Administration and Supply

5. SS Physician

Forced-Labor and Prisoner-of-War Camps

Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. SS units guarded the camps. During World War II , the Nazi camp system expanded rapidly. In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners.

Following the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union , the Nazis increased the number of prisoner-of-war (POW) camps and subcamps. Some new camps were built at existing concentration camp complexes (such as Auschwitz ) in occupied Poland. The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek , was established in the autumn of 1941 as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in 1943. Thousands of Soviet POWs were shot or gassed there.

Transit Camps

Jews in Nazi-occupied lands often were first deported to transit camps such as in France, en route to the Westerbork in the Netherlands, or killing centers in German-occupied Poland. The transit camps were usually the last stop before deportation to a killing center.

Killing Centers

Killing centers first made their appearance in Nazi Germany in the execution of Operation T4, the so-called "euthanasia" program. It was the Nazi state's first program of mass murder, where disabled patients in German facilities were murdered in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas.

To help carry out the " Final Solution" (the genocide or mass destruction of Jews), the Nazis established killing centers in German-occupied Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population. Killing centers were designed for efficient mass murder. The first one, which opened in December 1941, was , where Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans. In 1942, the Nazis opened the , , and killing centers to systematically murder the Jews of the General Government (the territory in the interior of German-occupied Poland). Here Nazi planners borrowed the gassing technique from the "euthanasia" program to murder Jews in gas chambers using carbon monoxide gas generated by engine exhaust.

At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau killing center had four gas chambers, known here as crematoria. Here gassing took place using the pesticide Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide, or prussic acid). During the height of deportations to the camp in 1943-44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day. Over 2,772,000 Jews (or 46% of Jewish victims) were murdered at killing centers.

Millions of people were imprisoned, mistreated, and murdered in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.

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and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state."

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Why did Hitler commit Suicide?

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Which groups were involved in the Holocaust

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti- Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Holocaust was "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators".

Scope of usage

While the term Holocaust generally refers to the systematic mass-murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman (Untermenschen) or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for extermination, e.g. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as a Jehovah's Witness.

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a total of 17 million victims.

Despite widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide while others were not), some died in concentration camps such as Dachau and others from various forms of Nazi brutality. According to extensive documentation (written and photographic) left by the Nazis, eyewitness testimony by survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and records of the occupied countries, most perished in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ethnic criteria

Jews delivered to Chełmno death camp were forced to abandon their bundles along the way. In this photo, loading of victims sent from the ghetto in Łódź in 1942

The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December, Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946. The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.

In January 1942, during the Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the " Final Solution to the Jewish Question" ( Endlösung der Judenfrage) and German State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as Vernichtungslager ( extermination camps):

In 1978, Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal-to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal-was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews. As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.

A photograph depicting Polish Jews captured by Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, May 1943

In Poland - home of Europe's largest Jewish community before the war - the Nazis murdered 3.3 million Jews, or 90 percent of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in The New York Times, in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.

Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were murdered; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby neutral Sweden; the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis. Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.

Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.

The Yad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with the names and biographical details of close to 4.8 of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.

The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis. According to British historian Ian Kershaw, the Nazis' genocide and brutality was their way of ensuring Lebensraum ("living space") for those who met Hitler's narrow racial requirements; this necessitated the elimination of Bolsheviks and Slavs:

The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans ... As Bartov ( The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race.

Polish priests and civilians in Bydgoszcz's Old Market Square, 9 September 1939. The Polish Church experienced brutal persecution under Nazi occupation.

The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 million ethnic Poles and about 3 million Polish Jews. The six million Jewish, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles represented nearly 17 percent of the country's population. Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939 speech to Wehrmacht commanders before the invasion. Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed en masse. Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in the near-complete destruction of Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as slaves.

Ukrainians

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine. More Ukrainians were killed fighting the in the Red Army than American, British and French soldiers combined. Original Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as slaves. Over two million Ukrainians were deported to Germany as slave labor. The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized or enslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.

Soviet Slavs and POWs

Naked Soviet prisoners of war in Mauthausen concentration camp

During Operation Barbarossa (the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union), millions of Red Army prisoners of war were summarily executed in the field by German armies (the in particular), died under inhumane conditions in German prisoner of war camps, on death marches, or had been shipped to concentration camps for execution. The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs by starvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941-42. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the winter of 1941 "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". 140,000-500,000 Soviet citizens and POWs were murdered in the concentration camps.

Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were severely persecuted and endured the treacherous conditions of the Eastern Front, which spawned atrocities such as the siege of Leningrad, when 1.2 million civilians died. Thousands of peasant villages across Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were annihilated by German troops. During the occupation, the Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions lost about a quarter of their populations. An estimated one-quarter of Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies (five million Russians, three million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians) were racially motivated. In 1995, the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totaled 13.7 million dead (20% of the population of 68 million). The figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease deaths. An estimated three million people also died of starvation in unoccupied territory. The losses occurred within the 1946-1991 borders of the USSR, and include territories annexed in 1939-40. The deaths of 8.2 million Soviet civilians, including Jews, were documented by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.

German police round up Romani in Asperg, Germany in May 1940

The Nazi genocide of the Romani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s, and opinions continue to differ on its details. According to historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, the genocide of the Romani began later than that of the Jews and a smaller percentage was murdered. Hitler's genocidal campaign against Europe's Romani population involved the application of Nazi " racial hygiene" ( selective breeding applied to humans). Despite discriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany's Sinti and Lalleri) were spared deportation and death, with the remaining Romani groups suffering a fate similar to that of the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, were shot by SS Einsatzgruppen in their villages, or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr. Robert Ritter

Estimates of the number of Romani victims range from 250,000 to 500,000. The Romani genocide was formally recognized by West Germany in 1982 and by Poland in 2011.

Spanish Republicans

Thousands of Spanish Republican refugees were living in France at the time of its occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940; 15,000 were detained in concentration camps, including 7,000 in Mauthausen-Gusen. Around 3,500 were murdered in the camp.

Non-Europeans

Nazi propaganda about the differences between German Aryans and blacks

The Nazis promoted xenophobia and racism against all "non-Aryan" races. African (black) residents of Germany and black prisoners of war, such as French colonial troops and African Americans, were also victims of Nazi racial policy. When the Nazis came to power, hundreds of African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived in the Rhineland. In , Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation troops as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe" who were "bastardising the European continent at its core". According to Hitler, "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate".

Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. No Japanese people were deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were considered " honorary Aryans". The same applied to Turks and all other "Ural-Altaic" peoples. In his political testament Hitler wrote:

I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. [...] and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilisation to which we belong.[unreliable source? ]

People with disabilities

According to their eugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed care and were considered an affront to their notion of a society composed of a perfect race. About 375,000 people were sterilized against their will due to their disabilities.

Those with disabilities were among the first to be murdered by the Nazis; according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the T-4 Program (established in 1939) was the model for future Nazi exterminations and it set a precedent for the genocide of what they described as the Jewish race. The program attempted to maintain the "purity" of the Aryan race by systematically murdering children and adults with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness, using gas chambers for the first time. Although Hitler formally halted the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the end of the war and an estimated 275,000 people with congenital disabilities were murdered.

Homosexual men

Homosexual men were also targets of the Holocaust, since male homosexuality was deemed incompatible with Nazism. The Nazis believed that gay men were weak, effeminate and unable to fight for the German nation; homosexuals were unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. According to the Nazis, "inferior races" produced more children than Aryans, so anything which diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger. Homosexuality was also thought to be contagious by the Nazis. By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was leading efforts to persecute gay men under existing and new anti-homosexual laws. More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned. An unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were chemically castrated by court order. Although an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps, the number who were murdered is uncertain. According to Austrian survivor Heinz Heger, gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners". Gay men in Nazi concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle on their shirts, along with men convicted of sexually assaulting children and bestiality. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's website, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more."

Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution under Paragraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This contrasted with the treatment of other Holocaust victims, who were compensated for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.

Political victims

Political prisoners

Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilian activists from across the political spectrum who opposed the Nazi regime, captured resistance fighters (many of whom were executed during-or immediately after-their interrogation, particularly in occupied Poland and France) and, sometimes, their families. German political prisoners were a substantial proportion of the first inmates at Dachau (the prototypical Nazi concentration camp). The political People's Court was notorious for the number of its death sentences.

Nazi SA guard shut-down trade union headquarters in Berlin, 2 May 1933

German communists were among the first to be imprisoned in concentration camps. Their ties to the USSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler his first dictatorial powers. Hermann Göring testified at Nuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Hitler referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir up class tension and mobilize trade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler's Commissar Order, in which he demanded the summary execution of all Soviet troops who were political commissars who offered resistance or were captured in battle.

Enemy nationals

Thousands of people, primarily diplomats, of nationalities associated with the Allies ( China and Mexico, for example) and Spanish Civil War refugees in occupied France were interned or executed. After Italy's 1943 surrender, many Italian nationals (including partisans and Italian soldiers disarmed by the Germans) were sent to concentration camps.

Other religious persecution

The Nazis also targeted religious groups for political and ideological reasons.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Historian Detlef Garbe, director of the Neuengamme Memorial in Hamburg, wrote about Jehovah's Witnesses: "No other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism [Nazism] with comparable unanimity and steadfastness". Between 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were murdered in the concentration camps; unwilling to fight for any cause, they refused to serve in the army.

Roman Catholics

The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church, with the Nazi leadership hoping to gradually de-Christianize Germany. According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion." Hitler vehemently despised Christianity, calling it the enemy of National Socialism. According to historian William Shirer, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler-backed by Hitler-the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists". He also wrote that Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism in and attacked both of the Christian Churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...". As reported in the New York Times, Hitler's forces wished to de-Christianize Germany after "the final victory" and destroy Christianity. According to historian Alan Bullock, "Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect." Political Catholicism was a target of Hitler's 1934 Night of the Long Knives. German clergy, nuns and lay leaders were also targeted after the Nazi takeover, leading to thousands of arrests over the following years. Priests who were part of the Catholic resistance were killed. Hitler's invasion of Catholic Poland in 1939 began World War II, and the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their campaign to destroy Polish culture.

The Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel at Dachau commemorates the clergy who were imprisoned there.

In 1940, the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp was established. Of 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority (94.88 percent) were Catholic. According to Ian Kershaw, about 400 German priests were sent to the camp. Although the Holy See concluded a 1933 concordat with Germany to protect Catholicism during Nazi rule, the Nazis frequently violated the pact in their Kirchenkampf ("struggle with the churches"). They shut down the Catholic press, schools, political parties and youth groups in Germany amid murder and mass arrests. In March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued his Mit brennender Sorge encyclical accusing the Nazi government of violating the 1933 concordat and sowing the " tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church".

The church was especially harshly treated in annexed regions, such as Austria. Viennese Odilo Globocnik confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations and sent many priests to Dachau. In the Czech lands, religious orders were suppressed, schools closed, religious instruction forbidden and priests sent to concentration camps. Catholic bishops, clergy, nuns and laypeople protested and attacked Nazi policies in occupied territories; in 1942, the Dutch bishops protested the mistreatment of Jews. When Archbishop Johannes de Jong refused to yield to Nazi threats, the Gestapo rounded up Catholic "Jews" and sent 92 to Auschwitz. One Catholic abducted in this manner was nun Edith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz along with Poland's Maximilian Kolbe. Other Catholic victims of the Holocaust have been beatified, including Poland's 108 Martyrs of World War II, the Martyrs of Nowogródek, Dutch theologian Titus Brandsma and Germany's Lübeck martyrs and Bernhard Lichtenberg.

Polish Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe was murdered at Auschwitz.

According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." The Nazis murdered millions of Polish Catholics. Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles-the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland-as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders). The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking the Polish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany). About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."

In Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, severe persecution began. The Nazis systematically dismantled the church, arresting its leaders, exiling its clergy and closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Germanization of the annexed regions began in December 1939, with deportations of men, women and children. According to Richard J. Evans, in the Reichsgau Wartheland "numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment." Among the clergy who were murdered at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II.

Hans Frank said in 1940, "Poles may have only one master-a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Thomas J. Craughwell wrote that from 1939 to 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 were murdered in concentration camps. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1,811 Polish priests were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Among the persecuted resisters was Irena Sendlerowa, head of the children's section of Żegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.

Protestants

The Nazis attempted to deal with Protestant dissent with their ideology by creating the Reich Church, a union of 28 existing Protestant groups espousing Positive Christianity (a doctrine compatible with Nazism). Non-Aryan ministers were suspended and church members called themselves German Christians, with "the swastika on their chest and the cross in their heart." The Protestant opposition to the Nazis established the Confessing Church, a rival umbrella organization of independent German regional churches which was persecuted.

Freemasons

The Nazis claimed that high-degree Masons were willing members of "the Jewish conspiracy" and Freemasonry was a cause of Germany's defeat in World War I. Reich Security Main Office ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) records indicate the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust. RSHA Amt VII (written records), overseen by Franz Six, was responsible for "ideological" tasks: the creation of antisemitic and anti-Masonic propaganda. Although the exact number is unknown, an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 Freemasons were murdered as a result of Hitler's December 1941 Nacht und Nebel directive. Masonic concentration camp inmates, considered political prisoners, wore an inverted red triangle.

Small blue forget-me-nots were first used by the Zur Sonne Grand Lodge in 1926 as a Masonic emblem at its annual convention in Bremen. In 1938, a forget-me-not badge made by the factory which produced the Masonic badge was chosen for the annual Nazi Winterhilfswerk, the charity drive of the National Socialist People's Welfare (the party's welfare branch). The coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear the forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of Masonic membership.

After the war, the forget-me-not was again used as a Masonic emblem at the first annual United Grand Lodges of Germany convention in 1948. The badge is worn on the lapels of Masons worldwide in remembrance of those who have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, particularly during the Nazi era.

The SS and police conducted mass actions against civilians with alleged links to resistance movements, their families, and villages or city districts. Notorious killings occurred in Lidice, Khatyn, Kragujevac, Sant'Anna and Oradour-sur-Glane, and a district of Warsaw was obliterated. In occupied Poland, Nazi Germany imposed the death penalty on those found sheltering (or aiding) Jews. "Social deviants"- prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, open dissidents, pacifists, draft resisters and common criminals-were also imprisoned in concentration camps. The common criminals frequently became Kapos, inmate guards of fellow prisoners.

Some Germans and Austrians who had lived abroad for much of their lives were considered to have had too much exposure to foreign ideas, and were sent to concentration camps. These prisoners, known as "emigrants", each wore a blue triangle.[better source needed ]

On rare occasions, POWs from Western Allied armies were sent to concentration camps, including 350 Americans - some chosen for being Jewish, but mostly for looking Jewish or for being troublemakers or otherwise 'undesirable'. Some captured in the Battle of the Bulge were forced into slave labor at the Berga concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald; over 70 were killed by the conditions there. The " KLB Club" was a group of 168 Allied airmen - mainly American, British, and Canadian - considered Terrorfliegers ("terror fliers"), denied POW status, and held at Buchenwald for two months until a German officer arranged their transfer to a standard POW camp, a week before their scheduled execution.

Bibliography

Further reading

Benz, Wolfgang (2015). Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus [Dimension of the genocide: the number of Jewish victims of Nazism] (in German). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-486-70833-2.

External links

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Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society.

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What was the Holocaust? Who was targeted?

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Introduction

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the Nazi era, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, some of the Slavic peoples ( Poles, Russians, and others), Soviet prisoners of war, and Black people. Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

What Was the Holocaust?

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By the end of the war in 1945, the Germans and their allies and collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the " Final Solution."

The Nazis considered Jews to be the inferior race that posed the deadliest menace to the German . Soon after they came to power, the Nazis adopted measures to exclude Jews from German economic, social and cultural life and to pressure them to emigrate. World War II provided Nazi officials with the opportunity to pursue a comprehensive, "final solution to the Jewish question": the murder of all the Jews in Europe.

While Jews were the priority target of Nazi racism, other groups within Germany were persecuted for racial reasons, including Roma (then commonly called "Gypsies"), Afro-Germans, and people with mental or physical disabilities. By the end of the war, the Germans and their Axis partners murdered between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma. And between 1939 and 1945, they murdered at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly German and living in institutions, in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people seen as biologically inferior or dangerous. Approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or brutal treatment. The Germans shot tens of thousands of non-Jewish members of the Polish intelligentsia, murdered the inhabitants of hundreds of villages in "pacification" raids in Poland and the Soviet Union, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians to perform forced labor under conditions that caused many to die.

From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and other Germans whose behavior did not conform to prescribed social norms (such as beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes), incarcerating tens of thousands of them in prisons and concentration camps. German police officials similarly persecuted tens of thousands of Germans viewed as political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, Freemasons, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of maltreatment and murder.

Implementation of the "Final Solution"

World War II provided Nazi officials the opportunity to adopt more radical measures against the Jews under the pretext that they posed a threat to Germany. After occupying Poland, German authorities confined the Jewish population to ghettos, to which they also later deported thousands of Jews from the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died from the horrendous conditions in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, SS and police units perpetrated mass shootings of Jews and Roma, as well as Soviet Communist Party and state officials in eastern Europe. The German units involved in these massacres included Einsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, and Waffen-SS units. As they moved through eastern Europe, these units relied on logistical support from the German military (the Wehrmacht). In addition to shootings, these units also used specially designed mobile gas vans as a means of killing. Mass shootings of Jews in eastern Europe continued throughout the war. Of the approximately 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million died in mass shootings or gas vans in Soviet territory.

In late 1941, Nazi officials opted to employ an additional method to kill Jews, one originally developed for the "Euthanasia" Program: stationary gas chambers. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi Germany and its allies deported Jews from areas under their control to killing centers. These killing centers, often called extermination camps in English, were located in German-occupied Poland. Poison gas was the primary means of murder at these camps. Nearly 2.7 million Jews were murdered at the five killing centers:

Some able-bodied Jewish deportees were temporarily spared to perform forced labor in ghettos, forced labor camps for Jews, or concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Most of these workers died from starvation and disease or were killed when they became too weak to work.

My mother ran over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, and she told me "Leibele, I'm not going to see you no more. Take care of your brother."
- Leo Schneiderman describing arrival at Auschwitz, selection, and separation from his family

The End of the Holocaust

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called " death marches," in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

On May 7, 1945, German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. World War II officially ended in most parts of Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day). Because of the time difference, Soviet forces announced their "Victory Day" on May 9, 1945.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, an estimated 250,000 Jewish survivors found shelter in displaced persons camps run by the Allied powers and the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Between 1948 and 1951, most Jewish displaced persons immigrated to Israel, the United States, and other nations outside Europe. The last camp for Jewish displaced persons closed in 1957.

The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated or completely destroyed Jewish communities across Europe.

Last Edited: Mar 2, 2021

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Introduction to the Holocaust: What was the Holocaust?

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The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

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Areas Controlled by Hitler and the Nazis During WWII

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Map of Europe During WWII

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Who sided with who during WWII? And where in the world it occurred

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How did World War II end?

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World War 2 ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

VE Day and street parties | V-J Day

Germany surrenders

On 8 May 1945, the Allies accepted Germany's surrender, about a week after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide.

VE Day - Victory in Europe Day

VE Day - Victory in Europe celebrates the end of the Second World War on 8 May 1945.

8 May 1945 - Winston Churchill announced VE Day - Victory in Europe. This day marks the end of WW2 in Europe.

Street parties were held all over Britain to celebrate the end of the war

1945 Hailsham Road street party, Tooting, London

But ........

Even though the war was officialy at an end in the Far East the war raged on, claiming more lives.

Until ......

Japan surrenders
Japan, did not surrender at the same time as Germany. It was able to hold out for another few months. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively. After that the Imperial government sought the Emperor's personal authority to surrender which he granted. He made a personal radio address announcing the decision.

V-J Day - Victory in Japan Day.

15 August 1945 - Japan surrenders to the Allies V-J Day (Victory in Japan)

2 September 1945 - Having agreed in principle to unconditional surrender on 15 August 1945, Japan formally surrenders, ending World War II throughout the rest of the world .

The surrender was signed on 2 Sept. 1945 aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Have a look at our timeline to see what events led up to the end of the war

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World War 2 ended with the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. VE Day and street parties | V-J Day Germany surrenders On 8 May 1945, the Allies accepted Germany's surrender, about a week after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide.

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How did World War II Start?

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For almost six years from 1939 to 1945 Britain fought the toughest war it had ever experienced. World War II was total war - every person, every business, every service was involved.

Britain did not fight alone, the war also involved many countries. World War II involved 61 countries with 1.7 billion people (three quarters of the world's population).

Fifty million people lost their lives and hundreds of millions people were injured.

How did the Second World War start?

After World War One ended in 1918, Germany had to give up land and was banned from having armed forces.

In 1933 the German people voted for a leader named Adolf Hitler, who led a political party in Germany called the National Socialists or Nazis. Hitler promised to make his country great again and quickly began to arm Germany again and to seize land from other countries.

Shortly before 5am on Friday 1st September, 1939, German forces stormed the Polish frontier. Tanks and motorised troops raced into the country over ground, supported by Stuka dive bombers overhead. A total of 1.25 million Germans soldiers swept into Poland

When did World War Two begin?

World War Two in Europe began on 3rd September 1939, when the Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany. It involved many of the world's countries.

Click on the play button below to hear Chamberlain's speech (now the full speech)

Why did the Second World War start?

The Second World War was started by Germany in an unprovoked attack on Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany after Hitler had refused to abort his invasion of Poland.

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For almost six years from 1939 to 1945 Britain fought the toughest war it had ever experienced. World War II was total war - every person, every business, every service was involved. Britain did not fight alone, the war also involved many countries.

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Jewish Population before and after War

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Jewish Population of Europe Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jewish communities across Europe were shattered. Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding.

According to the American Jewish Yearbook, the Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933. In 1950, the Jewish population of Europe was about 3.5 million. In 1933, 60 percent of all Jews lived in Europe. In 1950, most Jews (51 percent) lived in the Americas (North and South combined), while only a third of the world's Jewish population lived in Europe.

The Jewish communities of eastern Europe were devastated. In 1933, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, numbering over three million. By 1950, the Jewish population of Poland was reduced to about 45,000. The Soviet Union had the largest remaining Jewish population, with some two million Jews. Romania's Jewish population was nearly 757,000 in 1930 and fell to approximately 280,000 (1950). Most of these demographic losses were due to the Holocaust, the rest to postwar emigration from Europe.

The Jewish population of central Europe was also devastated. Germany had a Jewish population of 565,000 in 1933 and just 37,000 in 1950. Hungary had 445,000 in 1933 and 190,000 in 1950. Czechoslovakia's Jewish population was reduced from about 357,000 in 1933 to 17,000 in 1950 and Austria's from about 250,000 to just 18,000.

In western Europe, the largest Jewish communities remained in Great Britain, with approximately 450,000 Jews (300,000 in 1933) and France, with 235,000 (225,000 in 1933). In southern Europe, the Jewish population fell dramatically: in Greece from about 100,000 in 1933 to just 7,000 in 1950; in Yugoslavia from about 70,000 to 3,500; in Italy from about 48,000 to 35,000; and in Bulgaria from 50,000 in 1933 to just 6,500 in 1950 (the reduction in the Bulgarian Jewish population resulted from postwar emigration). The demographic focus of European Jewry thus shifted from eastern to western Europe.

Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a vibrant and mature Jewish culture. By 1945, most European Jews-two out of every three-had been killed. Most of the surviving remnant of European Jewry decided to leave Europe. Hundreds of thousands established new lives in Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, South America, and South Africa.

And we were traveling criss-cross Poland looking for surviving Jews, and we found them. And sometimes these meetings were so packed with emotion that I, I lack the words to describe it, you know. Because the idea that we are really survivors couldn't sink in yet.
-Leah Hammerstein Silverstein

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Jewish Population of Europe Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jewish communities across Europe were shattered. Many of those who survived were determined to leave Europe and start new lives in Israel or the United States. The population shifts brought on by the Holocaust and by Jewish emigration were astounding.

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What is a Concentration Camp?

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Concentration camp definition, a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc., especially any of the camps established by the Nazis prior to and during World War II for the confinement and persecution of prisoners. See more.

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What a Concentration Camp looks like today

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It's hard to imagine Auschwitz today and what does such place look like after many years without being there.

But you can get almost full image of this memorable place before visiting it.

After this article you will have a glance of what to expect there.

Take a look at these shattering descriptions, pitures and videos. They will help you decide if you want to visit Auschwitz.
Come on and see the truth.
How is Auschwitz today? 360′ walk trough
Go for your first walk trough Auschwitz. Quite sad experience, right?
If Auschwitz today looks frightfully, we can only imagine how terrifying it was during World War II.

Despite the passage of time, Auschwitz is still one of the most important historical sites in Poland.

This place is still a living memory of hunger, suffering, torture and death. We can not forget that thousands of innocent people lost their lives there, in unhuman conditions and without any proper reason other than their race or religious beliefs.

That's why Auschwitz is not another tourist attraction to cross out from the list of places to see.
Do you want to see more of it?
That's great, but remember - visiting Auschwitz should trigger reflections instead of being just entertainment.

Witness enclosed in pictures

Historians were able to restore the original image of Auschwitz thanks to pictures of it.

Most of them were left by the Nazis. Wthout them the exhibitions presenting Auschwitz today would be much poorer. These h undreds of pictures are now an irrefutable proof of the scale on which Auschwitz operated.

The pictures immortalize not only the prisoners' faces but also the last moments of their lives. You can see them arriving at Auschwitz, how they lived and how their bodies changed after weeks of insufficient nutrition and hard labour.

The black and white shocking Auschwitz pictures taken while the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz still operated are changing the way we imagine this place today.
But it's only small piece of what you can see.
During your tour to this bleak place, you will encounter a lot of faded photos of its former prisoners put on display there. It is also a fact that the overall impression of this UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site is not the most pleasant place on Earth you will ever sightsee.

Just like those old Auschwitz pictures indicate it.

However, once you take your informative tour to Auschwitz and Birkenau extermination facilities, you will also realise another thing.

Namely, that there are colours present all around the space.

Auschwitz today is almost the same place as 70-80 years ago. You can enter the same buildings and walk on the same paths as Auschwitz's prisoners did.
Follow this post and see the most important elements to day's Auschwitz.
Entrance to Auschwitz - Arbeit Macht Frei Gate

"Arbeit macht frei" gate is the most important and recognizable symbol of Auschwitz. It was made in the camp's forge by some selected inmates of the camp back in 1940. The gate was what columns of slave labourers from Auschwitz used to march through on everyday basis.

Imagine that those marches were often accompanied by the sounds of a camp orchestra, composed of 71 skilled prisoners.

Same blocks then and today

Upon your visit to Auschwitz, you will be let inside some of its blocks. There are some special exhibitions inside them.

The raw architecture of small-windowed, brick-made blocks surrounded by squares and alleys broad enough to allow for endless roll calls by the Nazi torturers. This indicates to the horrors that were lived through inside camp.
Every barrack is unique.
Block 10. - place of scary experiments

For example block no. 10 is particularly infamous for the criminal medical experiments carried out by dr Carl Clauberg inside.
What were the experiments for?
Professor Carl Clauberg was responsible for coming up with the best method of sterilization, one that would ensure infertility in an unlimited number of people in the shortest period of time.

His painful experiments were carried out on more or less 400 Jewish women.

Many of them died due to complications such as peritonitis, hemorrhages form the reproductive tract, high fever and sepsis.
But it's not the end of that sad story...
Those who survived the procedures were deliberately put to death so that the autopsies could be done.
Unfortunately Clauberg wasnt' the only one
A different kind of experiments was carried out by another medical criminal, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele. His research concerned twins and people suffering from dwarfism. When various medical examinations were over, the patients were killed with lethal injections of phenol to the heart.

To perform autopsies and the comparative analysis of their internal organs.

Block 7 and Auschwitz's Daily Routine

Block 7 is a place where Auschwitz's prisoners were gathered. This building shows us sets of pictures of Auschwitz detainees, piles of their personal belongings, the camp latrines and baths.

The working day at the camp began at 4:30 or 5:30 in the morning (depending on the season of the year) and lasted until 7 o'clock in the evening. The prisoners had various kinds of labor inside and outside the camp boundaries.

The prisoners returning to the camp carried the corpses of those who had died or been killed while working.
And it's not the end of sad facts about Auschwitz.
Place of many deaths - the Execution Wall

The Execution Wall of Auschwitz is placed between Blocks no. 10 and 11.

This is where the disobedient prisoners of the camp used to be shot.

The executions had their own routine:

If there were women among the condemned, they were led into the courtyard and shot first.

All prisoners had to strip naked and walked to the wall in pairs.

The executioner approached them from behind and shot them in the back of their heads with a small caliber rifle.

The corpses were then loaded onto trucks or carts and delivered to crematoria.

Among the victims of the Death Wall there are mostly Polish political prisoners and members of clandestine organizations.

You must be wondering:
How many people died this way?
There isn't much information about the number of victims of shooting as a great majority of the killed was never entered in the camp records.

In special cases death sentences were passed by courts operating inside the barrack adjoined to the courtyard.

You will often see fresh flowers placed at the site, as well as at many other locations inside the camp where a considerable number of prisoners were killed.

The Death Gate of the Auschwitz II

This picture of Auschwitz today shows the entrance to Birkenau, dubbed into "the Death Gate" by the prisoners.

40 to 50 long trains filled with Jews were passing through this gate each day, starting in the middle of May, 1944.

The route led to the third unloading ramp. There were literally not a single prisoner or victim of Auschwitz-Birkenau having been transported inside through this raw and blood chilling construction.

There were three different unloading ramps built in Auschwitz camp.

"Alte Judenrampe" was the longest used one (between 1942 and May 1944). The ramp was located between the camps of Auschwitz I and II (Birkenau). After the frequency of transports to Auschwitz intensified, the Nazi operators relocated the ramp and selection process behind the Death Gate.
What the selection was for?
This was all meant to facilitate the process of classifying the newcomers as capable for work (nearly 20% of all Jews transported to the camp) or sentenced to death inside gas chambers . Prisoners were lined up in two rows:

One row consisted of adult men and older boys.

In the other row stood women and young children.

The decision about the future of the people was based entirely on their appearance. If they looked too young, too old or too sick, they were sent to death.

Personal belongings were confiscated and many prisoners were killed on the spot immdiately to show the rest that their life depends on the whims of their oppressors.

Also doctors, such as previously mentioned professor Carl Clauberg, used to come to the ramp and select the future victims of their experiments.

Abandoned after the war, the ramp started to be overgrown with bushes and slowly got devastated. It was brought to its original state in 2004. Two authentic carriages from the time of war were placed on the tracks to symbolize the bloody history of this site.

The vast space of Auschwitz today

The picture says a lot about how large the camp of Auschwitz was.

The barbed-wired area was the biggest extermination and concentration camp of entire Europe.

Surface was complemented by high voltage applied to the wire and a lot of watchtowers.

That made the escape from camp nearly impossible.

There were approximately 300 barracks and buildings with housing, administrative and infrastructure purposes in total.

Barracks with inhuman conditions

None of us can imagine how terrible everyday life in Auschwitz was.

But construction of barracks from the inside moves the imagination.

Picture above shows a typical interior of a barrack where inmates were forced to live. Prisoners of Auschwitz would share wooden cots with their fellow imprisoned ones, sleep on the floor covered with hay or straw mattresses.

In theory, the blocks were supposed to hold about 700 prisoners each, in practice though, they housed more than 1200. The rooms were so overcrowded that prisoners could sleep only on their sides, in three rows.

The barracks erected in Birkenau were originally designed as horse stables, so they weren't resistant to freezing temperatures.

The barracks in Birkenau were divided according to their function.

All were opened and used in various time periods, sometimes one replaced the other.

Family camps were the only possibility for men, women and children to stay together. They were however opened solely for the reasons of propaganda. Prisoners were ordered to write censored correspondence which later was used as a tool to mislead public opinion.

Provisional camp latrines

It's obvious that living conditions at Birkenau were horrifying.

Intimacy and privacy were the concepts totally denied to its prisoners.

Quarantine section of Auschwitz today is a place where you can see that the latrines were just holes in a concrete block.

Fearful gas chambers

Gas chambers will possibly be the most moving part of your tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Initially there was only one gas chamber in Auschwitz and it was joined to crematory I since 1941.

Later also farmhouses were adopted to exterminate people.
Construction of it was well planned

it's dimensions are 17 x 4,5 m

the entrance had the inscription suggesting there was a washing room inside

it had the capacity of 700 to 800 people

Later on, there were 2 additional gas chambers ("red" and "white" houses) built inside nearby houses left by their Polish owners after the camp had been established.

Afterwards they were replaced by a complex of four gigantic gas chambers and crematories. Each gas chamber could kill up to 2,000 people at once.

As only the door was locked behind the people gathered inside, the operators of Holocaust used to insert Zyklon B gas inside, watching the death of their victims through a glazed door panel.

People were requested to undress before they could enter the chambers, To keep the idea of the shower even more realistic?

After the process was finished, designated prisoners took care of the corpses: cut their hair, removed golden teeth and took the jewellery. The loot was later re-used by the camp authorities.

Crematories in Auschwitz

Crematories were built in Birkenau between 1942 and 1943.

All crematories could burn 4416 corps a day. It was estimated that 1.6 million people a year could be burned there.

During your tour to Auschwitz, you will see the interior of crematorium I within the premises of Auschwitz I. This is where the members of Sonderkommando were harnessed to dispose of the bodies of Jews murdered inside gas chambers.

Crematories II-V were built in the territory of Birkenau a bit later.

They were managed to be destroyed near the end of WWII.

Leaving them intact would provide evidence in the hands of the Allies.

The same happened with number of facilities surrounding the extermination-aimed places of the camp.

Auschwitz today - summary

Nowadays Auschwitz is a memorial place to the tragedy of Holocaust.

A visit to Auschwitz today will undeniably make an unforgettable impression on you as it has on millions of previous visitors since the beginning of its operation as a museum. Here you can find first-hand report from one of them:

You can still find all symbols of this unpleasant place, touch them and feel their depressing ambience.

Visiting Auschwitz today is the only way to fully understand Nazi crimes.

If you are ready to face this place, take part in one of organized, guided tours to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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Auschwitz Today & How It Looks Like after 100 years? (2018 Update)

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It's hard to imagine Auschwitz today and what does such place look like after many years without being there. But you can get almost full image of this memorable place before visiting it. After this article you will have a glance of what to expect there.

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Hitler's Secret Weapons Factories

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A gigantic secret Nazi weapons factory where a NUCLEAR BOMB may have been developed has been discovered in Austria.

The 75-acre facility, located near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, is believed to have been used to create and test weapons of mass destruction and was deemed so important to the Nazis that the head of the SS and Hitler's right hand man Heinrich Himmler, even oversaw its development.

The complex, which experts believe was the "biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich", was discovered by Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary maker who found reference to the bunkers in the diaries of an old Austrian physicist.

They were so well hidden though that bulldozing equipment was to needed to cut away massive granite plates the Nazis had used to hide the entrance shaft in 1945. Ground penetrating radar was also required to confirm reports of how large the facility was.

The facility is believed to be linked to the nearby B8 Bergkristall underground factory that produced the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter, that posed a brief threat to allied air forces in the war's closing stages.

Mr Sulzer told The Times: "This was a gigantic industrial complex."

And similar to the Bergkristall factory, it relied on slave labour from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Up to 320,000 inmates are said to have died because of the brutal conditions in the subterranean labyrinth.

In order to fully discover the meaning behind the secret facility Mr Sulzer assembled a crack team of historians and found further evidence of scientists working on the secret project, which was managed by the feared SS General Hans Kammler.

Kammler, known to be a ruthless leader, was in charge of Hitler's missile programmes, including the V-2 rocket used against London in the latter stages of the war. He was also the man who signed off blueprints for the gas chambers that killed millions of Jews.

Rainer Karlsch, a historian who worked with Mr Sulzer, said: "The SS leadership aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

"They wanted to equip the A4 [a variant of the V-2] missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads."

Later the Russian army plundered Bergkristall removed all the technology and then destroyed and filled in the bunkers.

The second part of the site, which Sulzer has discovered, seems to have remained unnoticed by both the Americans and the Russians.

Sulzer's excavation was stopped last Wednesday by local authorities, who demanded a permit for research on historic sites. But he is confident that digging can resume next month.

"Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were handpicked for their special skills - physicists, chemists or other experts - to work on this monstrous project and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth," said Sulzer.

Artwork by former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler:

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'Biggest secret Nazi weapons factory of the Third Reich' discovered underground

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A gigantic secret Nazi weapons factory where a NUCLEAR BOMB may have been developed has been discovered in Austria. The 75-acre facility, located near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen, is believed to have been used to create and test weapons of mass destruction and was deemed so important to the Nazis that the head of the SS and Hitler's right hand man Heinrich Himmler, even oversaw its development.

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Why did Hitler hate the Jews?

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Anne Frank House Westermarkt 20 1016 DK Amsterdam

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Hitler and his rise to power

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How did Hitler come to power? The process occurred over multiple decades. Hitler's rise to power started when he became politically involved and joined the Deutsche Arbeiterspartei. From there he worked himself up in the party, which later became the Nazi Party, through charm, violence and cunning negotiations. He was an excellent speaker and surrounded himself with people who, like him, were not afraid to use violence to fulfil their political objectives. At one stage, Hitler recognized that he was one of the best speakers in the Nazi party and demanded that they make him party leader or he would walk out. They conceded and he became party leader.

Rise of the Nazi Party

The grim atmosphere of the early 1930s greatly contributed to the rise of Hitler's Nazi Party as it left the Germans desperate for a strong leader. They considered the German government to be weak and the actions of Bruning, the chancellor only added to the bitterness of the German nation. They suffered due to the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression left many with huge financial problems, which were only worsened by the chancellor's decision to cut unemployment pay and wages. Thanks to a very successful propaganda campaign focused on the poor and the suffering, the Nazi Party rose from only 12 seats in Reichstag in 1928 to becoming the largest party in 1932 with 230 seats.

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Hitler's Takeover

Although the Nazi Party had become very powerful, they lost close to two million votes in the November 1932 Reichstag elections, which meant that they only had 33 percent of the vote, and not the majority they needed. Papen, who wanted the position of vice chancellor and thought he could control Hitler, convinced Hindenburg to form a coalition with the Nazis and appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hindenburg finally gave in and appointed Hitler as chancellor. Hitler's final grab for power was when he negotiated with the Reichstag members to give him temporary "emergency" powers for four years, enabling him to act without the consent of parliament or the German constitution. While negotiations were taking place, his large military force was surrounding parliament with the threat of war, should they refuse. They didn't have much of a choice but grant him what he wanted and Hitler became absolute ruler of Germany.
This article is part of our larger selection of posts about Adolph Hitler. To learn more, click here for our comprehensive guide to the life of Adolph Hitler.
Cite This Article

"How Did Hitler Come to Power?" History on the Net
© 2000-2019, Salem Media.
June 25, 2019 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/how-did-hitler-come-to-power>
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Loading... How did Hitler come to power? The process occurred over multiple decades. Hitler's rise to power started when he became politically involved and joined the Deutsche Arbeiterspartei. From there he worked himself up in the party, which later became the Nazi Party, through charm, violence and cunning negotiations.

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History.com - Videos and Readings on the Holocaust

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Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust-even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine.

The Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler's particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I. Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country's defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers' Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract " Mein Kampf " (or "my struggle"), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany."

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the "pure" German race, which he called "Aryan," and with the need for "Lebensraum," or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party's status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer, becoming Germany's supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler's worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in "protective custody." Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000-just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an "Aryanization" of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients.

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass" in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland, starting World War II. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler's SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution) to "the Jewish question."

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins, injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death."

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on "International Jewry and its helpers" and urged the German leaders and people to follow "the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples"-the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide. Germany's formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy's front line. These so-called "death marches" continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz, the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat."

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust-known in Hebrew as "Shoah," or catastrophe-were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust's bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people's responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.
Sources
The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum.
What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums.
Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe.
Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations.

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Holocaust: Definition, Remembrance & Meaning - HISTORY

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The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, Romani people, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime from 1933-1945.

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Kids in Concentration Camp - Wearing clothing that looked like Pajamas

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Jewish People were forced to wear a Star of David symbol to show who they were in public

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People in a Concentration Camp

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Kids in Concentration Camps