Barbara Smoke And Ashes: The Story Of The Holocaust

Taking the lives of 6 million Jews alone, the Holocaust is one of , if not the, greatest tragedies in history. It is completely deranged that at one point in time, millions of people stood by and supported Adolf Hitler. Adolf was a man who stored so much hatred towards Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc., that he found it acceptable to kill them through mass shootings, gassings, and Nazi camps. Other times called ‘concentration camps,’ the mere idea of Nazi camps was purely wicked. Disease, forced labor, starvation, and murder are only a few things that were incorporated into these camps. During this time, Jews (and every other group affected) were absolutely dehumanized. Once they arrived to these camps, typically through compact trains, they were not only stripped of the few items they had brought, but were stripped of their names, families and friends, usual lives, and any dignity or hope they had once had.

In the 1940’s the Germans wanted to take rights and terminate the Jews. Some people tried to save Jews and help them by hiding them in their houses. Germans put over 6 million Jews in concentration camps and made them do work without pay, little food, and water. Women and very little children often got sent to gas chambers upon arrival. Jews usually work in the camp and did outside labor like factories, construction projects, farms or coal mines (Vashem). They walked miles to get to their work. If they did not corporate they were shot on sight. 11 million Jews were killed in the holocaust(Rosenberg).

World War II was a time of devastating and catastrophic events. One of the tragedies that occurred in this time was the Holocaust. It is estimated that over six million people were killed from Holocaust occurrences. The Nazi political party can be accredited with the creation of this horrible event. They were led by the infamous ruler Adolf Hitler. He believed that all Jews of every race were inferior to the rest of the world. In his mind, the only way to make the world better was to eliminate the entire Jewish population. In order to do this, he decided to set up concentration camps. These camps would feed the Jews a miniscule amount of food, humiliate them, and overwork them. One of the most notorious of these camps was known as

The Holocaust began on January 30, 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and ended May 8, 1945 when the war officially ended. During this time 6,000,000 Jews were killed, not by war, but rather at the hands of Germany. Hitler believed that Jews were an inferior race and was a threat to German purity. After years of being mistreated Hitler had a plan called the Final Solution, which was the attempt to extinct the entire Jewish Population. Germany would accomplish this by concentration camps that were set up in Poland.

The Jews were moved to the ghettos, because Hitler pushed the Jews to move to the east, then they concore move of the east and move them more to the east. Then “there was no more room for them to move to the east, so they built ghettos for them to live” (Byers 32). But his true intentions were to “separate the Jewish people from manly Germans and also other races” (Allen 37).

The Jews were convinced by the Nazis that they were just being relocated, but they were going to the so-called “Shower rooms,” but they were really gas chambers disguised(Blohm 48). Many of the concentration camps were improper, lacked protection from the weather, and one was just a series of tunnels inside a mountain that the Jews were forced on to build a secret weapon(Blohm 28)

The victims of the holocaust were taken to the concentration camps by train. The families were taken from the homes, with no belongings besides what they had on their bodies, and could even be separated from each other. The victims in the camps were also known as the ‘Walking Dead’ because of their poor condition. As soon as the victims arrived they were treated very poorly. “Once the SS guards got ahold of the victims they were beaten terribly, starved, and even murdered” (The Concentration Camps: The Treatment of Concentration Camp Victims). They did this to the victims who were mostly Jews because they wanted to purify the German race. They used propaganda to spread the ideals of National Socialism. “Propaganda was used to force beliefs and religions on the public, shown through

The Holocaust is the most significant historical event that I have studied so far. This tragic event took place during World War II and only very few survivors lived to share their shocking experiences. I have read a few of these survivor’s stories, such as Night, by Elie Wiesel and it has personally impacted me and influenced my thinking in various ways.

Jews were moved to the camps to either work or be killed (Veil 113). The Nazis also wanted to keep the children, but only twins because the Nazi scientist wanted to experiment on them (Veil 115). The Nazis had a plan called the System of Death where they told all the Jews that they were going to take showers and clean off and the Nazis took them to a medium sized room where they all stripped down getting ready for showers. The Nazis would then put some Zyklon B pellets into the chamber where it reacted with the oxygen in the air and turned into chlorine gas and all the Jews were dead in minutes. They then would force some other Jews to carry the bodies to the crematorium where the bodies would be

In the 1930s and 40s, a man named Hitler Took over Germany, and his goal was to kill every jewish person in Europe. He even said, “Eliminate the jews,” Hitler proclaimed, “and you will eliminate all of Germany's problems!”(6). Hitler did not like the jews, he thought it was their fault that the germans had lost WWI. So, he wanted to get rid of them. And he wanted to kill all nine million of them.

March of 1933 something happened that would change the lives of millions forever. In ¨Dachau¨ the first concentration camp was opened (¨United States Holocaust Memorial Museum¨). This would be the first of thousands more to come, all with the intention of either forced labor or mass murder, often both (¨The Holocaust¨). Many events led to this crisis and they all included the persecution of the Jewish people. Persecution included the making of Jewish laws, Kristallnacht, the creation of ghettos, and finally torture in the concentration camps.

The Nazis attempted to identify and contain all the Jews so that eventually, they could be moved to gas chambers. They used the euphemism “the final aim” to conceal their intention to exterminate the Jewish race from Europe (Byers 63). Additionally, Members of the Nazi party used the forced migration of the Jews to rob them of many of their belongings. Jewish families had their houses, money, clothing, artwork, jewelry and furniture taken in the chaos (Byers 65).

The concentration camps were awful. The prisoners were forced to do a useless and hard task. One of those tasks was moving large stones out of the river. If a person could not complete the task they were shot or beaten(Strahinich 33). The worst of all the camps was Auschwitz. If a Jew was being sent or taken to that camp, they knew that meant they would be killed. By gas chambers or hard labor At Auschwitz, thousands of people would die each day(Blohm 16). In the many or all of the camps disease, starvation, torture, experimentation, and hard labor was common for the captives(Steele

The death camps were places where the detainees would be taken into chambers where toxic gas would be released and the prisoners would just drop dead. The “Final Solution” was one of the key elements that the Nazi Society believed in. Though at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Europe work camps were the places where the prisoners were forced to work long grueling hours, later in the occupation they started to use death camps to help them in the “Final Solution”. According to the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Millions of people were imprisoned and abused 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. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1)”. The prisoners were tortured in ways beyond imagination. A special few prisoners would be selected by Nazi doctors, who would then perform dangerous medical experiments on them. The Nazi’s would also beat the Jews and do many treacherous things to them. In conclusion, the Nazi work and death camps were dreadful and affected many the lives of many Jewish families in

In 1945 jews and many others types of people were taken from their homes, apartments, and other places and were taken to concentration camps. concentration camps where they kept them to kill, torture, and just to make them feel horrible and even worse. Auschwitz was one of the most well known camp it was more of a death camp in was first opened in April of 1940. It was more that 3.5 miles long so it was pretty big.