AUSCHWITZ essays

AUSCHWITZ essays In the beginning the Jews were murdered in mass shootings on the Russian front. This method of extermination was very difficult on the soldiers, and far to public to the civilians. This was then the beginning. In 1941 for the plan to carry out their mass killing of the Jews at Auschwitz. Once this decision had been reached to kill all the Jews of Europe, a more discreet method of extermination had to be devised. Witnesses had later accounted that even the first commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess said that they needed a more humane and rational method for this mass killing. So late in the summer of 1941 the order was made that Auschwitz would be used for this purpose. There were six extermination factories located in Poland, many people were killed at the first death camps, but the largest camp was Auschwitz between January 1942 and November 1944 it was estimated to have exterminated 1,250,000 Jews. Auschwitz was a complex of camps, combining the different types of labor, internment and extermination. Auschwitz was a concentration center, and the most notorious of all the death camps. The Jews who were taken to Auschwitz came from many countries, Holland, Greece, Germany, Poland, Russia, France, Belgium, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Norway, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy and Yugolslavia. These victims, were unaware of their fate, and endured the indescribable torment of long rail journeys, during which they were crowded into cattle trucks and deprived of air, food and water. These journeys caused many to die just from the conditions, from suffocation and dehydration. As they would arrive at Auschwitz, the majority were tricked into taking showers or sometimes had to be driven with whips like slaves, into chambers, once naked inside these rooms, the doors were bolted and they were poisoned by hydrogen cyanide gas (Zyclon B.) All over Nazi-occupied Europe there were round-ups o ...