Figure 7: Holocaust Camps
Jewish people were increasingly transported to concentration camps, designed to kill more Jewish and other peoples quicker than before. Oskar Berger remembered “hundreds of bodies lying around.” Death was everywhere-the camps were full of corpses. Sometimes, local commanders worked to prove through worth through a dedication to killing. The commander at Treblinka (a concentration camp in Poland) worked to exceeded the death total of other camps and continued to accept victims even as the number of people to be killed far exceeded the facility’s ability to asphyxiate them. For the victims, many realized their fate as they approached the concentration camps. They threw their money, jewelry and other values from the train before arriving so as to deny them to their killers.
The rest of the Jewish victims perished in the concentration camps centered around Poland. of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, usually by gas, sometimes by bullets. The German T-4 project was designed to eliminate other undesirable characteristics-physical and mental handicaps, homosexuality, Gypsies-from the gene population and sterilized then killed its victims.
Local life began revolving around the camps. Jewish laborers searched the dead bodies for valuables, pocketing some and exchanging the valuables for food from local workers. The men then traded the valuables to incoming prostitutes who flocked to the areas surrounding the camps. The local men then consulted the Jewish doctors in the camp.
Overall, 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust-either shot in rural areas on the concentration camps. Another 2-3 million Russian prisoners of war died in in the German camps, making the German killing, especially throughout Eastern Europe, the largest example of mass killings ever.
Figure 8: Holocaust Prisoners
A Speech given by Heinrich Himmler in occupied Poland, 1943: “And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. (some laughter) Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.”
Testimony of Rudolf Hoess, commander of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex, at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal 1946: The Final Solution of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. l was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941….Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes – but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz .
