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Holocaust Research Paper

Tim Krueger

Mr. Neurberger

Comp 102

4/06/11
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Happiness and joy fill the air as well as concerns and fears for what lies ahead all come

from the Jews that finally became liberated. Happiness and joy breaks out for the sake of not

having to be put in horrible camps. Concerns and fears come as all wonder who all is left, and

what is waiting upon return. The unknown not having been their friend for the years past only

cause tension for what the Jews would find when they go back to their homes. Years of slavory,

torture, and tragedy all because one man was under the impression Jews were racially inferior to

Germans. This one man turned a country into an army and sent the

Jews into work camps which later turned into death camps. The

man behind it all was Adolf Hitler. Hitler not only captured Jews,

but also groups of Slavic and disabled people as well.

In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor.

After a month of his chancellorship, Hitler issued a policy that

everything and everybody should start having Nazi goals. A little

Adolf Hitler over a year later, the President dies and Hitler takes over his
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responsibilities and stats his reign of dictatorship. The German army also swore over their

loyalty to him for being the president. Hitler decided he could determine policy since he was the

President (head of the State), Chancellor (head of government), and Fuehrer (head of Nazi

party). He called the combination of those three and called it the “Fuehrer principle”(“Third

Reich”). As time went on Hitler was convinced Germany was destined to expand east by force.

His goal was to have the Germans take over and dominate Europe and the Soviet Union. To start

taking control of all he wanted control of, Hitler would start putting restrictions on the Jews in

every aspect of public and private life. The first step the Nazis would do was to limit the Jews to

their participation of public life in hopes of keeping them away from the general public. This law
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was the first of its kind and was called “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil

Service” because Hitler would continue to say that Jews were unreliable. The next step in

Hitler’s system was to limit the numbers of Jewish students from schools and universities. That

was shortly followed by the restriction of Jews in the Medical and Legal fields.

Eventually Hitler, eventually, had come to create the Nuremberg Laws. The first two

laws in the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews from their citizenship, making them Hitler’s

“subjects”, and also making it illegal for Jews to marry or have sexual relations with an Aryans,

or anybody that had blond hair and blue eyes (“Nuremberg Race Laws”). Following those laws,

another soon came in called “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”.

It required all people to have a medical examination before getting married. The examination

would check if a person were disease free or not.

Completing the examination got you a certificate that

was required in ordered to get married. After having the

laws in place, there became controversy over who is or

isn’t a full Jew, which resulted in the government making

Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust a chart of how a full Jew or any other Jew is determined.
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In the mid 1930s, Jews became fully banned and had no rights as humans. One night,

many Germans were destroying Jewish businesses and rioting while German soldiers were

evacuating every Jew they could find to send them into the ghettos. The soldiers would go door

to door and search each house to find every Jew possible and have them go to a ghetto. If the

Jews were to resist, the German soldiers would force the Jews out anyway. If the Jews were to

keep up their resist to leave, the Germans would end up just killing them and move on to the next

house. The ghettos were enclosed city districts which had very little food, sanitation, or many
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other basic necessities. The Germans wanted to just keep the Jews in the ghettos to keep them

separate from the rest of the population, but the Nazis wanted to completely move the Jews

elsewhere. The Jews were ordered to wear armbands and other types of identification that they

were of Jewish origin. Along with that, Jews were also forced into hard labor for the Germans.

All Jews would do as they were told by the Germans around them. The Germans started

becoming more aggressive when Jews wouldn’t do exactly as the Germans would want. If any

mistake were made and noticed by the Germans, they

would kill without thinking. Even if the Jew had done his

or her job correctly and the officer didn’t think so, that

Jew would immediately be killed. Also, Jews would be

accused quite often of resistance within the walls of the

ghetto they were in. A lot of Jews would be in trouble for Jews waiting outside of their train
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illegal activities that they saw necessary of their situation. The activities would include

smuggling food and medicine into the ghetto (“Ghettos”). Any religious movement within the

ghetto would also not be tolerated. Germans would often kill the ring leaders of any movement

or gathering happening.

When it became time to take the Jews to concentration camps, the Nazi and German

officials figure its best to use rail cars on the train systems to mass move all the Jews where the

Nazis wanted them to go. The cars were normally used for cattle, but instead many Jews would

pile into one car, like sardines, and travel to the camp. Other passengers were also taken on

passenger trains; it was random which group got which kind of train. The length of the trip was

unknown to the Jews riding. Some cars would travel for long lengths, others would travel short

distances, some trains would unload right away and other trains would have to wait days until
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they would unload their Jews. On the cars, Jews had no food or no drinks unless smuggled in by

one of the passengers. Some lucky Jews would find ice cycles outside the window and would put

them into a bucket or something to hold them and melt them down to make water for everybody

to share.

However, not every Jew was captured. When the rounding up of the Jews, before they

were put in ghettos, many Jewish people managed to run away and hide somewhere, mainly

children. The children would hide in a variety of places. Children have the advantage to hide in

small cupboards, hiding spots within the floors, or any other tiny spot they doubted an SS officer

would find them (“Hidden Children”). They would stay in there for hours. Many stayed a few

hours after they heard the last noise they heard; just to insure absolutely nobody were outside

waiting.

Once the Jews arrived at their concentration camp, they were immediately being sorted.

The Jews would immediately go through a selection process. The Nazis would select the Jews

they would want to work based on age, gender, body build, and any other means of choosing

they had. Elders and children were normally not kept

for work and sent elsewhere, normally a death camp

or a different concentration camp. Around fifteen

years old and older was around the cutoff age the

Nazis used to determine which kids to keep and not

Jews doing exactally what they are told by Nazi keep. The Jews never knew what the selection was
officer
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for. They were instantly divided to where to go the second they got off their train. Many families

were divided right away and never saw their relatives again. Parents would have to make the
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decision to choose one of their other kids to keep and which to let go, and other terribly tragic

decisions.

If kept in the camps, Jews were to work all day, every day regardless of the weather or

any other reasons why one couldn’t work. There were a variety of jobs to have once being in the

camp. It was never up to the Jews to decide what to work on, though. Some Jews would be able

to be the cooks. Other Jews could help make types of weapons or other war essential needs the

Nazi officers would have them do since it was free. Most others would just do hard labor day in

and day out like mine coal, and did other labor work to help expand industrial plants(“Inside a

Nazi Death Camp”). Many Jews will end up dying in the concentration camps. The mixture of

malnourishment and overworking of the prisoners took a terrible toll on the prisoners. Every

Jewish person looked like a walking skeleton by the

time the war was over. Their bodies ate up all

their fat and muscles due to lack of food or water

needed to even survive. Just like in the ghettos,

Jews would still get punished for not doing their

work correctly or whatever reason the Nazis

Starved children in a concentration camp
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needed to punish the prisoners. Most of the punishments were beatings which had greater toll on

the Jews because of their lack of nourishment. Unfortunately, the Jews who didn’t get sent to

work camps basically ended up being killed.

During the holocaust, towards the end of World War II, a conference was called in a

suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942 in order to figure out what to do with the Jews in all the

camps. The meeting was held by SS officer Reinhard Heydrich. Fourteen German and Nazi

officers were called in to discuss what they called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”.
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During the years of the Holocaust, these officials had talked of what actually to do with the Jews.

There were many ideas they had to choose from. The Germans wanted to keep the Jews in the

ghettos along the railways to keep them away from the rest of the world. Then next they wanted

to keep them in the concentration camps so they could finally execute them. Heydrich wanted to

make sure that everybody knew perfectly clear that they were to kill each and every Jewish

person (“Gutman, “The Wannsee Conference”).

The meeting called for the Jews working in the concentration camps to be moved into

death camps. These camps were designed to hold an extreme amount of Jewish people with

living quarters just as the concentration camps did. These camps were designed to work much

differently than the rest. The death camps had buildings that held different types of killing

chambers. Some buildings housed gas chambers that would hold about two hundred Jews at

once. The chambers would then start to filling with gas and every Jew in there would die under

ten minutes. They would then take the bodies to a crematory and burn all the bodies. There were

a couple other buildings in a few camps that could hold a much larger amount of Jews in the gas

chambers. Auschwitz was one of the biggest death camps, which also was a concentration camp.

On arrival most of the Jews were gassed right upon arrival. Many prisoners were able to stay

alive during the Final Solution of the Jews by working in the

camp (Bülow).

In hopes of not dying in a death camp, a select few Jews

get to work and close the door of the gas chamber and wait while

it fills up or do any other thing the Nazi officers would tell them

to do. There was a little hole in this system the Jews found as a Auschwitz Concentration/Death Camp
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life card. There were jobs they could do to survive for as long as they could. The Nazi would use
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one set of Jews to close the chamber door and do all that was needed to run it, then once the

bodies were gone the Nazi would select other Jews do the first set of Jews job and kill the first

set of Jews with the rest of the prisoners they had brought next.

However, gas chambers weren’t always the way they killed the Jews. The Nazis enjoyed

shooting Jews. One of their favored killing styles was to have prisoners dig a big hole, then have

them line up along the edge and shot them and have them fall into their own grave. The Nazi

would then have other few Jews in the group he brought and grab and move the bodies. Then

they would have to stand on the edge of the grave the last group dug to be shot into it again until

the vicious circle ends when the Jews were gone. The Nazis enjoyed the brutality of what they

did. They would also use a lethal injection on prisoners, but all of that would take too long

compared to using gas chambers due to their massive size and ability to kill and get rid of Jews

quickly.

At the end of World War II, allied troops made their way across Europe and started

running into many concentration camps and started

getting the prisoners out and taking over the Nazi forces.

The Soviet troops came upon the first major death camp.

The rapid movement scared the SS officers at the camps

which made them start destroying everything to hide the

Jews celebrating the liberation of the camps

evidence of the mass murder happening (”Liberation of
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Nazi Camps”). The Germans were demolishing buildings and setting fire to others to destroy

everything. In doing so, they left the gas chambers standing. The Soviets cleared three other

death camps by 1944, but unfortunately most of the Jews there had already been killed. As the

Germans retreated from the forces after them, they would attempt to destroy everything they
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could on all their camps. The Soviets found an incredible amount of evidence against the

Germans that they were mass killing the Jews and other captured prisoners. There were hundreds

of thousands of suits for men and fourteen thousand pounds of human hair along with all the gas

chambers and killing buildings were among the evidence against the Germans found at

Auschwitz alone. Once everything was done, the Germans managed to kill two-thirds of the

entire population of Jews.

Upon arriving back in Germany, the Jews would find all of their houses were gone. The

Germans took them as the Jews were in the camps. So many of the Jews never got to see their

family since the day they were separated from them. A

majority of Jews went into Israel to restart their lives with

what little family they did have. A lot of the survivors

immigrated to the United States to enjoy the freedoms they

were completely stripped of the last ten years.

The Jewish community did absolutely nothing other

than be the religious hatred of one well spoken individual

who turned an entire country on some of its own people. It

took the dedication and pure hatred of one man to create the More Jews celebrating the liberation
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biggest hate crime and come shockingly close to eliminating an entire race. Luckily that has only

happened once to that extent. Only once has a man started a slow, firm, and steady system to

eliminating Jews, or any other religion. Hitler created many laws making Jews less and less free

until they did not even register as people. He then evacuated the Jews into enclosed portions of a

city to live by themselves and away from everybody else. After living in the ghettos, trains of

various types, but usually ones used for cattle, took the Jews to work camps where there were
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forced to do hard and long labor every day. Hitler’s officers did not offer much to their health.

Gave them little to no food and never bathed. If they were lucky to survive the camps, the Jews

were unfortunately taken to Death camps where they were gassed and burned by the hundreds. It

took the efforts of the Soviet’s to discover and break down the camps and liberate the Jews. The

horrific tradgety is one that will never be forgotten and one that has changed the world.
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Works Cited

Bülow, Louis. ”Gates to Hell” Deathcamps.info, 2010. Web. 24 February 2011.

Grobman and Landes. “Kristallnacht” http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html, 2010. 24

February 2011

Gutman, Israel. “Inside a Nazi Death Camp, 1944”

www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/maidanek.htm, 2004. Web. 24 February 2011

Gutman, Israel. “The Wannsee Conference”. http://bit.ly/gfmMq7, 2004. 24 February 2011

Lisciotto, Carmelo. “The Wannsee Conference”. http://bit.ly/hnRpv5, 2007. Web. 24

February 2011

“Ghettos”. http://bit.ly/aCXPoy, 2010. Web. 24 February 2011.

“Hidden Children and the Holocaust”. http://bit.ly/hyGM8q, 2011. Web. 24 February 2011.

“Liberation of Nazi Camps”. http://bit.ly/aw0tDG, 2010. Web. 24 February 2011.

“The Camps”. http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holocamp.html. 1996. Web. 24 February 2011

“The Nuremberg Race Laws” http://bit.ly/1slphC, 2010. Web. 24 February 2011

“Third Reich: An Overview” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005141,

2010. Web. 24 February 2011.

“What Happened to the Jews After the Holocaust?” http://bit.ly/c2BAps. 1998. 24 February
2011