Auschwitz Concentration Camps Essays Example

It has been roughly 7 decades since the Second World War came to an end, culminating in a much-anticipated victory of the Allies over the countries representing the Axis Power. While gradually defeating the major belligerents, as Germany, Japan, and Italy, and fighting their way forward towards the heart of the evil alliance, aka Germany, the forces of the USA, the UK, France, and the USSR would often encounter specific facilities for prisoner detention. Concentration camps used to be detention facilities in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, the year that the Allies inflicted a crushing defeat on the Axis Power, most notably, Germany. A horrendous sight was meeting their eyes whenever they stepped foot on the once occupied territory. Half-dead prisoners sometimes bound hand and foot were tremendously skinny, suffering from utter exhaustion, famine, deceases would not stop decimating those liberated long after their detention had been over. Human bodies buried in communal graves at best, decomposing decaying corpses piled beside barracks at worst. Such was the outcome of Adolf Hitler’s quest of “Lebensraum” or the living space or the triumph of the self-professed German Aryan race, a de facto pseudo-scientific term used by Fuhrer to spur his nation onto victory.
A failed painter, the First World War corporal, a Beer Hall Putsch instigator, and the National Socialist German Worker’s Party founder, the Reich Chancellor of Germany, and its Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler could not have wished he rose to power at a better time. Always a great orator, Fuhrer was a skilful and opportunistic manipulator sensing the sentiments of people who dissatisfied with the way the First World War ended leaving the German Empire insulted and stripped of army, natural resources. The country was rendered poor, as France, the UK and other victors imposed heavy tribute, aka reparations, compounded by later inflation. Suffering from Nietzsche superhuman complex, Hitler got under the Germans’ skin so deep as to convince them that the ones guilty of national hardships were the Jews, and that there was no better way to do away with the accused than by physically eliminating them. Being receptive to the rhetoric of the ardent orator, the Germans accepted the rationale behind the massive killings of innocent people whose appearance was not in line with the anthropometric standards construed by Nazi ideological doctrine of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Speaking of the strategy of mass killings of both civilians and military captives, it was not new, with ancient Macedonians or Romans applying it to suppress local resistance on annexed territories. Even Soviet and Japanese crimes combined pale in comparison with what was under way in Germany and other occupied regions. However, it is not that Japan did not have such facilities for captives. Even the USSR had these. It was German engineers who had arrived to the Soviet Union before the war to share horrific experience. Back in 1945, the allies might have been too busy fighting the Nazi Germany to notice an obvious human right abuser before their face. The collapse of the USSR as any multiethnic oppressive empire is starting to shed light on its mysteries once kept tight behind seven seals.
Had Hitler conducted a liberating crusade against the red pest, aka Communism, without resorting to Auschwitz-like camps, he would have won the war especially in much hated Soviet regions. Launching such facilities was the beginning of the end for Germany. Since he acted like a butcher, out-Heroding Herod in terms of brutality, it only re-aggravated the situation since people resented and offered greater resistance seeing their families and compatriots disappearing inside the smoking furnaces of detention camps. They built camps to crush the spirit of other belligerents, take an economic advantage of free manual labor and exterminate the local elites or the ethnically undesirable, such as the Jews, the Romani People and other proclaimed marginal nationalities. For want of ammunition or due to its quick depletion, the Germans used such camps to mortify people via gas or electricity, which proved more cost-effective, than executions by firing squads did.
Auschwitz was one of those camps built on a hostile territory, to be more precisely, in Poland. The biggest of camp network, it operated since 1940 to 1945, comprising at least three facilities destined for the elimination of the Jews, the Romani People, the Poles, and the Soviet peoples. This facility was meant for not only the prisoners of war, but also civilians regarded as being unnecessary. Auschwitz was one of those camps that gave “the solution to the Jewish question”. The Gestapo, or the secret police, sent thousands of people identified as renegades, political criminals, and those who had attempted to escape or refused to betray their motherland. It is well documented that, once conquered, the territory would become German subject where the Nazis got their death factories working. Auschwitz was one of such facilities where human experiments aimed at improving troops’ stamina and battle performance, to modulate people genetically to produce the race of slaves or make German look more Aryan and manual labor in the shape of children and women’s exploitation for military equipment, ammunition production, were the case. Plenty of Auschwitz branch camps were erected in immediate proximity to mines, metallurgic factories, and plants, which is indicative of how strategically useful workforce was.
As far as other aspects of confinement are concerned, upon arriving to the facility, prisoners were subject to selection, with whoever was fit in medical terms registered. Administration officers stripped the delivered of their clothes and valuables, shaved them bold, and gave identification numbers by tattooing them on wrists or children’s hips. Of the arrived 60 to 80% were declared unfit, after which they were mainly gassed. Rash, spotted and typhoid fever were not uncommon since personal hygiene was not allowed to follow the way it should have been. Administration conducting penalty check-ups on a regular basis had prisoners knee-standing, squatting, or standing for a few hours, with their hands up in the air. Those kept in barrack were forced into sleeping on straw scattered on the concrete floor. It was already later that the Nazi introduced straw beddings. As many as 200 prisoners could be squeezed into rooms that could hardly accommodate 40 to 50 individuals. Captives could use cold water only for a few minutes per day while washing was something out of the ordinary. Prisoners were to work without a breach of continuity for a scanty portion of meal, which could not but add to overall mortality rates critically. Whether exhausted or killed, those unable to return to the barracks under their own power were either dragged along gravel roads or wheeled in a barrow, a brass band composed of their inmates playing nearby, which show how cynical and soulless the occupation authorities were. “Arbeit Macht Frei”, a slogan on the entrance to the camp, personifies the cynicism of administration, with which they treated the detained since whoever crossed the threshold of the facility never came back except for a number of prisoners released in 1945. This so-called work did not make them free. Instead, they were as good as dead while there, as they were to work under inhumane conditions until complete physical exhaustion or eventual demise. Rudolf Hoss, the camp commander, was used to joking that the only way for the detained to free themselves was through crematorium smoke pipe. He himself ended up being hanged in Auschwitz in 1947 following the trial.
Those accused of crimes were put in crammed cells with little-to-no access for air in numbers prior to being sentenced to death. Once they were, firing squads would strip them naked and escort to “the wall of death”. Crimes, such as picking up or plucking a vegetable or a ripe fruit by working on fields or in gardens, easing nature, or doing work too slowly were punishable. Vertical standing punishment cells that forced prisoners to squeeze into ones and spend the entire time standing almost always led them to die a suffering death from famine, dehydration, or physical exhaustion. Starting with 1941, the Germans initiated a mass gas mortification in hermetically sealed chambers, with gas injected through pipelines attached along cell walls. The Germans retooled some baths to mislead prisoners and lure inside. Once there, they had gas oozing through shower outlet or faucet-imitators kill them rapidly. As distinct from Polish, Soviet, and Romani children, the better part of their Jewish peers were killed in such chambers upon arrival.
With traditional German accuracy, they would pull teeth, if golden, jewelry, cut hair, and sometimes skin humans alive to produce gloves for top-ranking officers. For reasons now unknown, the Nazi went as far as to store the means of personal hygiene, artificial limbs, crutches, the articles of tableware, suitcases and other items. Everything was pressed into service, so to speak, for recycling or second-hand use. Gas extermination required the subsequent disposal of the killed. “Sonderkommando”, groups of Jewish prisoners were assigned the duty of burning corpses usually piled on each other in furnaces after they were looted. As horrific as it may sound, even gassing prisoners was profitable, as companies supplying Auschwitz and other similar facilities, were making money on selling such. Some firms capitalized on the never-ceasing death conveyors by supplying and installing furnaces and similar equipment. At a time when releasing prisoners was only a matter of time, camp authorities adopted the “every man for himself” strategy and tried to seek safety in flight. To conceal the traces of crime, they blasted the electrical conveyor used for mortifying people by means of electrical current. One of principal tools of destruction was crematoria where people were burnt alive or after preliminary killing. They never managed to wipe out the majority of traces, as people to survive against the odds were the walking proofs of beastly offenses against the humanity. An estimated 1.4 to 4 million prisoners are thought to have been exterminated therein.
Human experiment are, by far, the most atrocious page of the history of detention camps. To dispose of the unnecessary nationalities, Nazi doctors conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women. Who was one of the most notorious and sadistic doctor was Joseph Mengele who was known for experimenting on dwarfs, physically handicapped and twin children. These were mainly anthropological and genetic trials. Fatal injections claimed the lives of thousands of prisoners, including children. He carried out comparative postmortem dissections of siblings, sometimes causing the surviving child to be killed. On some occasions, such children were dissected alive. He had no scruple about castrating men and even little boys. Some children had their body parts amputated while some were surgically stitched together. Some speculations have it that women might have been impregnated with the seeds of animals possibly so that they will produce hardworking species of slaves. According to publicly televised evidence, what the doctor also did was test new medicines on prisoners, practice skin transplantation, and rub toxic substances into their epithelium possibly to elaborate new medication or the ways of rejuvenating the skin and body of the Third Reich top echelon officials. Apart from rubbing chemicals into skin, Mengele would experiment on changing the eye color by injecting toxic substances into children’s eyes. Children experiments might be more likely than not attributable to Hitler’s obsession with race purity and perfection. Whether it is true or not, Mengele was the one who often brought children to gas chambers after plying with sweets.
The scope of extermination was terrific, which later came to be exposed during the Nurnberg trial when holocaust charges were pressed against those detained while trying to escape across the border to Argentine, Brazil, and some banana republics controlled by Latino American dictators. Hermann Goring was one the caught. Much as he tried to build a strong defense, trying to counter the accusations, no arguments could refute the visual representation of Auschwitz crimes. Even though some Nazi top criminals committed suicides by biting through the ampules of cyanide hidden in teeth, some managed to evaporate. When the end of the regime was imminent, Joseph Mengele had a narrow escape to one of South American countries never to be discovered, much less brought to justice. As the new war was about to begin, as guessed by many, now against the nuclear Soviet Union, the USA gladly accepted some of Nazi Germany criminals, that is, high ranking intelligence experts who had excellent knowledge of the Soviet military machine. Of course, now that the regime is long gone, the world community will not let something like this ever happen in the future. However, some individuals are trying to resurrect Nazism in Germany and other countries.