Atrocities of the Holocaust
During WWII, Hitler convinced the majority of the German people that the Jews were responsible for Germany's defeat in WWI. Since the German people wanted the Jewish population exterminated, they discriminated against them. First, the Jews lost some of their rights, then they were deported, and finally, the dreaded concentration camps were built where Jews were taken and forced to do manual labor and where most eventually died. Near the end of the war, the Allies started to liberate those in these camps. What they found was gruesome and disgusting: desolate living quarters that were unfit for human dwelling, gas chambers and ovens used to execute the Jewish prisoners, and mass graves filled with the bodies of men, women, children, and the elderly alike.
"Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the highly rationalized gas chamber/crematorium system of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945. The names of Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek and Majdanek are indelibly stamped on history. Following the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, January 20, 1942, the "Final Solution" was an official policy and a major obsession of the Nazi regime. It was at that point that camps were constructed for the express purpose of rational mass extermination, principally of Jews, but of other groups as well."
[http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holocamp.html]
A First-Hand Account
"Eta, I know its bad now, but even with all the restrictions, it's better in Lithuania than in Poland with Gestapo,' Izzy said. ' At least here, our lives are safe. Nobody is going to kill us or put us in jail unless we become enemies of the Communists. We just have to get used to a different culture. Ours has been destroyed."
[Izzy's Fire, Chapter 3, p. 38]
[http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holocamp.html]
A First-Hand Account
"Eta, I know its bad now, but even with all the restrictions, it's better in Lithuania than in Poland with Gestapo,' Izzy said. ' At least here, our lives are safe. Nobody is going to kill us or put us in jail unless we become enemies of the Communists. We just have to get used to a different culture. Ours has been destroyed."
[Izzy's Fire, Chapter 3, p. 38]
Death train found by American troops
_Muenchen Dachau concentration camp prisoners found on a death train, April 29, 1945.
Film clip courtesy of Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive/United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum (ushmm.org) (NO AUDIO)
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Film clip courtesy of Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive/United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum (ushmm.org) (NO AUDIO)
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT