Concentration Camps of the Holocaust

Concentration camps were a creation of Nazi Germany during World War II. Immediately after his rise to power, Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of these camps to decimate political prisoners, criminals, Communists, Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies and anybody engaging in anti-social behavior. They established around 20,000 such camps between 1933 and 1945 for forced-labor, transit of the prisoners and extermination or mass murder. The extermination carried out in six extermination camps located in Poland were witness to the most organized killing in human history. These were the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Lublin, Chelmno and Sobibor.

Concentration Camps

Enslavement, forced labor, torture and killing were routine stuff in a concentration camp. The Jews and the Soviet Union's prisoners of war mainly comprised the detainees in a concentration camp though certain captured soldiers of the Allied Powers or traitors of the Nazi German cause in the war. The prisoners were given stripped clothes to wear with colored badges identifying the type of prisoner. The Communists and political prisoners were assigned red badges, green badges were for the petty criminals, black for gypsies and anti-social elements, yellow for the Jews, pink for homosexuals and purple badges for Jehovah's Witnesses. People died in the camps through mental or physical torture, hunger, starvation or execution.

Prisoners were transported to and fro, in extremely pathetic conditions by rail freight coaches. They were dumped in these coaches like piles of garbage and often went without food or water for days. The heat and the cold weather tortured the inmates to their last breath. The Jews were established as traitors and a 'filthy' race and had to be eliminated, according to the Nazi doctrine. In late 1941, the method of collective shooting was found to be inefficient and Nazis decided to build camps for systematic elimination of the Jews, in camps specially designed for murder. Accordingly, gas chambers were made and a huge populace was 'stuffed' into these chambers and were poisoned by chemicals obtained from the German chemical company, IG Farben. Some prisoners were subject to a number of medical experiments and warfare tests. For instance, few victims were subjected to harsh environment in order to test the conditions for aircraft pilots like safe ejection or effects of gravity at heights, while some were administered lethal drugs to test biological weapons.

The Life

Carbon monoxide almost instantly killed the inmates but a new drug Zyklon B used in these chambers gave an illusion that they were simply being deloused. Some of the inmates were used to assist the in-charge officers to carry out the exterminations. This group of inmates referred to as the 'Special Detachment Squad', reassured the victims that things were all right and it was in their interest to cooperate. In an almost silly desperation, Jewish women used to cover their infants beneath their clothes fearing that the 'disinfectant' would harm the babies. It was a tale of horror as everybody consented to their own deaths. Some screamed in panic on approaching the undressing area, while others revealed the names and addresses of their acquaintances who were still in hiding and still others simply joked their way to execution. The most violent reactors were taken aside and shot dead.

The doors were closed, once all the victims were inside and powdered Zyklon B was shaken and pumped through special inlets in the roof. The camp's commanding officers were asked to supervise the entire event; seeing the victims in, checking through special holes whether they die or not and supervising the cremation of the bodies in huge furnaces. Some of these commanding officers went insane after overseeing such cold-blooded acts. Auschwitz concentration camp, once had a routine inspection by the supreme commanders of the Nazi party. Even these people, who advocated the killings and glorified them in their speeches, felt that the process was very gruesome. Even then, such exterminations continued unhindered, until finally the Nazi regime collapsed, bringing the war to an end.

Holocaust is one of the darkest chapters in the history of civilization. These crimes inflicted on a certain section of population, had far reaching effects on future events.