Concentration Camps

How could the United States let millions of innocent people be starved, brutalized, and discriminated like they were in World War II? Easily, they did not want to get involved. The US stayed neutral in WWII until the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was bombed by the Japanese on December 07, 1941.

During World War II millions of Jews died in concentration camps. Concentration Camps are places where selected groups of people are restrained and are under cruel conditions, usually for political reasons and under inhumane conditions. They are also large detention centers created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war.

In Germany, the Nazis established concentration camps almost immediately after assuming power on January 30, 1933. The security police had the authority to arrest anyone and to commit that person to a camp for an unclear period. The political police, known as the Gestapo, imposed “protective custody” on a wide variety of political opponents: Communists, socialists, religious dissenters, Jehovah

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As the already starved and weakened prisoners fell from exhaustion, a group of SS guards bringing up the rear would kill them by a shot in the back of the head. Near the end of the war, these camps were used as holding areas for Jews from death camps who were moved westward to avoid detection. ” Early in 1945 the camp population exceeded 700,000. They weren’t really meant forThe function of the prisoners in the concentration camps was to work, but their lives were worthless to the guards, the camp commanders, and the ever-present SS. Those no longer able to work were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injections. Farben chemical works and the V-2 rocket factories. The people were also used for “medical experiments. More than 6 million persons, the majority of whom were Jews, perished in the Nazi camps.

During World War II the Nazis also established extermination centers to kill entire populations. With only a little food a day (usually a piece of bread and weak soup), many others died from malnutrition and starvation. In 1939 these camps held about 25,000 prisoners. During the 1930s six major camps were established: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and, for women, Ravensbrück. Early in 1942 the SS Central Office for Economy and Administration assumed operational control of the concentration camps, and inmates were exploited as forced laborers in industrial production.

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