The Holocaust as a Political Catalyst
The Nazi's concentration camps were the world's most effective killing machines ever. Here, Jews were put to horrible, unimaginable deaths as the Nazis attempted their ultimate goal of genocide. It all started with the growing anti-Semitic feeling spreading through Nazi Germany that would humiliate all those opposed by the fuhrer. Its victims had nothing more to expect than being sent off to concentration camps to die and be incinerated. The Jews were not the only victims of this war machine. There was a long list of political prisoners as well as the Jews that were victimized. Although insane, and inhumanly cruel, Adolph Hitler's war machine was both the rise and downfall to his reign. The use of these camps struck fear in all of his opposition. The concentration camps were the most top secret operation of the Nazi war machine. They worked quicker and more effectively than any bomb raid may have caused. "A man would step off a train in the morning, and in the evening, his cor!pse was burned and his clothes were packed away for shipment to Germany (Hildberg 211)." The most unique concept about the camps is that no other destruction process had been run on such an assembly line fashion. The camps were located in six main places:
If looked at on the surface, the camps are thought to all to be only a symbol of the Anti-Semitic sentiment across Germany. The SA and SS would place stickers on Jewish owned stores which were a sign for the German people to therefore boycott the store. The Nazi government decided to wipe out the country of Jews by making life completely unbearable for them. Once they reached their destination, the President of Cuba would not honor their visas, and made them return to Germany. Known to many is the fact that prisoners believed they were being put into a shower room, when, unbeknownst to them, they were being put to death by gas. The bodies were found in tower-like heaps, some in sitting positions, children or older people at the bottom. If they were to notify any other prisoners of what the so called shower rooms had in store for them, that prisoner, and all of those notified, were immediately executed. It was sparked by the murder of a German official in France by a Jewish teenager. " The survivors of the Holocaust could never go back and make life as it used to be. Some had foam on the lips, others bled t!hrough the nose. One captive recalls that, "The gas was now allowed to escape and after about half an hour, the door was opened. "The next morning, thirty thousand German Jewish men were arrested for the 'crime' of being Jewish and were sent to concentration camps (Bacharach 24). Then, on the night of November 9, 1938, Anti-Jewish violence broke out. " The camps could not keep up with all of the prisoners, so the SA and SS made their own prisons. The Jews also had big red "J"s stamped on their cards, and their middle names were changed.
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