THE HOLOCAUST
To many people, the Holocaust was a horrible event. However, the only people who can truly fathom such ghastly events were the people who went through it. It’s people like such as the Jewish, Soviet POW’s, Non-Jewish, Gypsies, Disabled, Homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses who can truly understand what happened in the time period of The Holocaust. The Nazis set up many death and concentration camps during The Holocaust. The Auschwitz Camp was ordered to rule and create on April 27, 1940 by Heinrich Himmler. Soon enough, Auschwitz had become three large camps and 45 sub-camps. This camp quickly became the largest Nazi death camp. Auschwitz I was the original camp. It was also known as the main camp. It housed the prisoners and the Nazi staff. The entrance had a sign that said “Arbei Macht Fre” or “Work Makes One Free”. Some features were Block 11 (the severe torture place) and the black wall where people faced their deaths. Auschwitz II or better known as “Birkenau” was completed in 1942. Birkenau was about 1.9 miles away from Auschwitz I. people called it the “main or real killing center”. It had the selections of who was going to die by gas chambers. Auschwitz III or “Buna-Monowitz” was built for “housing” forced labor. They worked for the Buna synthetic rubber factory. The other 45 sub-camps did the same thing.
The Majdanek Death Camp was built in October 1941. Nazis brought in Polish Jews from the labor camp on lipowa Street to start building the camp. They were taken back to Lipowa Street every night and brouth back to work in the morning. Later they brought in 2,000 Soviet prisoners to build Majdank. The prisoners were forced to live and work the camp outside without any water or plumbing.
The Sobibor Death Camp was the second of third to be established. It was located in the Lublin District of Eastern Poland. In April 1942, gas chambers were tested on 250 Jews who were from the Krychow labor camp. The Jews were tricked into believing that they were going to take “showers” which were really gas chambers disguised as showers. In the chamber, there were two doors. The first door leads Jews in and the other where the Jews would be dragged out, dead. The Jewish workers were forced to be the ones to pick up the bodies from the chamber and dump them into pits. In late 1942, Nazis ordered the Jews to start burning the dead corpses. 250,000 people died at Sobibor.
In late afternoon a total of around 8,000 to 10,000 Jews were killed in Trawniki. To cover up the horrid killings, the Nazis brought about 120 Jews from the Milejow camp to “cremate” them. The “cremations” took three weeks. Once they were finished, they were also shot and “cremated”. On October 14, 1943, after the uprising at Sobibor, Heinrich Himmler ordered killing the remaining Jews at General Government. On November 3, 1943, 43,000 Jews were killed at General Government. The murders started and finished in one day. After being forced to undress, the groups of Jews were told to lie down, and then they were shot at. The following groups were to do the same. However, this time, they were told to lay on the dead body who was shot in the group before them.
The Nazis invented a type of march called a death march. In the death marches prisoners were taken from their camps and were forced to march hundreds of miles. They had extremely little food and shelter. If you were to get behind the others or drag you would get shot.
Now I am going to explain to you what the mass killings of Babi Yar was. At Kiev, Nazis murdered around 100,000 at the ravine, Babi Yar. The mass murdred began around September 29-30. The killings did not end for months. Before this happened, there was a German takeover there. The germans attacked the Soviet Union in late June 1941. On September 19, after traveling for months the Germans reached Kiev. On September 24, a bomb exploded around four P.M. at German Headquarters. Before they could find out who maliciously destroyed
