Death In Elie Wiesel's Night

I am analyzing a picture of a mass shooting at some concentration camp. A deep trench full of dead bodies with weeping Jews kneeled down yelling while being shot in the back of the head to fall down to rest with their dead brethren . The solders look fearless while firing into the crowd, holding there gun high with no second thoughts. The dead bodies of Jews are effortlessly slumped in the mud-infested trench with nothing but the jumpsuit-like clothes gifted to them at the concentration camp and the Star of David to stay with them at an everlasting pit of death.

Among 1.5 million Jews were shot to death in the most brutal way by different Nazi units. The so-called Einsatzgruppen, which operated behind the front against the Soviet Union, were

responsible for many of these mass murders. However, other units as well, from the SS, the Waffen-SS, the ordinary police, and the army, also shot many Jews. Apart from German units, many locals from the occupied eastern territories took part on their own initiative.
“..Germans routinely had thrown Jewish children off balconies during the Holocaust.” - Anita Epstein.

The cruelness of the Germans was unbearable that is for sure but can you really blame them. Some of the Germans were just following orders. When you join the military, the only thing you can do is follow orders. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, some of the Germans he met in his time living through the holocaust in various concentration camps, he bluntly describes that they are made to have to be there. Those Germans are also a lot nicer than the others giving him extra rations of bread. Like his block leader at Auschwitz.

Soot and ashes soil the mud where the Jews are kneeling down to weep at their dead brethren. Still to this day the ash remains of the Jews burned at Auschwitz lays a few feet under the ground buried and when the ground ices over and thaws, it pushes the ashes to the surface as if it wants you to be a witness to uncover the horrors that happened there. The smell of them gassing the Jews had to be horrid, not just the soldiers had to deal with the smell, the Jews did as well, but the Jews had no idea what the smell was because they were unaware of what happened to the others that did not pass through the selection. The Jews were completely in the dark about what happened if you did not pass the

selection.
The Jews were given jumpsuit like clothes after their original clothing, they were wearing when they got to the camp, got taken away. The jumpsuit-like clothing they were given had numbers on them. The numbers the Jews were given, were to help the soldiers identify and differentiate between the Jews. Mainly because, I think, they didn’t want to remember names and faces, just a number on a jumpsuit.
The Germans had more methods for the mass killing of the Jews than just the notorious method of gassing. They died from a lot more than gassing, that is just the most well-known. Three ways of murder are less well-known, but equally important: forced labor in working camps, hunger, and disease. With terrible result the Nazis introduced the concept of ‘working to death’ (Vernichtung durch Arbeit), where Jews and other prisoners worked themselves to death for the German war machine. Thousands of others died of hunger in the concentration camps or in the Jewish ghettos.
In addition to that, with all the talk about gassing the Jews, it was not just the Jews Adolf Hitler was concerned with. He also targeted a few other races, but with Jews being the biggest target. A total of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others (primarily gypsies) fell victim to the most radical form of the Nazis race policy, the Final Solution. The majority of the 6 million Jews who were killed between 1941 and 1945 were of Polish and Russian origin. Approximately 2.7 million (90%) of the Polish Jews, and 2.1 million Russian Jews fell victim to the Nazi persecution. In the late summer of 1944 around 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau). A total of 550,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
No matter what you say about Hitler, the one thing that no one can deny is how great of a leader he was. We can also point out that he was elected as dictator or president. As he was fighting through this was against the Jews he was very smart to try and cover up what is whole operation was. The only thing that he did not plan on was testimonials of the Jews that survived the camps. I found a very interesting article talking about how he tried to keep everything a secret for the Fatherland:
“The Holocaust was a state secret in Nazi Germany. The Germans wrote down as little as possible. Most of the killing orders were verbal, particularly at the highest levels. Hitler's order to kill Jews was issued only on a need-to-know basis. The Nazi leaders generally avoided detailed planning of killing operations, preferring to proceed in a systematic but often improvised manner. The Germans destroyed most documentation that did exist before the end of the war. The documents that survived and related directly to the killing program were virtually all classified and stamped “Geheime Reichssache” (Top Secret), requiring special handling and destruction to prevent capture by the enemy. Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police, said in a secret speech to SS generals in Posen in 1943 that the mass murder of the European Jews was a secret, never to be recorded.

To hide the killing operation as much as possible from the uninitiated, Hitler ordered that the killings not be spoken of directly in German documentation or in public statements. Instead, the Germans used codenames and neutral-sounding terms for the killing process. In Nazi parlance, for example, “action” (Aktion) referred to a violent operation against Jewish (or other) civilians by German security forces; “resettlement to the East” (Umsiedlung nach dem Osten) referred to the forced deportation of Jewish civilians to killing centers in German-occupied Poland; and “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) meant killing.”
As you can see, this is a very gruesome picture and has a lot of symbolism. It shows through some of the cruel things the Germans did to the Jews and I believe that more people should read up and get taught some of this history. Why it may be interesting it is very disturbing and more people should be aware. If you had one thing you could say to Adolf Hitler, what would it be?