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Living in concentration camps
The concentration camps
Holocaust internment camps
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Labor was a major part in the Nazi belief, and the work was harsh and cruel. Homosexuals were arrested and sent to camps, which in those camps were put to intense work. The ways homosexuals were put to work are carrying clay from clay pits, which had a life-changing effect for some. Carrying clay on the backs of prisoners lead to back problems, severe injuries, and even death for some. Death marches also occurred, which also caused many deaths and issues. There was a very high death toll in Nazi work camps. About 2,000 to 5,000 homosexual men died in work camps. In fact, the Nazis didn’t actually want homosexuals to die off. The whole mindset of the Nazis was that they wanted to work them because they were believed to be valuable Aryan people.
Himmler thought homosexuals, just like Jews, were weak, decadent and unpatriotic. And he strongly believed their existence threatened the German folk community, mainly because they did not procreate, Himmler was in fact the one who had all German males convicted of homosexual crimes transferred from prison straight into concentration camps. That is when the badges came to action, Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David and homosexuals, rapists, etc were forced to wear the Pink Triangle. From 1933-1944 between 50,000 and 63,000 men were convicted on charges of homosexuality alone. By 1935 every gay German knew that if he was caught, he risked being shipped to a concentration camp. Now, gays were not as easily identified as Jews and gypsies, Many survived the Third Reich undetected.
Then those who were too young or too old to work were sent to the showers. Once the showers were tightly packed, the Nazi’s would turn on the water and drop in canisters of chemicals that would react with the water and release a deadly gas. Within minutes, everyone in the shower would be dead. The bodies would be hauled out and burned. Those who were not selected to die didn’t fair much better.
This genocide was mainly against the Jewish people. However Hitler also targeted homosexuals, and members of many other ethnical groups to be sent to concentration death camps. All of these actions are being carried out under the control of Adolf Hitler.
According to A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust, the Roma (Gypsies) and African-Germans were attacked because of their ethnicity. These two groups fell into the category of being “asocial” and too undesirable. The gypsies had pre-existing prejudices against them before Hitler’s rise which he just expanded on by creating laws against them. They had their civil rights taken away. Many were deported or sent to forced labor camps, and murdered. In 1933, the "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," was put into effect which gave doctors and physicians the ability to take away the choice and ability for the Roma and others to reproduce. The Romani and Negroes were considered minorities with “alien blood” so they were no longer allowed to marry those of the Aryan race (“Sinti and Roma”). The Gypsies and African-Germans foreign appearance, and customs were viewed as a threat to the “superior” race. They were under extreme scrutiny and judgment by researchers and scientists. They were measured, tested and became part of experiments to p...
Male homosexuality was illegal under Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code; however the Nazis wanted to rid society of homosexuality. Prior to 1933 this code was largely ignored throughout Germany, because the act of homosexuality was difficult to prove. On June 28th, 1933, a guy violated the code. When the Nazi party came into power, they decided to keep and update the code. According to the updated code, homosexual men could be punished in prison for up to ten years. A man could be arrested for lewd behavior towards another male or animals. This was punishable by imprisonment and loss of all civil rights.
The Nazi Political Movement in Germany, in the 1930s and 1940s, involved one of the most virulent anti-homosexual campaigns in world history. In the 1950s and 1960s, another less well known anti-homosexual campaign, known as the Lavender Scare, raged in Washington, DC. Though, the Nazi movement is much more well known, both movements used similar tactics and involved comparable people.
Thousands upon thousands of innocent Jews, men, women, and children tortured; over one million people brutally murdered; families ripped apart from the seams, all within Auschwitz, a 40 square kilometer sized concentration camp run by Nazi Germany. Auschwitz is one of the most notorious concentration camps during WWII, where Jews were tortured and killed. Auschwitz was the most extreme concentration camp during World War Two because innumerable amounts of inhumane acts were performed there, over one million people were inexorably massacred, and it was the largest concentration camp of over two thousand across Europe.
The Third Reich sought the removal of the Jews from Germany and eventually from the world. This removal came in two forms, first through emigration, then through extermination. In David Engel’s The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews, he rationalizes that the annihilation of the Jews by the Germans was a result of how Jews were viewed by the leaders of the Third Reich-- as pathogens that threatened to destroy all humanity. By eliminating the existence of the Jews, the Third Reich believed that it would save the entire world from mortal danger. Through documents such as Franzi Epsteins’s, “Inside Auschwitz-A Memoir,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, one is able to see the struggle of the Jews from a first-hand account. Also, through Rudolf Hoess’s “Commandant of Auschwitz,” one is able to see the perspective of a commandant in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz: A History, Sybille Steinbacher effectively describes the concentration camp of Auschwitz, while Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz reflects on Rudolf Hoess’s power and control in Auschwitz as commandant. Through these four texts, one is able to see the effects that the Third Reich’s Final Solution had on the Jews and the commandants.
Genocide is the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group (Merriam-Webster). This is what Hitler did to the six million Jews during the Holocaust, which led to many Jews fighting back. This paper will talk about how the Holocaust victims fought back against Hitler and his army. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews and non-Jews who were viewed as unneeded within the world by Adolf Hitler. Hitler became leader of Germany and tortured and killed many people. With Nazi Germany killing and torturing millions of Jews and non-Jews, victims decided to fight back with armed and spiritual resistance.
The Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed care and were considered an insult to their idea of a perfect race. About 375,000 people were sterilized against their will due to their disabilities. “In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of “mercy death” code-named “Operation T4,” in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program” (People with Disabilities). In total, a staggering amount of 250,000 disabled people died during the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of people died for their uncontrollable
Although Elie Wiesel gives you a detailed account of how the Nazis would treat them; how it slowly started to dehumanize them. For example the Nazis took away their names. “We were told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (Wiesel 42) Not to mention the Nazis put so much fear into the Jews that they would commit cruel acts that they never imagined they could do. The selection process was another such scarring event that Nazis inflicted on the Jews to put much fear in them. It caused them to do whatever it took to survive. The selection process is when the prisoners would get completely naked and go in front of the SS doctors for examination, the advice given to the Jews is run in front of the doctors, not to walk. Then there were also random beatings for example: “One day when Idek was venting his fury, I happened to cross his path. He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood. As I bit my lips in order not to howl with pain, he must have mistaken my silence for defiance and so he continued to hit me harder and harder. Abruptly, he calmed down and sent me back to work as if nothing had happened. As if we had taken part in a game in which both roles were of equal importance.” (Wiesel 53) Among all the disturbing things Nazis did, the fact that they would make Jews look in the face of a hanging corpse is something I do not think they will ever forget. “Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…
The War selected men and women from across the country with different backgrounds and placed them in sexually segregated camps. “The war severely disrupted traditional patterns of gender relations and sexuality, and temporarily created a new erotic situation conducive to homosexual expression” (D’Emilio pg. 106). At the time of capitalism and war, young men and women whose sexual identities had not been formed where placed in single sex training facilities where they would only interact with their own sex. This made the transition for most soldiers difficult and allowed for some already lesbian or gay individuals to interact and unify because of the confines of the war. The temporary freedom of sexuality allowed for men and women to challenge some of their heterosexual upbringings. In addition to gay identities resulting from the restrictions of war communities witnessed a large increase in bars and other meeting places for gays to meet and unify post World War
6,000 Jehovah witnesses, over 15,000 homosexuals, 400 “colored” children, and over 5,000,000 Jews were killed. Hitler’s anti-Semitism grew out of anger because the Germans lost the war. He blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war. Hitler also used the Jews as an excuse for all the problems that Germany was facing. To get the Jews to get deported, Hitler and his Nazis made the Jews think that they were moving to a better, happier place, when in reality, they were moving to concentration camps, or death camps.
With Hitler thinking he could rule mankind he not only put Jews through what they went through but he also included other races he was also disgusted with homosexuals and hated them so he always put homosexuals through the stages of the Pick up, to the ghettos and to the concentration camps. Hitler and other high class men had many followers because Hitler was so passionate about what he said to the public and he was a strong smart man with a plan so Germans and his army felt uplifted of his plans and what he said. Hitler was so persuasive he changed the public’s opinion on the Jews and other people so many people joined the Nazis and followed Hitler in his reign of terror.
The treatment of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazi’s can be described as actions that could only be done by a totalitarian state. Hitler believed in eugenics, the idea of improving a race by selective breeding. Nazi ideology of the Jewish race was severe anti-Semitism and pure hatred. The Nazi policy towards the Jews has been said to be the most brutal and horrific example of anti-Semitism in history.