Gas Chambers You think you are just going to go take a shower before you go to the special camp for all the Jews. You take your clothes and shoes off in this sort of locker room and then go to this really big shower room with a door. You think, “Why is there a door and why are people starting to freak out about something called a gas chamber? Why are there so many people in this room? Do they think we can really all take a shower like this?” Then you hear the door close and hear a lock latch. That is when you start getting scared and before you know it you can barely breath. You are going to die in a Nazi gas chamber. During the Holocaust the Nazis created gas chambers to kill Jews and other people groups more effectively. Gas chambers were …show more content…
simple, an easy way to kill Jews, and very few lived to tell about them. Constructing the gas chambers was a whole new monsters for the Jews to fear. The construction of 4 large gas chambers and crematoria began in Birkenau in 1942. They went into operation between March 22 and June 25-26, 1943. The gas chambers at crematoria II and III, like the undressing rooms, were located underground, while those at crematoria IV and V stood at ground level. About 2 thousand people at a time could be put to death in each of them. According to calculations made by the Zentralbauleitung on June 28, 1943, the crematoria could burn 4,416 corpses per day—1,440 each in crematoria II and III, and 768 each in crematoria IV and V. This meant that the crematoria could burn over 1.6 million corpses per year. Prisoners assigned to do the burning stated that the daily capacity of the four crematoria in Birkenau was higher—about 8 thousand corpses (Gas Chambers). Concentration camps like Stutthof, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrueck, although not designed specifically as killing centers, also had gas chambers. The gas chambers were relatively small, constructed to kill those prisoners the Nazis deemed "unfit" to work. Most of these camps used Zyklon B as the killing agent in their gas chambers (Museum). Being inside the gas chamber was an unexplainable experience that only the Nazi workers could live to tell about. In principle, all Jews classified because of their age or physical condition as unfit for labor were subject to immediate extermination directly after their arrival in the camp, without being registered or assigned a number.
Upon arrival, the people were told of the baths and disinfection that awaited them and ordered them to undress in two huts reserved for this purpose, then they were led into the farmhouse. Individuals suspecting a trick, whose behavior might evoke panic, were discreetly led behind the building and shot in the back of the head with low-caliber weapons. Death of the people inside the gas chamber occurred after a few minutes as a result of internal suffocation caused by the prussic acid halting the exchange of oxygen between the blood and tissues. Those standing near the shafts died almost instantly, those who shouted, the old, the sick and children also died a quicker death. In order to ensure that no one remained alive, the gas chamber was not opened until half an hour had elapsed. In periods when the pressure of incoming transports was particularly intense, the gassing time was shortened to ten minutes. Most of the corpses were found near the door through which the victims had tried to escape from the spreading gas. The corpses, which covered the entire floor of the gas chamber, had their knees half bent, and were often cloven together. The bodies were smeared with excrement, vomit and blood. The skin assumed a pink hue ( Aushwitz Concentration Camp- The Gas Chambers & Crematoria). After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill
on uneven ground and in marshes. (The Extermination Procedure in the Gas Chambers)A Sondermommadno prisoners were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust (Sonderkommando). There are not many personal stories of the gas chambers because all who went in never came out. But there are the stories of the workers and here is one. This gas chamber Sonderkommando said this when the doors opened to the chamber, “They fell out. People fell out like blocks of stone, like rocks falling out of a truck. But near the Zyklon B gas, there was a void. There was no one where the gas crystals went in – An empty space. Probably the victims realized that the gas worked strongest there. The people were battered – they struggled and fought in the darkness. They were covered in excrement, in blood, from ears and noses. One also sometimes saw that the people lying on the ground, because of the pressure of the others, were unrecognizable. Children had their skulls crushed. It was awful, Vomit, Blood – from ears and noses, probably even menstrual fluid. I am sure of it. You see, once the gas was poured in, it worked like this: it rose from the ground upwards. And in the terrible struggle that followed – because it was a struggle – the lights were switched off in the gas chambers. It was dark, no one could see, so the strongest people tried to climb higher. Because they probably realized that the higher they got, the more air there was. They could breathe better. That caused the struggle. Secondly, most people tried to push their way to the door. It was psychological – they knew where the door was, maybe they could force their way out. It was instinctive, a death struggle. Which is why children and weaker people, and the aged, always wound up at the bottom. The strongest were on top. Because in the death struggle, a father didn’t realize his son lay beneath him” (Muller) The Nazi gas chambers were some of the most brutal ways to die during the Holocaust. During the Holocaust the Nazis created gas chambers to kill Jews and other people groups more effectively. Gas chambers were simple, an easy way to kill Jews, and very few lived to tell about them. Flip Muller was one man to tell about it and to hear what that sounded like makes me want to throw up. Learning about the gas chambers has helped me to learn more about the Holocaust and what it was like. By learning about it now we can help prevent something as bad as that happening in the future. Gas chambers shouldn’t have been a way to kill and can’t be a way to kill today. Our world needs to learn and find peace. The Holocaust is a learning experience.
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.
Jewish citizens and families are being sent to these camps, held there forced to do work. They are put in chambers where multiple people, large groups and families are gassed with Zyklon B, and are left for dead. Nazis are sent to kidnap Jewish people right out of their houses to send them to these camps. Others were also just shot and killed on the spot. The jewish people tried to resist, but it is difficult with lack of weapons and resources. Hitler was trying to gain power and land from this genocide. He thought that if he took over the world he could be the most powerful person. He also wanted revenge, he was angry about the outcome of WWI and this sparked his interest to get back at his
Nearly all of the deportees who were sent to the centers were instantaneously guided to the gas chambers to die, except for a select few who were chosen to be sonderkommandos. Over two million Jews were murdered inside killing centers either by smothering with poison gas or by shooting with guns (Killing Centers ). The gas-van was a product of the Third Reich; it consisted of a van with a gas-tight cabin attached on its understructure used to kill victims by the motor-exhausts led into that cabin (The Development of the Gas-Van in the Murdering of the Jews). The Germans executed over 150,000 people at Chelmno between December 1941 and March 1943 and then again in June and July 1944 by means of gassing vans (Killing Centers ). The Germans also found the use of gas chambers to be more effective and usually killed thousands of people daily. Within minutes of being inside a gas chamber, pris...
While being forced to live in Auschwitz they endured many cruel and harsh punishments. The main form of punishment was the gas chambers. These chambers were cells that were made underground and were able to be sealed. Zyklon-B was the poison used to gas and kill the Jewish people. “It takes about 10 minutes to kill 2,000 to 3,000 people in the gas chamber.” (Saldinger p.57) After gassing they would then be extracted from the chamber and taken to the crematorium where the bodies would be disposed of. Sometimes it wasn’t even the guards who would dispose of the bodies, most of the time it was the prisoners who were forced to extract their own people from the chambers. This was just one of the many forms of punishment; there were many more and some were just as bad.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, it talks about the holocaust and what it was like being in it. The Germans were trying to make the German race the supreme race. To do this they were going to kill off everyone that wasn’t a German. If you were Jewish or something other than German, you would have been sent to a concentration camp and segregated by men and women. If you weren’t strong enough you were sent to the crematory to be cremated. If you were strong enough you were sent to work at a labor camp. With all the warnings the Jewish people had numerous chances to run from the Germans, but most ignored the warnings.
During the holocaust 17, 500, 00 victims were killed or displaced by the Nazi from 1933-1945. On the 24th of July 1994 the Russians liberated Liu Bolin in eastern Poland; just outside of the city they find the concentration camp. The SS had tried to kill the entire inmate and destroy all trace of the extermination plant but a Polish resistance group seized the camp before could complete their work. The gas chambers disguised as bath and disinfection rooms were captured intact. Crematoria still strewn smoking human ashes were only slightly damaged. Close by they found cabbage fields strewn with human bone meal fertilizer. Auschwitz was less than a hundred and seventy miles away.
As common knowledge, people normally recognize the term “concentration camp” and immediately refer to the prison camps the Jews were sent to during the Holocaust. In Corrie Tenboom’s famous collective story of her imprisonment, The Hiding Place, she writes in visual description of exactly how the Jews were treated in these camps. Women were forced to stand naked in front of Nazi guards for not much reason at all and made them feel less than human and animalistic. The people were beaten and killed on a regular day basis. One of the worst parts of these camps were the barbaric gas chambers. Men, women, and children would be fooled and dragged into chambers in groups to stand and be slaughtered by the dozen. Concentration camps are what can be known as the cruelest and most barbaric part of World War II history.
Bodies were often thrown into huge ditches located east of the chambers. Containing nothing but filthy, scrawny, and hopeless bodies. Five thousand to seven thousand Jews arrived each day increases to about 12,000 a day, though thousands were dead on arrival. This camp was the the last camp whose sole purpose was “extermination”. It was only fifty miles from the large city of warsaw, which blows my mind that people will still fully confidently try to convince people that the camps never happened. It became known as Treblinka I when the death camp, Treblinka II, was built. The camp was laid out in an irregular rectangle, 400 m by 600 m, surrounded by barbed wire and anti- tank spanish hors...
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
In 1943 or as you may know it as The Holocaust, there were many different ways they executed the people at the Auschwitz camp, including hanging, shooting their heads or even letting them starve to death. But I'm not going to talk about them. This may tickle your fancy or wreck with your emotions after seeing the movie. I'm going to be talking about the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber is probably the worst place to be EVER, because you're going to be standing in a grey metal room ,butt naked surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of other people. Everyone is crammed inside the room as Cyclone B (a highly used deadly mixture) was sprayed into the room, causing you to either burn to death, or have to sit around dying slowly over an amount of days
The camp what actually used as like a prison before the 40’s (Carter, Joe). Because of its large size, it looked to be the perfect place to transform into a concentration camp. If the Nazis had not been able to make the area into what they wanted to, thousands upon thousands of lives would be saved. Taking that step off of the train had to be the hardest thing someone could do but there would be worst. People would be starving to death, or maybe they would catch a disease, or die like some who would just get shot by an SS officer just because they thought they should kill them or they just wanted to. Doctors could do what they wanted with anybody they wanted. Dr. Mengele was one of the most famous doctors that was at Auschwitz and during the Holocaust itself. He was able to pick the people he wanted when he wanted them. He did experiments on diseases and other tests (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine). He liked to do experiments on twins because he could easily see what changes it does to the one that he would test it compares to the healthy one. Such things like this add up into making Auschwitz how bad it
“Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body. “A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
The holocaust was a horrific period of time where unbelievable criminal acts were carried out against the Jews, Gypsies, and other racial gatherings. These defenseless individuals were sent from unsanitary ghettos to death camps, one being Auschwitz. The Auschwitz death camp comprised of three camps, all in which are placed in Poland. Numerous forms of extermination came about overtime to speed up the killing process. Life at the death camps was cut short for those who weren’t fit to work; such as the elderly, women, the mentally disabled, and young children. The others were put work while being starved to death. Experiments were held on dwarfs, twins, and other misfits were carried out by Josef Mengele. These inhuman acts against the Jews were all held in secret from society by the Nazis until liberation day.
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...