Liceo Bilingüe Centroamericano

World History

Research

World War ll:

1. Josef Mengele
2. Jewish Ghetto
3. Nazi Concentration camps

Ms. Andrea Mejia

Rina Nayeli López

11th Grade A

June 1st, 2020

Table of contents
Josef Mengele ................................................................................................................................1
Jewish Ghettos ..............................................................................................................................2
Types of ghettos ..........................................................................................................................2
Nazi concentration camps ..........................................................................................................4
Types: ...........................................................................................................................................4
Major Nazi concentration camps: ..............................................................................................4
References ......................................................................................................................................6
 Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911 in the city of Günzburg. During
his childhood, he was a wealthy child from a Catholic family. From a very young age,
he was famous for being cheerful, smart and very competitive, eager to excel. It was
impossible to believe that years later, he would join the Nazi party and be nicknamed
in Auschwitz as "the angel of death" for his cruelty.

Growing up, Mengele became a member of the Red Cross, able to overcome
various diseases and serious accidents, at the age of 20 he began to show interest
in medicine. However, it seemed that his intention was not so much to heal, but to
experiment. In fact, his studies focused on anthropology and paleontology to unlock
the secrets of human genetics, especially on the difference of ethnic groups
according to the shape of the jaw.

Once he received a degree and a doctorate in philosophy and later a medical

degree in Frankfurt. There he worked as an assistant to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, a
biologist and geneticist who directed the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial
Hygiene. In 1937, he joined the Nazi party and a year later in the SS. His
investigative passion makes him stop at Auschwitz where his experiments are
financed by the I.G laboratory. Farbenindustrie. Already in 1943, he managed to
access as an official doctor in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where his most
cruel and sadly famous experiments began. He aimed to validate Nazi racial theory
and create the perfect Aryan race.

During two years, he killed hundreds of people due to his experiments.

However, once the war ended in 1945, he fled the countryside to avoid purges for
his crimes and disappeared. It is unknown when exactly he died.

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 Jewish Ghettos
During World War II, Jews became the object of violence and humiliation at
the hands of German soldiers. Guided by a racist ideology, determined to establish
a new order in Europe, the Germans separated the Jews from the rest of the
population through ghettos. These were usually located in a poor urban district,
where Jews were forced to live behind fences, walls, or barbed wire.

The ghettos were created as a temporary measure as the Germans continued

to search for a solution to what they called the "Jewish problem". They did not care
about the well-being of the Jews locked in the ghettos, nor did they try to create an
alternative that would have meant a continuity of Jewish life. In fact, tens of
thousands of Jews died because of the harsh conditions prevailing in the ghettos,
although it is not clear that this was the intention of the Germans.

Poland's first ghetto was established in the city of Piotrkow Trybunalski on

October 8, 1939, just a month after the start of the war. The largest ghetto in Europe
was the Warsaw ghetto, established in November 1940. In other areas, the ghettos
were later and each one was fenced and guarded differently.

Types of ghettos
 Open ghettos: They had no walls or fences, and existed mostly in the early
stages of World War II in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet
Union.
 Closed ghettos: Most of the Nazi ghettos were of this type. They were located
mostly in occupied Poland. They were surrounded by brick walls, fences, or
barbed wire stretched between the posts. Jews were not allowed to live in any
other area under the threat of capital punishment. In the closed ghettos, living
conditions were the worst. The rooms were extremely crowded and lacking in
hygiene.
 The ghettos of destruction: They existed in the final stages of the Holocaust,
lasting between two and six weeks only, in the Soviet Union under German
occupation, especially in Hungary and occupied Poland. The Jewish

2
 population was imprisoned there only to be deported and sent to the death
camps.

Image. “The locations of the largest ghettos”. They were about 1,100 Jewish ghettos
established by the Nazis and their allies in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

As the Final Solution was implemented, the Germans began to eliminate the
ghettos. The first were liquidated in the spring of 1942, and the last Polish ghetto,
Lodz, in the summer of 1944. Most of the Jews were deported to death camps, where
they were killed. Only a small number were sent, towards the end of the war, to
concentration camps and forced labor camps.

3
 Nazi concentration camps
The Nazi concentration camps were a series of camps where all those
individuals considered enemies of the State were held. Among the people locked up
in these camps we can name Jews, Gypsies, Communists and homosexuals, people
of all ages, boys and girls, young people, adults, old men and women. There, these
individuals were subjected to all kinds of bad treatment, forced labor, scientific
experiments, and mass extermination.

Types:
 Transit Camps: were usually the last stop before deportations to a killing
center.
 Forced Labor Camps: Where works were carried out, under subhuman
conditions, every day of the week, except Sundays.
 Concentration Camps: Over time, the forced labor camps became
concentration camps, since they also carried out forced labor.
 Fields of Extermination: they were the fields of no return, fields of death.
 Prisoner-of-war camps: where prisoners captured by the Germans were held.

Major Nazi concentration camps:

Camp Location Type Time of use
Auschwitz Poland Extermination; April 1940 - January 1945
Forced-labor
Belzec Poland Extermination March 1942 - June 1943
Bergen-Belsen Germany Concentration April 1943 - April 1945
Buchenwald Germany Forced-labor July 1937 - April 1945
Chelmno Poland Extermination December 1944 - April 1943;
April 1944 - January 1945
Dachau Germany Forced-labor March 1933 - April 1945
Dora-Mittelbau Germany Forced-labor September 1943 - April 1945
Flossenburg Germany Forced-labor May 1938 - April 1945
Gross-Rossen Poland Forced-labor August 1940 - February 1945
Janowska Ukraine Extermination; September 1941 - November 1943
Forced-labor
Kaiserwald Latvia Forced-labor March 1943 - September 1944
Majdanek Poland Extermination July 1941 - July 1944
Mauthausen Austria Forced-labor August 1938 - May 1945
Natzweiler- France Forced Labor May 1941 - September 1944
Struthof

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Neuengamme Germany Forced Labor June 1940 - May 1945
Oranienburg Germany Concentration March 1933 - March 1935
Plaszow Poland Forced Labor December 1942 - January 1945
Ravensbruck Germany Forced Labor May 1939 - April 1945
Sachsenhausen Germany Forced Labor July 1936 - April 1945
Sobibor Poland Extermination May 1942 - October 1943

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References
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/ghettos-an-
overview/ghettos/

Guindon, N. (2004). Unknown. Retrieved from

http://www.kawvalley.k12.ks.us/schools/rjh/marneyg/04_holocaust-
projects/04_Guindon_JosefMengele.htm

Jewish Virtual Library. (s.f.). Obtenido de https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/list-of-major-nazi-

concentration-camps

Streit, K. (2020, March 6). Study.com. Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/josef-

mengele-experiments-angel-of-death-at-auschwitz-birkenau.html

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, W. D. (2019, December 4). Holocaust encyclopedia.
Retrieved from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ghettos

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, W. D. (n.d.). Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved from
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps

Unknown. (n.d.). Sky History. Retrieved from https://www.history.co.uk/biographies/josef-

mengele