Concentration Camps notes

Slide 1: Concentration Camps

Slide 2: Concentration Camps

- Nazis concentrated on silencing political opponents and turned against several groups in
Germany including: gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally retarded,
the insane, the disabled, and the incurably ill.
- These individuals were rounded up and shipped off to “special treatment centers” where
they were given a “mercy death.”
- Following the invasion of Poland, hundreds of thousands of Polish people were killed or
shipped to Germany to perform slave labor.
- Nazi murder squads were assigned to round up Jews, strip them of their clothing, and
then shoot them in cold blood.

Slide 3: Concentration Camps (cont’d)

- Other Jews were herded in dismal ghettos or Jewish quarters in Polish cities and were
left to starve or die from disease.
- Life in concentration camps was a cycle of hunger, humiliation, and work that only ended
with death.
- Prisoners were crammed into wooden barracks that help up to 1,000 people each.
- They shared their meals (thin soup, occasional scraps of bread or potato) with hoards of
rats and fleas.
- Prisoners worked from dawn until dusk, 7 days per week, until they collapsed. Those
too weak to work were killed.

Slide 4: Extermination
- 1941 - Germans built 6 death camps in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno,
Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
- Each camp had several huge gas chambers in which as many as 6,000 people could be
killed each day.
- When prisoners arrived at Auschwitz - the worst/largest of all camps, they had to parade
by several SS (Shield Squadron) doctors who separated those strong enough to work
from those who would die that day.
- Both groups were told to leave their belongings with a promise that “they would be
returned later.”

Slide 5: Extermination (cont’d)

- Those destined to die were led to a room outside the gas chamber and were told to
undress for a shower...they were even given a piece of soap to make it seem realistic.
 - They were led into the gas chamber and poisoned with a cyanide gas that spewed from
the vents in the walls. Sometimes, the mass extinction was accompanied by cheerful
music played by an orchestra of camp inmates who had temporarily been spared
execution.
- At first, the bodies were buried in huge pits. Prisoners were assigned jobs that included
grave digging or emptying the gas chambers.

Slide 6: Extermination (cont’d)

- The decaying corpses gave off a horrendous stench that could be smelled for miles.
- As an attempt to cover up the slaughter, some camps installed huge crematoriums =
ovens, in which to burn the dead.
- At other camps, bodies were simply thrown into a pit and set on fire.
- Other methods of extermination: shootings, hangings, lethal injection.
- Others died as a result of horrible experiments carried out by camp doctors.
- Some were injected with deadly germs in order to study the effect of disease on different
groups of people. Others were forced to exist only on seawater in experiments to
determine how long shipwrecked seamen could survive.