The Holocaust
January 30, 1933-March 8, 1945
The Horror
This terrible thing happened in the month of January of the year 1933. The German forces were trying to get rid of all "unperfect" forms of life in Germany, then all of Europe and then later the whole world. Jews were just the most targeted people they were trying to get rid of, they were also trying to get of gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the disabled for persecution.
Where and why it happened
It first started in Germany, the name of it was Dachau, it opened in March of 1933. Some locations of death camps, a form of concentration camp, were Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. These camps were built for a variety of reasons such as work labor, transit camps which serves as temporary way stations, and mass murders. Thousands apon thousands were put into these concentration camps and all because of one man's opinion, Hitler, that their race goes hand and hand with the lowest scum of all the earth.
Methods Used
There were many methods used to kill the jews in these concentration camps. Three in particular. Mass Shootings, Gassing Trucks, and Extermination Camps. The method was first of all mass shootings. The Jews were captured or arrested, forced to dig their own graves or simply placed along large mass graves, and then shot so that they fell into the grave. Another one of the killing methods was using mobile gassing trucks. It happened as follows: the Jews were forced into a hermetically sealed truck, and then exhaust gas from the engine was led into the truck. The Jews were thus suffocated. The last killing methods was by forcing Jews into gas chambers, where they were gassed to death using exhaust fumes or Zyklon B. The procedure of killing the victims in gas chambers was the following: the victims were forced into the gas chamber, the door was closed and either exhaust fumes or Zyklon B-gas was led into the room. These were some of the methods for "getting rid" of the 'undesirables'.
Mass Shootings
Nazi shooting a Urkranian Jew
Gassing Trucks
A group of Jewish men await their death in one of Chelmno's gassing trucks
Extermination Camps
Gas chamber in Auschwitz
World Response
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the civilized world was shocked to see photographs of unimaginable horror; skeletons of victims stacked in piles of hundreds and thousands, living skeletons describing unspeakable brutality and atrocity, and searching for the truth as to what would permit this to occur without intervention. Could an event of this magnitude have occurred without the knowledge of the Allies? If the Allied governments knew this was taking place, why was nothing done? Why was there such deathly silence?
Holocaust