O Holocaust it was the mass extermination of about six million Jews in the concentration camps. It was carried out by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany during World War II (1939-1945).
Prejudice against the Jewish People
For the Germans, they were the only pure descendants of the Aryans (the Indo-European primitives), so Hitler considered his people a "superior race". In your book “My fight” (1925), he refers to the Germans as the "best species of mankind".
Even before the war, during the first six years of Nazism (1933-1939), Hitler installed his personal dictatorship.
O anti-Semitism it is prejudice against the ethnic group of Jews – the Semites. It was propagated by III Reich through discriminatory laws, decrees and regulations against Jews throughout Germany.
In 1935, it was signed by hitler The Nuremberg Law that created the immediate segregation of the Jewish people.
Among other determinations:
- forbade Jews to be seen in hospitals;
- Jewish university students could no longer take doctoral exams;
- no Jew could be considered German;
- They couldn't work in any government agency;
- they were not allowed to interact with citizens.
Concentration Camps and the Massacre of the Jews
Auschwitz Camp, the biggest Nazi concentration camp
As the Second World War and the defeats piling up, the persecutions of the Jews “inferior beings” increased.
Starting in 1942, at a conference held in Wansee, on the outskirts of Berlin, the Nazis adopted the “final solution”. A scientific massacre directive was agreed, mainly of the Jews.
It already existed in Germany and other countries, concentration camps Nazi, where political enemies, Jews and the mentally ill were kept and many were killed.
We then proceeded to the construction of extermination camps and there would be taken Slavic prisoners, gypsies, pacifist religious and mainly Jews.
Around eight million Jews lived in Europe. The largest community – 3 million people lived in Poland, followed by Romania (800,000) and Hungary (400,000).
Therefore, most extermination camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, were built in Poland.
Prisoners from all over Europe were deported to the extermination camps, from regions invaded by the Germans.
The deportees believed they would work for the Nazis. Some were employed as slave labor in German companies such as Bayer, BMW and Telefunken.
At the entrance to the camps, doctors separated the prisoners into two lines. Old people, sick people and children went immediately to their deaths in the gas chambers, where the signs indicated “showers” or “disinfection”.
The bodies were headed for cremation ovens. Doctor Josef Mengele died in 1986 in Brazil, where he lived in hiding for many years.
At the height of its activities, Auschwitz it exterminated six thousand people a day in gas chambers or even by starvation.
Treblinka in Poland, Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany, are some of the countless concentration camps that recall the horror of the Nazi regime.
Hundreds of prisoners were used in horrific “experiments” with new drugs by the Bayer laboratory. They paid 170 marks per head and after testing the guinea pigs were exterminated.
All valuables, gold teeth, glasses and bags were taken from the victims. When the war was over, it turned out that about six million Jews, three hundred thousand Gypsies, multitudes of Soviet prisoners, communists, socialists and religious pacifists had been massacred.
With the military offensives in Germany by the allied troops, thousands of prisoners were found in the concentration camps.
On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces were the first to arrive at the largest Auschwitz camp.
The prisoners who resisted the massacre were released. British forces released 60,000 prisoners in Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, Germany.
US forces released more than 20,000 prisoners in Buchenwald, also in Germany. The Najdanek camp in Poland had been burned to conceal evidence of the extermination.
Only after the release of the prisoners did the world become aware of the Nazi atrocities. January 27th is "International Holocaust Remembrance Day".
Know the story of Anne Frank, one of the victims of the holocaust.
Read too:
- Nazism
- Anti-Semitism
- Racism
- Nazi Concentration Camps
- Auschwitz camp
- World War II movies
- Greatest Dictators in History
- Questions about WWII
