The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as “The Shoah”, means “destruction” or “catastrophe”. The Holocaust was the annihilation of approximately sin million European Jews during World War II. This programme was led by Adolf Hitler. In Nazi Germany, the Jews had to be removed from civil society, including Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehova’s Witnesses and other political and religious opponents. The total number of Holocaust victims is between 11 million and 17 million people.

Legal repression of the Jews The “racial” enemies, such as the Jews, were viewed as enemies because of their “blood”. They were regarded as “genetically inferior” because they didn’t belog to the Aryan race. From 1933, the Nazis intensified their campaign of violence against the Jews. They set up concentration camps, where the Jews and their opponents had to be placed. The legal, economic and social rights of the Jews were steadly restricted. The Jews couldn’t take part in agriculture, Jewish lawyers were dragged out of their offices and beaten, Jews were excluded from schools and universities. Jews couldn’t marry or have sex with Aryans. Hitler said that if the “Jewish problem” cannot be solved by these laws, it must be a “final solution”, which is taking the Jews to the concentration camps and isolate them from society. Hitler wanted to annihilate all European Jews. Jewish intellectuals started to leave the country but most of them were persecuted and took to the concentration camps. After the war, those who remained alive were released.

The concentration and extermination camps The concentration camps were places where the Jews were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. In these places, Jews were treated very badly. They were constantly beaten by the Nazis, they were forced to work, they didn’t change their striped pyjamas for six months, they slept on wooden bunks, they didn’t eat almost anything and they had to suffer a lot of medical experiments. Most of them thrown themeselves against the electric fence because they didn’t want to live anymore. People with disabilities were killed once they were taken there. The extermination camps were camps equiped with gas chambers where the Jews were taken and exterminated. Most of the Jews didn’t know where they were taken when Nazis transferred them to the concentration camps.

The most famous concentrarion camps: Dachau The most famous concentrarion camps: Dachau. The first concentration camp, created in 1933.

Buchenwald: 1937

Auschwitz: It was composed of three main extermination camps, Auschwitz I (1940), Auschwitz II (1942) and Auschwitz III (1942).

Concentration camps throughout Europe

Medical Experiments: Dr. Mengele Dr. Joseph Mengele was a German physician and a SS Officer in a Nazi concentration camp. He was known for being the person who decided which prisoners were going to be killed and which were forced into labor. He also was known for performing experiments on the prisoners. He was called the Angel of Death. He liked to do experiments on twins.

Dr. Mengele’s experiments: Eye color: He thought he could change the eye color of the children by injecting chemicals into their eyes. He would take a set of twins and use one of them to test his theory of eye color change on. Although it never worked, he kept trying. Siamese Twins: He wanted to see what would happen if he created is own set of siamese twins. He took a set of twins and sewed them together. He supervised the surgery, which included a resection done on the twin’s hands. Their hands became infected and caused them to have gangrene. Germs: He would inject a child with a lethal germ. He wanted to study how they would react to it. Sex Change: He would perform a sex change operation on one twin. He wanted to see if they would react differently being of the opposite sex then as the same sex. Isolation Endurance: He wanted to know if twins could survive without each other. He would separate them to see which one could go the longest without the other one. He would lock them up separately without the company of anyone and wait it out. Pregnancies: He wanted to see what kind of children would come from a brother/sister pair. He was interested in knowing if it was even possible to happen. Every girl that became pregnant in the concentration camp, was due to incest. Sterilization: He wanted to test methods to sterilize young women. He subjected a number of them to shock treatments and surgeries. Most of them died, due to the infections the surgery caused or during the procedures.

Other experiments: ○ Bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation from one person to another: Sections of bones, muscles, and nerves were removed from the subjects without use of anesthesia. As a result of these operations, many victims suffered intense agony, mutilation, and permanent disability. ○ High altitude experiments: A low-pressure chamber containing the prisoners was used to simulate conditions at altitudes of up to 20,000 m. Of the 200 subjects, 80 died outright, and the others were executed. ○ Head injury experiments: A young boy of eleven or twelve was strapped to a chair so he could not move. Above him was a mechanized hammer that every few seconds came down upon his head.The boy was driven insane from the torture. ○ Freezing experiments: Subjects were forced to endure a tank of ice water for up to five hours.

Freezing and high altitude experiments.

Survivors: Viktor Frankl He was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He was born in a Jewish family, so he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with his wife and his parents. His familiy died but he survived in several concentrarion camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of Existential Analysis. He wrote: “Man's Search for Meaning”, which chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate.