Concentration Camps
"Whoever is happy will make others happy too."
~Anne Frank
Concentration Camps
*While concentration camps were meant to work and starve prisoners to death, extermination camps (also known as death camps) were built for the sole purpose of killing large groups of people quickly and efficiently.
*Living situations were awful. There were rats everywhere and the roofs leaked.
*Although many people refer to all Nazi camps as "concentration camps," there were actually a number of different kinds of camps, including concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and transit camps.
*One of the first concentration camps was Dachau, which opened on March 20, 1933.
*From 1933 until 1938, some prisoners in the concentration camps were political prisoners (i.e. people who spoke or acted against Hitler or the Nazis) and people the Nazis labeled as "asocial".
*Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp built. It is estimated that 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.
What really happened in the camps
"Once a week the german officers, they used to come in every barrack, they... used to go block to block and tell the women to undress... and one by one they used to pass through them, naked of course, and they were looking at you if you haven't got any disease or anything like that... and the once that they didn't like, that had something wrong with them, they took the number and they put them in a room, completely separate from the others and then, at nighttime They came with a truck, they took them to the gas chamber. That was every week we had to do that!... To live with that fear! Can you imagine? If someone doesn't know when they will die they are not scared, but if you know are going to die, that your turn will come, it's a terrible thing."
-Lola Putt
"They sent us into have a shower and then they shaved our heads. They gave us striped striped uniforms to put on. I had a mans suit and my father quickly rolled up my sleeve and my pants because thats all you had-- the striped uniform. That striped uniform I kept until I was liberated.I was with my father-- all the men were on one side and the women were on the other. Then this woman walked up to me and she asked me how old I was and I said 'I'm thirteen' and she said quickly 'Don't say you're thirteen say your seventeen' She was with the Nazis, with the SS who were walking around. So I told my father and he said 'Then say your seventeen if she told you' That saved my life because the SS were walking around asking 'How old are you?' I said I was seventeen and this officer looked me up and down and he left me there, left me with my father. That was unbelievable; it was just luck that she walked over to me"
-Peter Hersch
*While concentration camps were meant to work and starve prisoners to death, extermination camps (also known as death camps) were built for the sole purpose of killing large groups of people quickly and efficiently.
*Living situations were awful. There were rats everywhere and the roofs leaked.
*Although many people refer to all Nazi camps as "concentration camps," there were actually a number of different kinds of camps, including concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and transit camps.
*One of the first concentration camps was Dachau, which opened on March 20, 1933.
*From 1933 until 1938, some prisoners in the concentration camps were political prisoners (i.e. people who spoke or acted against Hitler or the Nazis) and people the Nazis labeled as "asocial".
*Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp built. It is estimated that 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz.
What really happened in the camps
"Once a week the german officers, they used to come in every barrack, they... used to go block to block and tell the women to undress... and one by one they used to pass through them, naked of course, and they were looking at you if you haven't got any disease or anything like that... and the once that they didn't like, that had something wrong with them, they took the number and they put them in a room, completely separate from the others and then, at nighttime They came with a truck, they took them to the gas chamber. That was every week we had to do that!... To live with that fear! Can you imagine? If someone doesn't know when they will die they are not scared, but if you know are going to die, that your turn will come, it's a terrible thing."
-Lola Putt
"They sent us into have a shower and then they shaved our heads. They gave us striped striped uniforms to put on. I had a mans suit and my father quickly rolled up my sleeve and my pants because thats all you had-- the striped uniform. That striped uniform I kept until I was liberated.I was with my father-- all the men were on one side and the women were on the other. Then this woman walked up to me and she asked me how old I was and I said 'I'm thirteen' and she said quickly 'Don't say you're thirteen say your seventeen' She was with the Nazis, with the SS who were walking around. So I told my father and he said 'Then say your seventeen if she told you' That saved my life because the SS were walking around asking 'How old are you?' I said I was seventeen and this officer looked me up and down and he left me there, left me with my father. That was unbelievable; it was just luck that she walked over to me"
-Peter Hersch
Point of view in concentration camps
JEws"I didn't know what was happening but I knew it was something terrible happening and the neighbor next to me said 'They took her children, they took her children and I said 'Where did they take them?' and she said 'probably to burn them.' and I got scared thinking 'this woman has lost her mind, will we lose our minds too?' I didn't believe they were willing to burn children"
-Aniela Ania Radek "I remember getting to the camp and I was screaming all the time. I was scared and I was all alone in the middle of a mass of children and people. In the camp we slept on the floor sitting up anywhere, and we were given soup and bread. We were all thrown together adults, with children, but then the children got separated. I was only there for 4 days but it felt like 4 years they were the longest days" -Michelle Cohen-Rodriguez |
Nazis"I had no feelings in carrying out these things, but I received an order. That, incidentally was the way I was trained"
-Josef Kramer "At Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chambers from a small opening. It took 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending on climatic conditions. We knew they were dead because their screaming stopped." -Rudolf Hoess |