Einsatzgruppen, Concentration Camps, Extermination Camps, Zyklon B.
Concentratrion Camps
Extermination Camps
Einsatzgruppen
Zyklon B
Concentration & Extermination Camps Now
What Were They?
- The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditons.
- Zyklon B is a poisonous gas used to kill rats and insects, but were used in concentration camps death chambers.
- The Nazis used Zyklon B to kill about 1.2 million holocust victims, the Jews.
- The Nazis produced the gas also during World War 2 and used them on Auschwitz victims as well, in the gas chambers.
- Extermination camps were made by the Nazi's to efficiently mass murder Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and Soviet War Prisoners.
- They were different from concentration camps because concentration camps were mainly used as detention and laborcenters while extermination camps were used for mainly killing or as a work site for Sonderkommandos.
- Sonderkommandos were groups of people who were selected from the groups that were being killed and were temporarily forced to drag out and cremate or bury corpses that were killed in the gas chambers.
- The Nazi's forced the Sonderkommandos to get rid of the bodies so that there was no evidence that there were people being murdered there. They got rid of the people's ashes by spreading them among the landscape to hide what was really going on.
- People killed in these camps were either killed by poison gas or by shootings.
- Einsatzgruppen-mobile death squads
- Mainly made up of German SS, Schutzstaffel meaning Protection Squadron, and police personnel
- Under command of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo), German Security Police, and Security Service, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), officers
- Murdered those perceived to be racial or political enemies that were in the occupied Soviet Union behind German combat lines
- Victims: Jews, Roma (Gypsies), & officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist party, thousands of people in institutions for the mentally and physically disabled
- Total: 1mill.
About Concentration Camps:
- The first concentration camps were established in 1933.
- German authorities put camps all over Germany: Oranirnburg, noth Berlin; Esterwegen, near Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nazi-war-crimes-prosecutor-message-nuremberg-ben-ferencz-a7725216.html
Zyklon B
Einsatzgruppen
Concentration Camps
SS-- Schutzstaffel; Protection squadrons (The entire guard of the Nazi party).
Extermination Camps
More About Concentraion Camps:
- An expert claimed that Zyklon B should kill a human within seconds when inhaled, but at times it took half an hour for holocaust victims to die.
- When Zyklon B was inhaled by the victims, the brain and the heart were the 1st to be attacked. The efffects of the gas began with a stinging feeling in the chest and the brain, similiar to epileptic seizure.
Why Did They Stop Using Mobile Killing Squads?
- Main killing method was shooting
- Later developed gas vans, a mobile gas chamber on a cargo truck that used carbon monoxide from the truck's exhaust
- Inefficient and were psychologically burdensome for the killers
- Replaced with gas chambers located at centralized killing centers
- Most extermination camps were located in Poland. The six camps which were set in poland were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek, and Aushwitz- Birkenau.
- The most infamous camps were set in Poland because Poland had the largest number of Jews living in Europe.
- The people that were captivated in the camp Aushwitz were given special badges.
- yellow stars= Jews, brown triangle= Gypsies, pink triangle= gay prisoners, purple triangle= Jehovah witnesses
- In the extermination camps there was approximately a total of 11,720,000 people who were killed. 6 million jews, 2 million soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic poles, 1,500,000 Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals, 5,000 Jehovah witnesses.
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- After December, 1934, the SS was the only agency allowed to establish and manage concentration camps.
- By 1937, the only four camps left were: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Lichtenburg.
- After WWII, the camp system expanded and became places where the SS targeted and killed groups of enemies of Nazi Germany, real or fake.
- The SS would diliberetly malnouriush and mistreat the prisoners while also ruthlessly forcing them to work which resulted in a high mortality rate.