The Holocaust and Auschwitz Concentration Camp

The Holocaust is one of the most significant historical conflicts in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. It refers to the genocide that was conducted by the Nazi Regime under the leadership of Adolf Hitler in Germany. This is considered the deadliest genocide in global history. It is estimated that the genocide resulted in the deaths of about six million people of Jewish descent, including 1.5 million children (Wood and Stone 19). This figure is about two-thirds of the entire Jewish population that lived in Europe at the time. The mass killings took place throughout Nazi Germany as well as other territories that Germany had occupied under Hitler.

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The most notable feature of the Holocaust is the use of extermination or concentration camps. These were a series of death camps that were equipped with poisonous gas chambers used for the mass killings. The main concentration camps were situated in Auschwitz, Treblinka Belzec, Jasenovac, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Maly Trostenets (Wood and Stone 21). These camps were constructed under the leadership of Hitler for the sole purpose of killing people by gassing them as well as putting them to work under extreme conditions and starvation.

The Auschwitz Concentration Camp was one of the largest camps. It was a series of Nazi extermination camps that were operated by the Third Reich in areas annexed by Nazi Germany in Poland during the World War II. It comprised of Auschwitz I, which is the oldest and the original camp, Auschwitz IIBirkenau, which served as a significant concentration or extermination camp, and Auschwitz IIIMonowitz that was a labor camp established for purposes of staffing the IG Factory. Also, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp also consisted of 45 other satellite camps located throughout the Nazi Germany (Wood and Stone 26).

Auschwitz Concentration Camp was also known for being the hotbed of conducting medical experiments on human beings during the Holocaust. Most of the physicians in Germany had aligned themselves with the Nazi regime and used their professional skills to propagate the Nazi agenda. One of the most notable doctors is Josef Mengele, who was based in Auschwitz. His experiments included putting prisoners in gas chambers and testing drugs on them as well as freezing them in a bid to change their eye color (Wood and Stone 53). He also performed amputations and other surgical procedures on the prisoners in his medical experiments. However, a vast amount of his works remains unknown since most of the evidence detailing the gross nature of his works was destroyed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute by Otmar von Verschuer (Wood and Stone 61). Also, most of the survivors of Josef Mengeles subjects were almost killed after the experiments.

There were transport trains that delivered Jewish people to the concentration camps in Auschwitz beginning from September 1941 for extermination (Wood and Stone 22). The Jews were taken from all over European territories that German had occupied. The gas that was used in killing prisoners in the chambers is known as Zyklon B, which is a poisonous pesticide (Wood and Stone 31). It is estimated that about 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz, with about 90% of them being Jews (Wood and Stone 73). Those that were not killed in the gas chambers were killed through individual executions or suffered death through inhumane conditions such as hard labor, starvation, or diseases. Reports also indicate that more than 144 prisoners managed to escape from Auschwitz camps successfully (Wood and Stone 66).

Works Cited

Wood, Angela; Stone, Dan G. Holocaust: The Events And Their Impact On Real People. Dorling Kindersley. 2007. Print.