"My younger brother was very religious. Like you. Everyone admired him. But the Nazis killed him anyway. It did not do him much good to be so religious." This instance is true of millions of Jews and other chief targets who could not escape the horror of Hitler's cause. With the inflicted terror that rose with the formation of the Nazi Regime, many tactics were used to extinguish what Nazis called "the Jewish problem." The most prominent representation of evil characterized by the Nazi regime is the deliberate and well-planned extermination of millions of Europeans in what is termed the Holocaust. Establishing a policy first of persecution and later of gruesome annihilation, the largest death camp being Auschwitz, Nazism began a time when malignity conquered all.
The Nazi regime immediately began to take methodic actions against Jews when they came to power in Germany in 1933. With the persecution of all Jews being their main goal, the Nazi Party, along with government agencies, banks, and business enterprises, made concerted efforts to eliminate Jews from economic life, and from German life in general. Jewish businesses were boycotted and vandalized, and Jews were driven from their jobs in government and universities. Due to the Nuremberg laws of 1935, they lost their citizenship and were forbidden to intermarry and associate with other Germans, not belonging in their own country, with no claim to rights of any kind. This atmosphere the Nazi's forced upon the Jewish society was just the beginning of the evil yet to come, as the seriousness of the predicament soon became clear.
The "Night of Broken Glass" was an extreme signal to Jews of the horror the Nazi's intended to present. On this night in 1938, all synagogues and other Jewish institutions in Germany were set on fire, windows of Jewish shops were smashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested. Many of these people were imprisoned in concentration camps that confined other opponents of the Nazi party, such as Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals. Here, inmates were required to work for their wages in food, as there was a great demand for labor at that time. So little food was given, however, that many starved, while others died of exposure or overwork. Overall, this time of persecution most often resulted in painful exertion or inevitably death. The horrific events meant to cause this expiration and suffer exemplify the vice of the Nazi regime that was raging at the start of the Holocaust.
The most formidable extension of the persecution system was the Nazi Party's establishment of extermination centers. These were set up primarily to kill Jews and housed the main slaughter performed. It is believed that 18 to 26 million people were killed in them, including 6 million Jews out of an estimated 8.3 million Jews living in German-occupied Europe at the time.
Upon arrival at the camps many Jews were killed without reservation, while others endured slave labor and meager rations until they died. Some prisoners were even used for barbaric medical experiments. The killings were performed by mobile death squads in a variety of ways. The most effective method of the Nazis' extermination of people was in specially constructed gas chambers, into which the victims were packed wall to wall. After, the remains of the gassed bodies were then moved to nearby furnaces and crematories to be burned. Before or after they were killed, however, they were stripped of every potentially valuable possession, such as clothing, eyeglasses, jewelry, gold teeth, and hair. This plan of centers where killing was actually the main cause is appalling. The deliberate extermination, called the Holocaust, proves the atrocity the Nazi's possessed in performing such monstrous deeds.
One of the most notorious extermination camps, showcasing the evil of the Nazi regime at its highest, was Auschwitz. Located near Krakow in Southern Poland, it was the largest concentration camp, with inmates from all over Europe. The killing center was established due to its convenient location and abilities. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi guards, told Rudolf Hoss in a meeting held in the summer of 1941 his reasoning. "It has been ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we are to implement that order. The existing extermination centers in the east are not in a position to carry out the large actions that are anticipated. I have therefore designated Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards to communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged." Already, the clever and deranged tactics of the Nazi Party were expanding.
Birkenau, constructed nearby the main site of Auschwitz and known as Auschwitz II, had crematoria used to incinerate bodies and gas chambers. Each gas chamber had the potential to kill six thousand people daily and was built to resemble shower rooms. The arriving victims were told that they would be sent to work, but that they first had to undergo disinfection by showering. Once inside the chambers, they would immediately be gassed, their bodies then sent to be burned.
The Nazi's used other means of torture in Auschwitz as well. Many Jewish and non-Jewish inmates performed forced labor, eventually dying from starvation or disease. The Nazi's also subjected some prisoners to atrocious medical experiments. Josef Mengele earned the notorious nickname "the Angel of Death" in the camp. His own barbarous experiments were mainly carried out on infant, young twins, and on dwarfs.
By 1944, the total number of prisoners being held at the Auschwitz complex was 155,000. "The prison population was constantly growing, despite the periodic changes resulting from mass deaths, and despite the high morality rate caused by starvation, hard labor, contagious diseases, and the total exhaustion of the prisoners." By the end of the war, estimates of deaths there ranged from one and a half million to as many as four million. Due to these startling numbers and the brutal means that caused them, Auschwitz is the prime symbol of the inhumane and appalling measures the Nazi regime took to erase the Jewish culture. Through the killing of millions at this camp, the Nazi regime truly presented the degradation they lived by.
As you see, especially during the time of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime had only evil in their mind as they made it their goal to kill millions of innocent people. Never were any of their actions moral or able to be accounted for. From the times of early persecution and forced suffering to extreme extermination and murder, the most conspicuous example being the camp of Auschwitz, the Nazi regime exhibited pure terror upon select Europeans. For this reason, the barbaric and deliberate extermination is definitely a true representation of the corruption imposed by perhaps the greatest murderers to unfortunately live, the Nazi regime. Return to Asher Lev Page