Auschwitz :: Essays Papers

Auschwitz Imagine that a man is lying in his bed asleep. He hears a noise downstairs, and gets up to see what the commotion is. Upon going downstairs, he spots ten soldiers, who grab him and throw him into the back of a truck with twenty more people. When the man asks what is going on, he discovers that the truck is heading towards Auschwitz. This situation happened many times years ago, and is known as the Holocaust. Many Jews and other groups were sent to Auschwitz and this report will explain the dark details that occurred there. Auschwitz was the largest German concentration camp and is located close to a Polish town Oshwiecim in Galcia. This camp was set up on April 27, 1940 and could handle its first prisoners by June 14. Auschwitz housed many groups ranging from Jews and Poles, to Soviet war prisoners and Gypsies (wysiwyg://179/http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-b...&hits=10&pt=t&sort=relevance& firsthit=off). The leading commander of this camp was Heinrich Himmler, who was the chief of the Schutzstaffel, Nazi guards, and the secret police. Under Himmler’s direction he was able to create two more camps similar to the original Auschwitz camp. The way that he set up the operations was to have the prisoners sent by rail to the camps, upon arriving at the camps they were then divided into three different groups. One group was sent to the gas chambers within hours of their arrival. The second group was sent to serve as slaves in industrial factories. The third group was sent to different places to underg o medical experiments (http://www.nizkor.org). The first group that were sent to the gas chambers underwent many events before finally being exterminated. When they arrived at Auschwitz, their fate was to be gassed at a smaller camp called Birkenau. At this camp there were many ways that the prisoners could be killed. There were a total of four gas chambers and four crematoria. The gas chambers appeared as showers to the prisoners and the crematoria was used to incinerate their bodies. First, the prisoners would be given a bar of soap and they would be told to go wash in the showers. Then the Germans would ventilate a gas called Zyclon-B into the bath houses. The chemical was invented by a pest control company and could kill the prisoners in a short period of time.