Term Papers on Horror In Aucshwitz

Term Paper Title	Horror In Aucshwitz
# of Words	2197
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	8.79

Horror in Aucshwitz

     Concentration camps were meant to arrest so-called "SchŠdlinge am deutschen Volkskšrper" ("People's delinquents") in order to eliminate them from society and educate them in a national socialist way. Therefore, the Nazis arrested without legal basis real or potential political opponents and people for racial, religious and other reasons.  One of the most well-known German concentration camps was the Auschwitz-Birkenau facility, located in the town of Owiecium in upper Silesia, Poland. Auschwitz was, in fact, a complex of camps which combined the functions of labor, internment, and the extermination.
      There were three main components of Auschwitz: Auschwitz I, the conventional concentration center, Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, what became the Holocaust's most infamous death camp, and Buna, Auschwitz III, which was a large slave labor camp which served the German war economy. According to Landau (1992), it was here that over 1.25 million people were killed within the confines of Auschwitz, 90% of which were Jews. Hitler had found what he termed "the final solution to the Jewish question."(p. 118)
     Auschwitz was not the first Nazi concentration camp, but it was without doubt the most infamous. Preparations for Auschwitz began as early as the summer of 1940, under the supervision of Rudoplh Hoess. He would later become the commandant of the camp. Although the concentration camp system had been in operation for seven years when Auschwitz opened its doors on June 14, 1940, Auschwitz has come to symbolize the atrocities of the Nazi regime due to the masses who were murdered there.  The majority suffered from dehydration and malnourishment and were put to death almost immediately upon arrival or given a fate almost worse than death in the labor camps.
     Because prisons had become overcrowded, the original plan for the Auschwitz concentration camp was to be a place of punishment for Polish political prisoners. It slowly came to be a death camp for the races who were persecuted by the Nazis, though Jews were the most hated race. Most of the prisoners sent to Auschwitz went directly to the Birkenau facility.  Very few managed to avoid the infamous gas chambers of Auschwitz but before many were put to death they were put to work in labor camps. Those who remained in Auschwitz I were given striped prisoner clothing and a number was tattooed on their arm.  A color coded triangle attached to their clothing indicated the type of prisoner.  Rogasky (1988) states that the political prisoners wore red, asocials black, homosexuals pink, Jehovah's Witnesses purple, and green indicated habitual prisoners.
     The most efficient method to kill people was gassing them. Therefore, the SS used the hydro-cyanic acid compound "Cyclone B" which evaporated at body
temperature in a hermetically sealed room and led to death from suffocation within a very short time.  First attempts to kill with gas took place in September 1941 in the arrest cells of block 11 at Auschwitz I, the main camp. Then, the mortuary at crematory I was used as gas chamber. For lack of secrecy and the limited efficiency of crematory I, the SS went to Birkenau and reconstructed two farmhouses in the wood into gas chambers. The bodies were brought over narrow-gage railway tracks to pits, some hundred metres of distance, where they were first buried, but dug out again in the fall of 1942 and burnt.

     Since also the provisional plants were not sufficient,
the construction of the four big crematories started in July 1942 which were put into operation between March and June 1943. These extermination plants had to be built by prisoners themselves.  Within those crematories, all stations of the extermination process were geographically centralized and mechanized. Each station had undress rooms, gas chambers and ovens to incinerate the bodies.
     Those who managed to escape the fate of Birkenau were then forced to do slave labor. The prisoners at Auschwitz I were housed in brick barracks, thousands were packed into each one. According to Swiebocka (1993), a ...

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