Auschwicz
...in the history of the world. The Holocaust as it became known as was the mass killing of an estimated eleven million people, around six million of those being Jews. Although many of these people died in different ways a lot of them where sent to concentration camps where they where put to work and either died of physical exhaustion or they where killed by the many crematories and gas chambers in the camps. The largest of the camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau where around 1,500,000 people where eventually sent to there death.
The Nazi party made their “Final Solution” public in 1933. This plan called for the extermination of the Jews in a dramatic fashion. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933 the set strict laws making Jews put signs on the doors of their shops to let people know that they where Jewish and also they set new laws that would not allow Jewish people equal rights. On the night of November 9th the German SS and SA, the Nazi police force, stormed the streets and broke the glass on the fronts of all Jewish shops. They took the Jewish prayer books and burned them in the streets and completely destroyed the Jews’ places of worship. All these actions taken against the Jews where all systematically planned and the Germans wanted to drive them out of the country. This event became known as “Kristallnacht” or night of the broken glass. This event really sparked the Nazi’s plan to exterminate the Jews.
The Nazi’s first laid the blueprints out for Auschwitz in May of 1940 because of an increase in the Polish resistance and the jails and prisons there could no longer meet the needs of the incoming prisoners (Gutman and Berenbaum 7). Auschwitz was established in the town of Dachau, Poland and quickly became the model for all other concentration camps. The area on which the camp was to be build totaled forty square miles.
Heinrich Himmler, the...
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