Holocaust Research Paper:

An Overview of Hell

Jordan Byrum

Dual Credit College English

Mr. Larry Neuburger

September 10, 2008

 Byrum - 1 -

As the 1920’s came to a close a new decade arose that gave rise to one of the worst

chapters in the history of humanity. It became known as the Holocaust worldwide. During twelve

long, gruesome years, six million Jewish people died, along with five million people who include

homosexual, gypsies, or mentally and physically disabled. One of the biggest problems facing

the Nazis may have been how to go about killing twelve million people in the most efficient and

expeditious means possible. In addition, it is important to understand the atrocities faced by those

targeted by the Nazi regime. However, it is also important to understand resistance to the Nazis

usually met an instant fate in the form of a bullet to the head. If one might lucky enough to make

it through the killing, the Nazis sent them to ghettos or concentration camps.

The massacres started when Adolf Hitler came into power. He believed the Jews,

gypsies, disabled people, socialists, Jehovah’s witnesses and homosexuals most inferior to the

German race. Hitler planned to kill as many of these people as he could by instituting a plan

called the “Final Solution.” This plan included many stages in which the Nazis would kill the

non-German people. Producing anti-Jewish legislation became one of the first things he did.

Many would boycott buying from Jewish owned stores. Kristallnacht or Night of the Broken

Glass aimed to isolate Jews from society and to have them driven out of the country.

To make things go faster they invented mobile killing units, concentration camps, and

ghettos. Paneled trucks, which had the exhaust pipe reconfigured to force carbon monoxide gas

into sealed places, became known as Mobile killing units, would kill those people locked inside.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website, “Concentration camps

were originally established to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents.”

(Paragraph 5) In order to concentrate the Jews and to maintain the numbers the Nazis created

ghettos, theses places forced Jews to live in fear everyday of their lives. They never knew when
 Byrum - 2 -

they would have enough food to go around or when they would be digging their own mass

graves. Often people met their fate by being deported to killing centers.

These tragedies happened in a number of ways, some of which included shooting and

gassing. The Nazis began gassing operations in which they experimented with fatal gases for the

purpose of mass murders. Mental patients happened to be the first to go when these pitiless

experiments started. When the new people arrived at the camps they were sent immediately to

the showers, where the Nazis told them they would be sanitized. With their hands being raised

more people could fit in, so the Nazis forced them to do this. Some had the most misfortune to be

shot in mass graves they had to dig themselves. It was required of these people to strip of their

garments and lay face down in the ditch, this was known as “sardine packing”. Shooting soon

became the most widespread form of murder.

After seeing this go on for so long, the Jews started their own resistance. It mainly

consisted of smuggling groceries, medication and weaponry across the walls of the ghettos

without the consent or awareness of the Nazis and Jewish council. Members of the resistance

staged uprisings, the largest of which was at Warsaw ghetto in August of 1944. The rumors of the

ghetto residents being deported to the Treblink killing center became stronger, so instead of

standing there and doing nothing, a large number of Jews began to attack German tanks. Since

they did not have much, their weapons consisted of stolen hand grenades, molotov cocktails, and

a handful of smuggled arms. Although the Germans were taken aback by the fierceness of this

resistance, they brought to an end the major hostility within a couple of days. It took the superior

German forces almost a month before they calmed the ghettos.

To being describing this place you could only use the word unimagionable. According to

The Holocaust History Project, “often times the Jews packed into cattle cars for ten days at a
 Byrum - 3 -

time with no food or water.” Upon arriving at the death camps the Nazis found most of them to

be already dead. They threw these people to the side and ordered any surviors to separate into

two lines, men and women. From there further seperation happened, the nearly dead from

everybody else. The dieing people immediately marched to the gassing chambers to be killed. If

one was strong or lucky enough to work they went to the work camps.. This process became

known as the selection process. From there an individual identification number was given, being

assigned and tattoed to their forearms.

Ruth Webber, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website, can recall

being sent to these camps when she says:

“I have seen a lot of dead people around, all over, and I guess when you see so
many, it doesn’t really make that much of an impression. One of the times in Ostrowiec
Lager [camp] I was in the, uh, outhouse, in the bathroom, which was in the corner of the,
uh, uh, area where like it was a big area in the center of the camp, and then all the
barracks were around it, mostly actually on two sides, and the outhouse was at the corner.
And I happened to have gone into the outhouse and, uh, all at once there is a commotion
and everybody is rushed into the barracks, because that’s where they were supposed to
go, and, uh I got stuck in the bathroom. Well, I got up and I looked out of the little
window on top, and what had happened is some people tried to escape, and they were
caught. And I guess they were wounded, and there was some shooting going on, and they
got about, I think, four people to dig graves just outside of the wire fence of the camp.
And they brought these, uh, people that tried to escape, that were, uh, shot already, but
they were not dead. And they made the other Jews bury these people that were not really
dead yet, and they were begging not to be buried, that they’re still alive, that they should
do something to kill them. But they didn’t do anything, they just buried them alive. And
these people had to do it, or else, these poor people who that were been picked to do it,
because otherwise they themselves would have would be in—dead. That was a very, very
traumatic experience. I can still hear them screaming.” (Personal Stories, paragraph 1)
Now that one can understand how horribly treated these people were and the conditions

in which they lived, one can be better related to how they might have felt and the horrors that

these people had to go through everyday. By the end, the Nazis found the most efficient ways to

kill as many people as they could in the least amount of time. In conclusion, even though their

fate would be horrific if they revolted, some had the spirit to stand up and fight back against the
 Byrum - 4 -

people who made their lives hell everyday. These people were made silent heroes by everybody

who was a prisoner at the time.

 Byrum - 5 -

Bibliography

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The Holocaust." Holocaust Encyclopedia.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10005143 (accessed September 8, 2006).

USHMM. "Nazi Camps." Personal Stories. 1992. United States Holoaust Memorial

Museum. 3 Sept. 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&moduleid=10005144&mediaid=1209>.

"Final Destination Treblinka." The Holocaust History Project. 5 May 2006. 5 Sept. 2008

<http://www.holocaust-history.org/operation-reinhard/final-destination-treblinka>.