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Comparing concentration camps

Lesley Gutierrez
UWRT 1103-005
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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2
Comparing Concentration Camps

Concentration camps are widely known to be places where a group of people suffer.
Unless there is a relationship between an individual and a concentration camp, most individuals
do not know what a particular concentration camp was ever like. However, it is certain that the
ultimate goal of a concentration camp was to kill as many people possible and get free labor
from that group of individuals. Over 20,000 camps have been researched, out of those
Auschwitz, Belzec, and Chelmno are greatly known. Camps like Gross-Rossen and Putskow on
the other hand are not so known.
The SS, also known as Schutzstaffel, is a state within a state in Germany. The staff within
the state identified themselves as the racial elite. In 1939, they took on the responsibility of
answering the Jewish question, two years later in 1941 their solution was to exterminate all of
the European Jews (SS Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2016).
The camps
Auschwitz is undoubtedly the most known concentration camp from the holocaust, infact it was the largest of its kind established by the Nazi regime (Holocaust Encyclopedia,
2016). Auschwitz was a series of camps that were known as Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II, and
Auschwitz III.
Auschwitz I was the original camp. SS physicians performed medical experiments on
prisoners which included research on: infants, twins, and dwarfs. The camp only intended to be a
concentration camp for Polish prisoners, at first but, as the number of inmates grew, they were
able to expand on Auschwitz through forced labor and Auschwitz I became the administrative
center for the whole complex.

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Auschwitz II, more commonly known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, is considered to be the

camp responsible for the killing majority of the Jews. The inside structure consisted of three gas
chambers and four large crematoria where they carried out the mass killings. Zyklon B gas was
used in all three gas chambers. Living conditions in the barracks was bad. The barracks were
unsanitary, they were extremely over crowded, and lacked heat. People died every night. The
SS designed the barracks not so much to house people as to destroy them (Auschwitz
concentration camp, 2016).
Auschwitz III was a labor camp like Auschwitz I was at first. The life expectancy at
Auschwitz III was about three months considering that a fifth of the population was lost each
month. The people who did not work efficiently or for other lousy reasons would be sent to
Auschwitz II to be killed. The estimated number of people killed in all of Auschwitz was about
1.1 million out of the 1.3 million that were deported there.
Chelmno, a different concentration camp, was the first concentration camp that began
mass killing operations, starting in December of 1941. The SS used carbon monoxide to
exterminate the victims which included the Jews (majority), Gypsies, and Roma. Then the
deceased were thrown into a nearby forest where the SS had already dug mass graves. Members
of the SS guarded the facility and killed people in trucks, in which the exhaust pipes had been
reconfigured to pump carbon monoxide gas into sealed paneled spaces behind the cabs of the
vehicles (Killing centers, 2016). Approximately 150,000 people were killed here in just two
years.
Belzec was a camp constructed to aid the Germans in Operation Reinhard, a plan to
exterminate two million Jews. It began operating in March 1942 making it the second
concentration camp to open during the Holocaust period. This concentration camp, like

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Chelmno, killed most of its victims by locking them into gas chambers where trucks directly
pumped carbon monoxide gas into there. A few other victims were shot instead. Another few
were selected from each transport and were essentially used to do the SSs dirty work such as
removing the bodies from the gas chambers and burying them into mass graves.
Putskow was originally a small village in Poland, people that were settled there were
forced to evacuate in order for the SS to construct a new concentration camp. The village was
then burned down after they evacuated. The first set of victims died from terrible conditions of
life (The forgotten camps, 2016) and the survivors were executed. In 1941, the Germans built
another camp, on the same property, for Russian prisoners of war. In 1942 a third camp was
built, on the same property once again, this one was for Polish workers. Survivors from the third
camp were transferred to other camps and those buildings were torn down. They were not
sufficient enough. About 15,000 people were killed at Putskow.
Gross-Rossen was a concentration camp that was used as a slave quarry devoted to
producing stone for important building projects (A narrow bridge to life, 2016). The camp
provided Jewish forced labor for local construction. They produced electronics, munitions, and
parts for airplanes and rockets. A survivor recalls, the place was the very embodiment of hell (A
narrow bridge to life, 2016). Four years later Gross-Rossen was the administrative center of
more than one hundred sub camps.
Camp life and activities
In order to understand the cruelty of concentration camps during the Holocaust, it is
important to have primary resources. Documentaries, interviews, and published stories from
survivors have made it possible to see what it was like to spend just one day in Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was a death factory, no one was intended to survive (A day in Auschwitz, 2016).

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According to Kitty Hart-Moxon, a Jewish survivor, from the moment they got to camp
families were split. People were stripped of everything they owned and left with only a bowl for
food. Everyones hair was shaved, they got tattooed with their own number, and were then
smothered in a green substance.
The prisoners day began at 4:30 in the morning, they were rushed out of the barracks to
line up outside, they were forced to do physical exercise while they waited on the guards to
arrive. When the guards arrived, the prisoners were put to work all day with no breaks. The no
breaks rule was taken very seriously. The guards would time prisoners while they were using the
latrines. Due to limited space in the latrines the only bowl the prisoners owned, the bowl they
had to use for food, had to be used as their latrine sometimes. With scarce water, there was no
way to wash the bowl where they would later eat from; Unless it was winter then they would
wipe it off with the snow. Needless to say, disease rates were high.
Kitty talks about survival in the camp. According to her story, survival was based on luck,
friendship, and yourself. Life in Auschwitz was so miserable that it quite literally dehumanized
the victims. Kitty says that in order to survive you had to think like an animal, what would an
animal do (A day in Auschwitz, 2016)? Friendship was essential to survival because that way
they were able to share certain things. For example, when food was served if you had a friend at
the front of the line, you and the friend would not starve as much. On the other hand, a persons
own luck determined their survival as selection was random and occurred daily.
Conclusion
Factors however that helped the SS succeed in the attempt to exterminate Jews included
strategies that dehumanized the Jews, the amount of SS officers involved, and the amount of
work that the Nazis wanted done. The SS guards were very strict and they devoted each day to

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making the Jews day miserable. Life for the Jews got so bad that they felt worse than animals.
Dehumanizing the Jews first made them more vulnerable which in turn would make it easier to
kill them. After giving up on life, many Jews killed themselves. The amount of SS guards was so
massive that of the millions of Jews and minorities, less than a quarter of a million survived. The
imprisoned were watched at all times, it is obvious that the SS officers were very well organized.
Although there werent many survivors from the Holocaust genocide many who did
survive have told their stories, they want their story to be known. They deserve to be hold and it
is our responsibility so that something like this doesnt repeat itself. Because there arent many
files on the camps we rely on the information that witnesses or survivors give us. Most survivors
come from the more known camps because those camps were amongst the biggest ones, like
Auschwitz, some people were bound to survive. However, with smaller camps, the SS guards
were able to pay more close attention to each individual making it more impossible to escape or
survive. For that reason, smaller camps are less known, because not as many people survived to
tell their story about the small camps.

References

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(2015). A Day in Auschwitz. [Motion Picture]. United States: Digital Philosophy.
Ordinary people robbed of their future
Auschwitz concentration camp. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp
Cox J. (2016). To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford
University Press
Holocaust Encyclopedia Auschwitz. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005189
Holocaust Encyclopedia killing centers. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007327
Holocaust Encyclopedia SS. Retrieved November 10, 2016, from
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007400
Straede T. (2011). A narrow bridge to life: Jewish forced labor and survival in the Gross-Rosen
camp system. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 25, 154-157
The forgotten camps. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from
http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/MainCampsEng.html