Equality Essay Research Paper Amber HughesHistory 301Dr

Equality Essay, Research Paper

Amber Hughes

History 301

Dr. Lassiter

November 16, 1999

Equal Responsibility for All:

An In-depth Look at Four Prison Camps during WWII

Over six million people were either worked to death or murdered in cold blood inside German concentration camps during World War II. This number includes both Jews and non-Jews who died inside the camps, but does not count the many people who were executed in the towns and ghettos. Almost the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe was murdered during this war. Murdered alongside the Jews were political prisoners, homosexuals, gypsies and other minority groups. The Jews, however, were the only group singled out for absolute extermination (Chatel and Feree 6). Although many of the concentration camps and sub-camps were started for purposes other than the annihilation of minority groups, without exception, every camp contributed to the millions of dead left after the war.

The first concentration camp was started on March 22, 1933, at Dachau. “The initial decision to open concentration camps was made by Herman Goering, the minister of Prussia” (Chatel and Feree 1). In fact, Dachau’s first prisoners were not Jews. They were “political prisoners (e.g. Communists or Social Democrats), habitual criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and “anti-socials” (5). After the Second World War officially started, concentration camps began to spring up all over Eastern Europe. Camps such as Buchenwald, started in 1937, and Bergen-Belsen, established in 1943, were “horrible places where many people died” (Treblinka 1), but were not established for the sole purpose of mass murders. Bergen-Belsen, the worst known work camp, was a camp for prisoner exchange and was later used as a sick camp for prisoners who could no longer work in the other concentration camps (1). There were also six extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzer, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka (Chatel and Feree 4). All six extermination camps were located in Poland, with Auschwitz and Treblinka being the two worst camps. In its two years of existence, over 870,000 people were annihilated inside Treblinka’s hidden compound. In the 58 months that Auschwitz was functioning, almost 2.5 million people were murdered there. All death numbers have to be estimated from the camps because there are no certain records of how many people were killed by the Germans.

The concentration camps w ere bad enough for the prisoners inside, but at least they had more chance of living than those at an extermination camp. The prisoners who would soon live inside built the concentration camp at Buchenwald. “During the entire summer of 1937, the SS forced the prisoners to use their ‘free time’ to carry huge stones from the quarry to the camp” (Chatel 2). Any prisoner who carried a rock that was too small for the guard’s liking was shot dead (2). “The official goal of Buchenwald was the destruction of the prisoners by work” (3). They planned to work the poor, emaciated creatures until their bodies could no longer take the strain. Many prisoners died from exposure to the climate, horrible sanitary conditions and repeated beatings. Medical experiments also took the lives of some prisoners inside Buchenwald, but mostly the prisoners were worked to their death (3). The camp was started with only 300 working prisoners in 1937, but it soon became massively overcrowded, with a total population of 80,436 prisoners by 1945. Life inside the camp was terrible, but the prisoners were not sentenced to immediate death as inside the extermination camps. However in its eight years of existence, there were between 50,000 and 60,000 people killed inside Buchenwald’s gates (Chatel and Ferree 2). A testimony by a survivor of Buchenwald, Ludwig Scheinbrunn, claims that “As of September 21, 1939, I was obliged to carry corpses in Buchenwald. I did that for two and a half years. During the winter of 1939, they erected a tent camp near the actual crematorium, where more than 40 prisoners died every day, from cold and starvation (Chatel 5). According to CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow, who went to Buchenwald soon after its liberation, inside a small building, he witnessed “two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood [...]. [He] arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more that 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles [...]. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed” (Murrow 2).

At Bergen-Belsen, another concentration camp, the conditions varied based on the type of prisoner. The camp originated as a place to hold political prisoners of the war until they could be exchanged for German prisoners held inside Allied countries (Krakowski 185). There were five different camps inside Bergen-Belsen. The “prisoner’s camp” was where the 500 prisoners who built the camp lived. “Conditions in the camp were among the worst possible, and the mortality rate was very high” (186). This sub-camp was closed quickly due to the many deaths. The “special camp” was for the 2,400 “Jews who had papers.” Many of these prisoners were able to leave the country freely, but they were detained anyway. Many of these met their death upon transport to Auschwutz. The ‘neutral camp” had the best conditions of any camp. “The prisoners were nationals of neutral countries” (186). These pri