Does anyone know about concentration camps? Help me!?

Question

During the cold war, I guess... If you know anything significant... It can be anything, like a movie recommendation even... It's just wwe are in desperate need of information! Help!

Answer 1

The term concentration camp lost its original relatively innocent meaning after Nazi concentration camps were discovered, and has ever since been understood to refer to a place of mistreatment, starvation, forced labour, and murder.

Beginning in 1940, Nazi Germany built several concentration camps and an extermination camp in the area, which at the time was under German occupation. The camps were a major element in the perpetration of the Holocaust; at least 1.1 million people were killed there, of whom over 90% were Jews.

At Auschwitz the families were separated, those unable to work gassed, and the remainder singled out for conscription. The girls were shaved bald and tattooed with camp numbers. Their possessions, including clothing and shoes, were taken away and replaced by prison uniform and shoes. The dress was in one piece, made of grey material, with a red cross on the back and the yellow Jew-patch on the sleeve.

The crematorium contains a large hall, a gas chamber and a furnace. People are assembled in the hall, which holds 2,000. They have to undress and are given a piece of soap and a towel as if they were going to the baths. Then they are crowded into the gas chamber which is hermetically sealed. Several SS men in gas masks then pour into the gas chamber through three openings in the ceiling a preparation of the poison gas maga-cyclon. At the end of three minutes all the persons are dead. The dead bodies are then taken away in carts to the furnace to be burnt.

Conditions in all camps for foreign workers were extremely bad. They were greatly overcrowded. The diet was entirely inadequate. Only bad meat, such as horsemeat or meat which had been rejected by veterinarians as infected with tuberculosis germs, was passed out in these camps. Clothing, too, was altogether inadequate. Foreigners from the east worked and slept in the same clothing in which they arrived. Nearly all of them had to use their blankets as coats in cold and wet weather. Many had to to walk to work barefoot, even in winter. Tuberculosis was particularly prevalent. The TB rate was four times the normal rate. This was the result of inferior housing, poor food and an insufficient amount of it, and overwork.

Books: Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Weisel
Movies: Shindlers List, The Pianist

Answer 2

Starting in 1933, the Nazis set up concentration camps within Germany, many of which were established by local authorities, to hold political prisoners and "undesirables". These early concentration camps were eventually consolidated into centrally run camps, and by 1939, six large concentration camps, located in Poland, had been established. After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, the concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis, including Jews and POWs, were either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept undernourished and tortured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust

Answer 3

You have been given some great answers about the Nazi concentration camps. You mentioned the cold war. Stalin and his ilk had them before Hitler did; and they continued after WWII. Read Alexander Solzenhitzen's "One Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago". They were dastardly places regardless of who operated them. Mostly killing places;genocide. You might reference the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as well. And don't forget the camps that the US forced Japanese-Americans into during WWII! The world's history of full of shameful deeds of human on human. And, just a sudden thought, I suppose the Reservations designated for the Native Americans are/were a form of a concentration camp.
I hope this helps you. Good luck with your project.

Answer 4

I think was an invention from the Bure wars in Southern Africa.

The idea was made perfect and perverse in my country Germany during World War II in order to erase what was called "lives unworthy to live" meaning this handicapped people and mainly Jewish people and Sinti/Roma people. The German abbreviation for concentration camp is KZ (=Konzentrationslager) but the translation doesn't really transmit the reality: it was not just concentration of people in a place, it included also an industrial killing machinery.

Millions of people lost their lives in camps like KZ Auschwitz/Poland and KZ Dachau/Germany (near Munich) or KZ Sachsenhausen/Germany (near Weimar). This tragedy is summed up under the name "holocaust" and you will easily find a lot of descriptions on google.

Answer 5

Auschwitz was the most notorious of concentration camps during WWII. They did burn the bodies of dead jews in furnaces but they also gased them. They would take a large group of them gas them and then dump the bodies into a huge body bit and bury them. The living conditions were horrific for those marked as jews. They would lay and sit in their own feces and urine even drink they're urine if I remeber correctly. Just a little extra tid bit there was a time in our country's history that we had concentration camps. They were for people of Asian decent or nationality. Because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor Americans became afraid and angry of those with asian backgrounds and nationalitys. The government rounded them up and put them in camps. For more information check the web here is a site for auschwitz.

www.auschwitz.org

Answer 6

Yes, Schindler's List is a great film; also more recently The Pianist. Other good, excessible resources: Night by Elie Weisel, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Number the Stars.

Answer 7

Concentration camps are most infamous from World War 2, not the cold war. A good movie to begin your research is "Schindler's List". A good book to read is "Surviving Aushwitz" by Primo Levi.

Answer 8

There's this thing called the internet where you can find out all sorts of history and facts. Try it.

Concentration camps during the Cold War?... is this what public schools have been reduced to?

Answer 9

Concentration camp was the phrase commonly used for Jewish, homosexual, gypsy and mentally handicapped internment camps used by the Nazi Germans in WWII.; ie, Dachau, Auschwitz, and others. The Nazis forced the Jews and others to work to death and forced them to undergo horrific medical experiments. Later, a strategic measure named the "Final Solution" called for a total annihilation of the Jews in Europe in the late 1930s and 40s. The camps were used for the purpose of putting the Jews to death in gas chambers.

Answer 10

If you want a movie recomendation then you should watch Schlinder's List or The Diary of Anne Frank. Or even the Grey Zone.