World War 2 Help!?

Question

I want to know how you feel about wat the Germans did to the Jews, killing them all by gassing them with toxic gasses! Is this right? Shoudl they have done this? And how many inocent lives were lost by these killings? I want to know everything about concerntration camps, everything you know!
-Thank-You!

Wow all the answers so far are excelent! Thanks! Keep the good answers going!

Answer 1

~If you want to know about the mass murders and the gas chambers, you don't want to know about the concentration camps. From the first, at Dachau, the concentration camps were neither designed nor used for this purpose.

The idea of concentration camps was born with Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. The world's first such camps were built for the Indians in Tennessee. The name itself was coined by the British for the British internment centers of the Boer Wars.

The Nazi concentration camps were not initially established for the Jews. None of the camps housed only Jews. They were built to confine enemies of the Reich and undesirables as defined by the government. Internees included journalists who criticized the government, clergymen who opposed government policy, the mentally and physically disabled, communists, criminals, Gypsies, Serbs, Slavs, Poles, Russians, POWs, important prisoners, such as the officers who were accused of being involved in the Hitler assassination plot, Jehovah's Witnesses, academicians, dissenting judges, and a multitude of others, including the Jews. The camps were brutal and millions died in them, but the were not built as or intended to be killing factories. Many of the Jews there would have been there for their 'crimes' had they not been Jewish. They would have worn a triangle instead of a star but otherwise their fate would have been the same.

The Final Solution was a Jewish issue. That is the name given the Jewish genocide. There was no similar name for the eradication of other national, racial, religious or ethnic groups. The Nazi goal was to kill all of the estimated 11 million Jews in Europe. At first, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht and rounded up the undesirables and the Jews and shot them on site. Babi Yar is a good example of such an operation. Those not killed immediately were then shipped to concentration camps. There is no accurate tally of Einsatzgruppen murders but Heydrich and Himmler gave them a blank check. They did their jobs with gusto.

An estimated 15 million Soviet civilians died during the war. Some of them were collateral damage of the mega-battles in places like Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad and Smolensk. Some were killed by Stalin's order and some were victims of the Einsatzgruppen. There is no way to account for the Slavs and Ukrainians killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Those millions do not usually get included into the atrocity totals.

Himmler decided the shootings were inefficient and were having an adverse effect on the morale of the troops. That is when Operation 14f13 was implemented. The Death Camps or Extermination Camps were constructed and designed for the sole purpose of efficient, industrialized killing. Chelmno, the first, opened for business in late 1941. The other six followed within the next several months. The were not built to kill only Jews. Jasenovac, in fact, was built for the Serbs. Some Jews died there as well, just as non-Jews were murdered at Auschwitz II or Majdanek. It is the seven death camps that you should focus on if you are interested in the gassing. Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) was the biggest and busiest. It was connected to Auschwitz I which was only a concentration camp and not a death camp. The others were Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek (Lublin), and Belzek.

Stutthof, primarily a transition camp and a concentration camp for non-Jewish Poles had mobile gas chambers (seated 150) to supplement the built in ones as needed. The guards there had a tendency to march prisoners into the Baltic then mow them down with machine guns. Stutthof was built as a concentration camp though, and used only sparingly for executions. It was at Stutthof that Professor Richard Spanner, according to his own testimony, experimented with making soap from human fat. Also according to Spanner, he made less than 100 kg of the product and it was only used for injection into joint ligaments. When Himmler heard rumors of Spanner's experiments, he ordered an immediate halt to them.

Maly Trascianiec was built as a POW camp for Russian prisoners. After the Wehrmacht took Minsk, it was used for a time for extermination of the Minsk Jew and communists and other undesirables. It had mobile gas chambers but usually prisoners were marched into the nearby forests and shot through the back of the neck. Executions happened at all the hundreds of concentration camps, satellite camps and auxiliary camps, but only 7 Extermination camps were built exclusively as murder factories.

Himmler realized the killing factories were depriving the Fatherland of a valuable source of slave labor and ordered a halt of Operation 14f13 in late 1943. He stopped the killing at Jasenovac earlier because the were killing so many Serbs so quickly. {It was reported that one night, August 29, 1942, some guards had a bet as to which of them could kill the most inmates. Petar Brzica, a priest, won the prize by reportedly slitting 1,360 throats with a butcher knife. The story is suspect but such a contest is probable.} Children got special treatment: they were taken for a walk in the woods, where their skulls were crushed with a mallet.

In all, about 3.6 million were killed in the death camps. About 2.7 of them were Jews. In all, about 18 million died in concentration and death camps and in places like Babi Yar. About 6 million of them were Jews.

But for the heroic effort of the Red Army, the Extermination Camps would have been much busier, and more than 7 would have been built. The Nazis had targeted some 30 million Slavs for extinction. They got some, but when the Soviets turned back Barbarossa, the genocide of the Slavs was put on hold. When the Germans lost at Stalingrad, then Smolensk, then Kursk, they had all they could do to save their own skins and the campaign against the Slavs never got going in earnest.

The campaign against the Roma was near 100% effective. They were fewer of them so the total dead is not as high as the Jewish count. The total tally of murdered Serbs is right up there as a percentage of population, well ahead of the Jews ratio.

What do I think about what the Nazis - not the Germans and not the Wehrmacht - did to the Jews. I think it was horrendous, but it was more humane than what the US Bureau of Indian Affairs did to the Indians. A bullet, carbon-monoxide or Zyklon B are much more merciful ways to kill than is the distribution of tainted meat or blankets infected with measles and smallpox. I also think that it is an absolute disgrace that the Jews comprise about only 1/3 of the victims of the camps, less if one includes the on-location killing fields, but the other 12 million and more souls are forgotten or ignored.

Should they have done it? Under Nazi philosophy, yes. What kind of question is that? If they didn't think they should have, they wouldn't have. The rest of the world didn't get all that upset when Jan Karski brought his photographs and eyewitness accounts out of the Warsaw ghetto and Belzek in the summer of '42. The Nazis had every right to expect a worldwide yawn. They knew what happened to the MS St. Louis passengers and they knew what was done (or, more correctly - not done) at the Evian Conference.

Evian was the time the rest of the could have stepped up to the plate and saved the Jews. Their intended upcoming annihilation was no secret but no one lifted a finger. The US didn't even send a government official as its representative even though the conference was convened at FDR's initiative. Of course, Roosevelt had promised Chamberlain that he would not mention Great Britain's anti-Jewish policy in Palestine and her failure to fulfill the Balfour Declaration on the condition that the Brits didn't bring up the fact that the US hadn't allowed stated quota Jew immigration into the the States for years.

The National Socialists are no more innocent and no less guilty than their US cousins who conducted a rather successful genocide campaign of their own against the Indians. Right or wrong, good or bad, they did it. Can't be undone. Listen to the talk on the streets and in the Fundamentalist churches about nuking the Ragheads and Camel Jockey and Slants back to the stone ages. It can happen again. With people like Georgie the Younger at the helm, it is likely to happen again.

Answer 2

Oh dear, surely you've read about the horrors of WWII...

I think it was awful what the Germans did to the Jews. But it was all an act of jealousy and supreme power. After all, Hitler blamed the Jews for being wealthier than most, having successful businesses and everything.

From the other side, the Jewish already knew they were superior to the Germans before the war had started. Either way, both sides wanted to claim their mark.

However, it doesn't change the fact that the Germans, preferably Nazis, were evil in their actions. More than 6 million Jewish people were killed.

Answer 3

Of course it was horrible. In most death camps, the gas was from an engine-in other words, in was the pollution. The gas used in Auwswhitz and Dachau was Cyclone B. There were isolated cases of children remaining alive after spending time in the gas chamber being gassed. Millions-Jews and non Jews-where killed this way. Of course, tens of millions of others were killed in other ways. But yes, being gassed is a horrible way of dying.

Answer 4

The Germans did was was nesecery at the time. They killed many inosent lives. Concentration camps didn't hold only Jewis people, in there were slavens to. My grandma almoust end up in one, because she is Slovenian. But her nose save her. She has small nose and that is not how should Jewis or Slaven people look like. There were many concentration camps in Europe in WWII. But Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and Dachau (northwest from Munich) were the worst.

3 milion people died in Auschwitz but these number are not just Jews. After 1943 were in these camps German people too, every body who didn't like Adolf Hitler.The complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz I, the administrative center; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager; and Auschwitz III (Monowitz), a work camp. If you are reading book about how many Jewis people were in the camp, it will say 90 %, but that is a lie.

Dachau-In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of which nearly one-third were Jews.[3] 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps,[4] primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide. In early 1945, there was a typhus epidemic in the camp followed by an evacuation, in which large numbers of the weaker prisoners died.

Question is (are). Why didn't Jewis people fight, they fight with Palestinians? Was all these plan for Jews to get own country?Why no body talks about others who were in those camps? Stalin killed many more Jews before WWII and during WWII, did you know about that?

Answer 5

international conflict a million: a million)Franc Ferdinand Asassinated by using Serbian Sparking international conflict a million 2)Germany march into Belgium, Britain declare conflict on Germany 3)German's U-2 submarines sink united statesS Lusitania 4)Zimmerman notes further the united statesinto conflict 5)Treaty of Versaille ended international conflict a million international conflict 2: a million)Germany invade Poland sparking international conflict 2 2)Japan attack Pearl Harbor bringing the united statesinto WW2 3)eastern Internment camp, All eastern in united statesa. have been sent to camp throughout the time of the conflict 4)D-Day Allies destroy into Europe 5)Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki thoroughly destroying the citys.

Answer 6

Here are some sites you might like to visit.
They have some of the information you're after.
There is too much to put here.

Conditions in the Nazi Concentration Camps
http://home.snu.edu/~dwilliam/s98/holocaust/conditionsinnaziconcentrationcamps.html

Map of Eastern Europe, indicating locations of major Nazi concentration and death camps.
http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blmap.htm

Holocaust: The Camps
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/

The Dachau Gas Chambers.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/

Woman's story of life in concentration camps grips students .
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/holo08.shtml

Answer 7

Well, I am a complete expert on WWII. Hitler did that because when he was a child, he was picked on or teased by Jewish people, and he held a grudge against them. He also wanted to take complete control of Europe because he wanted everyone in Germany to know who he was and respect him.