The Second World War is a terrible time. Those of the people who found her and remember the horrors that they had experienced, do not like to remember that period of their lives. This is especially true of those unfortunate people who saw with their own eyes the Nazi death camps.
Much has been written and said about this phenomenon, but it does not get any less terrible from this in the least.
What it is?
This is the name of the place for the forced isolation of people who are objectionable to the ruling fascist regime . Unlike prisons, their creators were not guided by any norms of humanity. Anyone could enter the death camps, including women, the elderly, and even children. As a rule, even those who survived in those inhuman conditions became hopeless invalids.
Children who were prisoners of the camps received terrible mental disorders, being unable to forget about all the horrors that they witnessed.
What were they intended for, what were they?
In Germany in those years, these institutions were intended for terror and genocide in relation to both civilians and prisoners of war. Everybody knows about them as “concentration camps”, although this species was just one of many. The main species were labor camps and death camps, in which people were killed literally in a conveyor way. As events unfolded on all fronts, and in a far from favorable way for Nazi Germany , the popularity of these varieties grew.
Why were they created?
They were created immediately after the Nazi regime came to power. The primary task for them was the repression and physical extermination of all dissenters. Many believe that the Nazis started their organization only with the
outbreak of World War II, but this is far from the case: in the same Dachau, they opened their first “branch” back in 1933, when nothing reminded of Hitler’s crazy plans to crush the whole world.
By the beginning of the war, the death camps held in their walls more than 300 thousand anti-fascists, who were captured both in Germany itself and in the countries it occupied. Most of them were built just on the conquered territories. First, the Nazis pretended to build the usual places for prisoners of war, and many believed so almost until the end of the war. The truth was much worse: it turned out that the Nazis used these camps as places where millions of people were physically destroyed.
We still don’t know and probably will never be able to figure out reliably how many people the Nazi executioners actually killed. At the final stages of the war, there were cases when the selected, most combat-ready SS divisions, until the last day, covered up the "recycling" of the camps, which consisted in the complete destruction of all prisoners and documents that could tell the world about all the indescribable atrocities of the Nazis.
About their real purpose
During the war, the Americans and the British were extremely active in pushing for the idea that, in fact, the Third Reich death camps did not exist at all. Say, all these objects are ordinary prisons for prisoners of war. But this is far from the case. These terrible places existed: their main purpose was the physical destruction of people. First of all, they killed the Slavs, Gypsies and Jews, who were recognized as "inferior" people. In order to take away human lives with maximum convenience, builders took care of efficient gas chambers and crematoriums.
Many of the Third Reich death camps were aimed at round-the-clock and continuous extermination of people. When designing them, they did not attach any importance to the maintenance of people: it was assumed that the doomed prisoners would wait no more than a few hours in their turn. Through the crematoriums these places every day (!) Passed by several thousand people. The "death factories" include the following camps: Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and some others. Of course, this list of death camps is far from complete.
How were prisoners treated?
All prisoners became completely powerless, their life was not worth anything, they could be killed at any time, just “in the mood”. All aspects of the lives of these unfortunates were strictly controlled. They did not stand on ceremony with the violators: most often they were killed on the spot. But this was far from the most terrible fate, since the Nazi doctors constantly needed experimental subjects to conduct the next experiment.
How were the prisoners of the camps divided?
It should be noted that at first the prisoners were classified according to many parameters, including both race, place of detention, and the reason for the arrest. Initially, all prisoners were divided into four large groups: anti-fascists (political opponents), those same representatives of “inferior races”, as well as ordinary criminals and “potentially unwanted elements”.
All prisoners from the second group eventually went to the Nazi death camps, where they were massively killed. They, at the slightest suspicion of unreliability, were tortured by SS guards; they were sent to the most difficult, dangerous and harmful jobs.
Among the political prisoners, sometimes even members of the nationalist party came across who were accused of some serious "crimes against the race", members of religious sects. You could even get to the death camp for listening to a foreign news channel on the radio.
To the "unreliable" ranked homosexuals, people prone to panic, just unhappy. Oddly enough, the “purebred” criminals were in the best position, since they were used by the administration as assistant overseers; numerous privileges were applied to them.
Distinctive signs of prisoners of camps
It is well known that in the camps people were assigned serial numbers. Much less is known about the fact that prisoners had to wear multi-colored triangles on the left side of the chest and on the right knee, as well as a number in the form of a patch on clothes. Only in Auschwitz it was applied directly to the human body, in the form of a tattoo. So, the “ red ” triangle was intended to be “political,” the criminals received a green badge, all the “unreliable” had a black triangle, homosexuals wore pink, and gypsies wore brown.
The requirements for Jews were stricter. In addition to the usual classification triangle, they also relied on yellow, and they were obliged to sew “David's star” on clothes. In addition, those Jews who were guilty of diluting "Aryan blood" who dared to marry or marry a representative of the "true Aryan race" were especially distinguished. A black border was applied to their yellow triangles.
Prisoners of war were classified according to their country. So, the French were marked “F”, the Poles were supposed to use the letter “P”, etc. The letter “K” marked war criminals (Kriegsverbrecher), the “A” sign marked malicious violators of labor discipline (Arbeit - “work”). All people with mental disabilities should have a Blid patch on their clothes, "fool." If the administration suspected a prisoner of preparing to escape, a red-and-white target was put on his clothes (on his chest and on his back), which allowed the guards to shoot such unfortunates at the slightest suspicion of disloyalty on their part.
How many people were in the camps?
It is generally accepted that the Nazi death camps totaled no more than three to four dozen objects, but the reality is much worse. Historians have established that everything in the system of "correctional labor" institutions included more than 14 thousand (!) Organizations of various kinds, each of which played a role in the elimination of millions of people. More than 18 million people passed through their walls alone, with at least 11 million people killed.
When Hitlerism was finally defeated in the war, it was the German death camps that became one of the most disgusting acts of the Germans. Their construction was condemned during the Nuremberg trials as "a grave crime against humanity." At present, no distinction is made in Germany between the people who were held in these camps and those who were imprisoned in “places equivalent to concentration, correctional labor institutions”.
But there were such places among them that even now the thought of them trembles the most seasoned scholars and historians. Take at least the Auschwitz death camp. According to the most conservative estimates, more than one and a half million people died in its walls. But they included the largest number of adults, while in some places the Hitlerite monsters did not disdain to kill thousands of completely defenseless children, the oldest of which was only 12 years old.
Kurtengof
But one of the most terrifying places was the Salaspil death camp. He received his monstrous glory due to the fact that it contained many juvenile prisoners. He was in Latvia, which "the valiant warriors of the Reich freed from the yoke of the Soviet invaders."
They "liberated" extremely successfully: in this camp alone, at least 100 thousand people died by martyrdom. This assessment is clearly underestimated, but it will never be possible to establish the truth: in 1944, all camp archives were pedantically destroyed during the evacuation.
What was going on here?
The Salaspil death camp was “glorified” by the incredible monstrosity of the crimes committed here. So, the most common method of killing children was the complete pumping of blood from them, which was then used in German hospitals and hospitals for military personnel. They also tested various methods of transplantology.
After the war, not far from the territory where this children's death camp was located, they found a strange piece of land that was literally saturated with some kind of oily substance. Researchers who began to study it were in terrible horror: in a huge pit, in which the earth was mixed with human ash, they found unburned remains of bones. Lots of.
All of them belonged to children five to nine years old. As it turned out later, almost all of them were “blood donors”, whose bodies were pumped out literally dry.
Other "experiments"
Infectious diseases were rampant in the camp, the main of which was measles. Truly inhuman experiments were carried out on the children who became ill with her: they were frozen, starved, limbs were amputated to "establish the limits of the human body." In addition, the "experimenters" washed the unfortunate with iced water.
In this case, the infection quickly went deep into the body, the children died in terrible torment, and the agony sometimes lasted several days.
Like all death camps (photos of which are in the article), this was extremely actively used by German "doctors" to test new vaccines and antimicrobials. New antidotes were tested on children, for which they massively poisoned them with arsenic. We found out the resistance of the causative agents of gastrointestinal diseases to antimicrobials that existed at that time, for which young prisoners were infected with typhoid fever, dysentery and other diseases.
conclusions
Any war is inherently extremely cruel and meaningless. It does not solve the contradictions, but only leads to the accumulation of completely new ones. But World War II recalled that some war crimes have neither a statute of limitations nor grounds for forgiveness.
We must always remember the death camps in which millions of lives were taken. In no case should one forget about such monstrous crimes against human nature itself, as this will be a betrayal of the memory of their many, often nameless victims.