The Holocaust | Teen Ink

The Holocaust

May 25, 2011
By CAtlan SILVER, Marietta, Georgia
CAtlan SILVER, Marietta, Georgia
9 articles 0 photos 1 comment

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 no one would have believed it possible that twelve years later he would become one of the most infamous people of all time. Adolf Hitler had destroyed millions of people all around the world had created one of the most horrific battles in war history. In addition to all of this, he created a racial state and anyone not German was persecuted, enslaved or simply murdered. Among the many victims of Nazi persecution, most tragically of all, Hitler made it his aim to murder every Jewish person within his territory. Men, women and children, all were to be killed. He succeeded in killing over two thirds of them. The Holocaust is the time where mainly Jewish people, Gypsies, disabled people etc would be put in concentration camps or killed immediately.
In 1918 Germany lost the First World War. Among the war veterans returning from the trenches was Adolf Hitler. On his return to Munich he worked for the German army, spying on new political parties. Between them was a small party known as the German Workers Party, which he joined in September 1919. In 1921 he then became the leader of the now renamed National Socialist German Workers' Party, now known as The Nazis.
The Nazis developed a system of camps in order to enforce their rule of terror, first of all in Germany. The first concentration camp to be built was at Dachau, near Munich, in March 1933. Communists, socialists and trade unionists were put here, or anyone who disagreed with the Nazis. In most of the camps life was very hard and cruel for the Jews and every one of the inmates. In the early morning all the prisoners were roused for roll call. They then would stand in all types of weather conditions to be called to make sure that every one was there. Although the loss of life was expected in these camps, and crematories were built to deal with the dead, gas chambers were only constructed in six camps in Poland.
In September 1939, the Nazis developed a plan to round up the Jews of Poland and relocate them into areas known as ghettos. Soon, starvation, overcrowding, and degradation started to be more common. The reason why they did this is still unclear, but it is known that they had an aim, which may have been either the deportation or the mass murder of the Jews. Thousands of people started to die as conditions deteriorated. Food was in desperately short supply and children often took on the role of smuggling food from outside the ghetto to help their families to live. Slave laborers were taken from among the population of the ghettos to help with the German war. These individuals were worked hard with no pay and little food. Work did mean that, for a short period, a person’s value to the Nazis might prevent his or her deportation to harsher conditions in the concentration camps.


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