Auschwitz Birkenau Research Paper

The Holocaust involved the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime. The word “Holocaust” has a Greek origin meaning, “sacrifice by fire.” During this time, the Nazis believed that the Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jewish population was “racially inferior” (Introduction to the Holocaust). The Nazis viewed the Jews as a threat and a target to use as a scapegoat. The Jewish population was kicked out of their homes and forced into the “ghettos” to be separated. Soon after, during the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government created concentration camps to detain the Jewish population (Introduction to the Holocaust). The Jews were then transported by train from the ghettos to these camps. These camps were

As stated in Auschwitz A History In Photographs, “Auschwitz was not the first Nazi concentration camp, but it was without a doubt the most infamous” (Świebocka, Teresa, Jonathan Webber, and Connie Wilsack). The death camp was established in 1940 to retain the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Auschwitz-Birkenau was divided into three main areas. It consisted of “...a large area of wooden huts and brick barracks, and two gas chambers, attached to which were crematoria in which the bodies of those murdered were burned almost at once” (Dear, Ian, and M. R. D. Foot) Analysts estimate that the “...number of people murdered at Auschwitz was somewhere between 2.1 million and 4 million” (Auschwitz-Birkenau: History & Overview). These prisoners faced their death from starvation, forced labor, disease, and terrifying medical experiments. The first commander of Auschwitz was Rudolph Höss. The function of the camp, initially, was to intimidate the Polish and to imprison those who resisted the German government. However, in 1941, Heinrich Himmler (who was responsible for “The Final Solution”) ordered the enlargement of the camp. The next year, Camp Auschwitz became “...the center of the mass killing of the Jewish population” (Auschwitz-Birkenau: History & Overview). The Nazis marked all the Jews living in Europe for total extermination, regardless of their age, sex, occupation, citizenship, or political views (Auschwitz-Birkenau: History & Overview). They were killed for one reason only, because they were Jews. One of the most known methods of this mass murder was the gas chambers. The Germans would tell the prisoners that they were going for a shower. After all of the prisoners arrived in the chambers, they would lock it shut and dump in a gas called zyklon B, which would then kill large amounts of people almost instantly. These horrors continued for about