During the Holocaust families were torn apart in places known as concentration camps. For example, these camps, forced the Jews into slave labor and harsh conditions. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust mostly because of concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler was influential during the Holocaust because of his monopoly over the police and Nazi party.
Heinrich Himmler had extremely strong anti-Semitic feelings, and many Jews suffered due to that. For example, “At the same time he had acquired unified command of all German state police to become Reichsfuhrer SS and chief of German police” (“Himmler, Heinrich”441). As chief of police, Himmler was in control of masses of people. This meant everything that the police or Gestapo did against
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For example, “The killing of Jews represented for Himmler the fulfillment of a mission” (“Himmler, Heinrich” 99). Himmler felt good and felt as if he had accomplished something from killing Jews. He felt satisfaction from Jew’s death, and continued to do it throughout almost all of the war. In addition, “These camps were not only the site of genocide, they were also the source of slave labor for the German war machine” (Axelrod,par.6). Himmler did not feel enough satisfaction from killing them, so he gave them a use as slaves as well. Slave labor in these camps was extremely brutal. Therefore, “He used these powers to exploit Jews and Slavs as slave laborers, to gas millions of Jews, and to institute pseudo-medical experiments on Jews, Gypsies, and other “asocial elements” to determine their resistance to extremes of cold and decompression” (“Himmler, Heinrich”91). Himmler no longer saw the Jews as people, and Himmler treated them as lab rats. Experiments were done on them to see the limits of decompression and cold on humans. In other words, Himmler was psychologically ill, and got satisfaction from killing an insanely enormous amount of