In 1940,in Oświęcim, Poland, a concentration camp opened for the prisoners of Germany’s invasion of Poland. Auschwitz, the main camp used by Adolf Hitler, was the single most substantial concentration camp built during the Holocaust and oversaw the casualties of over one million people, whilst even more were put to labor and tortured for “scientific reasons.” The anti-Semitism from Hitler and his followers consequently sent innocent Jews by the train into Auschwitz. By the end of Auschwitz’s use, one sixth of the lives claimed during the Holocaust were at Auschwitz. Auschwitz was not just a place where people were slain, it was far worse than could ever be conceptualized. To the prisoners there, death would have seemed like a gift. Of the survivors …show more content…
The iron fences were armed with guards who would shoot anybody who stepped foot in sight of the fence. The camp was monitored constantly to avoid anyone escaping to freedom. Prisoners of Auschwitz were kept on the brink of death and starvation. They were exploited for slave labor, with the hope that it would lead them toward freedom? At this point, death and freedom meant the same thing to them.
Prisoners were greeted with the phrase, Arbeit Macht Frei, meaning, work sets us free. This presented them the idea that working there would set them free. Auschwitz oversaw the deaths of over a million people from when it was finished and opened, to when the Nazi regime had ended. The people sent there were loaded in trains like canned sardines. Once they arrived, people were separated into two or more groups. The trains carried thousands of people to Auschwitz, and most of them were never seen again. If someone didn’t comply with Hitler or the guards there, that person would be terminated
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To the prisoners, this was their tragic and unfortunate reality. Death would seem to loom at the door every second of the day for them. What would seem like a rather normal day for the prisoners, could always be their last, yet they would never know until it was too late for them. Auschwitz wasn’t only a place of looming death, it was a torturous science lab, where humans were its test subjects. The excruciating and unethical experiments often involved testing medical procedures on prisoners. Procedures such as reattachment of lost limbs were performed at Auschwitz. The only people that even had a chance of gaining anything from the atrocities done in the medical laboratories in Auschwitz were Hitler’s army, moreover, that’s who the experiments were for. The lengths such doctors went to incredibly inhumane lengths just to support Hitler’s army for WWII. They collected data from testing in order to integrate the radical forms of medicine into the war effort. Most of the experiments were performed on twins and identical twins. Once the twins were seperated, they never saw each other again. Whenever a test subject died or was killed, that person was dissected for further information toward the war