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Ww2 Concentration Camp Essay

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For many people during WWII, life in concentration camps was a cruel and unjust fate. Before we dive into this topic, it is important to define what a concentration camp is. A concentration camp is defined as a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, radical or pacifist groups, etc. Its savage conditions and inhumane treatment of innocent victims left an indelible mark on their souls. The prisoners' physical suffering was only matched by the psychological torture they endured: starvation, sleep deprivation, overcrowding and substandard living quarters, incessant labor for little pay, and no freedom to move around. Furthermore, prisoners were frequently subjected to gruesome …show more content…

The Nazis routinely subjected prisoners to all-day hard labor. If they did not perform their duties well enough, they were beaten until they passed out. These prisoners were not fed a nutritious diet and were not getting the vitamins they needed every day. “The soup was unappetizing, and newly arrived prisoners were often unable to eat it, or could do so only in disgust. Supper consisted of about 300 grams of black bread, served with about 25 grams of sausage, or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade or cheese. The bread served in the evening was supposed to cover the needs of the following morning as well” Due to the prisoners not getting enough food, starvation was the largest problem in these concentration camps. When your body does not get enough food to produce the energy it starts to use everything in your body that is stored up. For example, this would be any type of muscle mass, fat, and tissues that are in the organs. Once everything was finally used up by the prisoners it would cause them to get sick. Overcrowding is another type of torture in these camps. These camps had built rooms for long-term workers, which could hold up to 1000 people. Another source of disease is the large number of people in these camps. When combined with a lack of hygiene and a large population, disease was extremely common. It is impossible to have any kind of privacy or alone time in these camps. As previously stated, overcrowding is another reason why there was not enough food, water, and supplies for everyone at the camp. For example “In every camp, Allied soldiers encountered appalling scenes. Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British forces on 15 April 1945. It had become exceptionally overcrowded after the arrival of survivors of the death marches. Thousands of unburied bodies lay strewn around the camp, while in

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Along with, the guards did not want to feed the prisoners a ton of food because they wanted the prisoners to be scronney so then the prisoners could overpower all of the guards. “Meals usually consisted of a bowl of broth with a bit of vegetable and a bowl or a half bowl of rancid rice, sometimes mixed with a little barley” (149). The low caloric intake made it so the POWs would lose a couple of pounds a day. Not just by an undernourished meal, but also by having diarrhea and vomiting all the time. The Red Cross team started to send supplies to the POWs because they knew they have not been getting their nutrient they needed to survive.

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The prison camps were acompanied by about 120 soilders per camp. They were fed but, the camps were not sanitary. Prisoners enjoyed playing sports while at the camp but, soon the camps started to flood with people. Over10,00 people flooded into the salisbury camp. With all of the overflow of men lack of food came.

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The reason that the camp did not have enough tents for all of the prisoners was because “approximately 400 more arrived each day. By the end of June, 26,000 men were penned in an area originally meant for only 10,000 prisoners” (Civil War Trust). Since the soldiers were entering the prison so fast, then prison guards did not have time to expand the prison because every day four hundred people were entering the prison and the population grew to fast for everyone to keep up with. The camp also did not have enough food for all of the prisoners so to overcome this problem the food rations were made to be extremely small. So when the number of prisoners increased everyone, including the Confederacy were not getting enough and “Even the army's horses were suffering” (Gourley 19).

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Also the SS men made all the prisoners look the same so they could all feel like there was no place for them. Also the SS men’s form of dehumanization was abuse and the SS men were hurting the prisoners in many violent ways including, whipping , hitting, blows to the head, barley feeding them, forcing them to get tattoos of numbers on their arms that they have to live with forever, and much more. The prisoners had to live with these scars and memories for the rest of their lives and always have a memory of what it was like in the holocaust always in the back of their mind. It's a very awful experience that they went through while in the concentration

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The Germans would give the inmates nearly nothing. They had only bread crusts and one bowl of soup at the end of each day of hard work. This caused everyone to lose gigantic amounts of weight. Because of this, the Jews began slowly descending into madness. They would fight each other over small scraps of anything they could get their hands on.

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Imagine being woken up at sunrise every morning to the sound of an excruciatingly loud bell and people already yelling at you, screaming at you, beating you, and treating you like you are a piece of garbage. During the holocaust millions of Jews and thousands of other people in concentration camps had to deal with that kind of torture every day. The Holocaust impacted the whole world by being one of the worst periods of time to date, ruining millions of people's lives due to the starvation, time spent in the camps, and the brutal living conditions they had to deal with. To begin with, the time spent in the concentration for some people was incredible. In some cases, people would spend 2 to 3 years in a concentration camp, but for those few unlucky souls, they could spend up to 12 YEARS in an array of concentration camps.

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These barracks we usually built to house 250-400 inmates but ended up holding 700-1200. Diseases and epidemics spread very quickly in these crowded conditions. The inmates lived

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This can be interpreted by any means necessary to maximize output of produce, including forced labour, brutal mistreatment, and random public executions to scare the workers to remind them what would happen if one would rebel or break a rule. Once one is selected to work, labour in these camps are very intensive; the daily work hours for is generally 17 hours per day and only a few hours of sleep. With this in mind, being very tired can lead to punishment like being whipped or even death. An addition to this kind of treatment is the kind of food that is served, which is not enough for survive. Your average ration in the morning consisted of bread that is made out of flour and sawdust with a hot cup of “coffee”.

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Prisoners receive three meals per day. In the morning, they received only half a liter of coffee, or rather boiled water with a coffee substitute tea and these beverages were usually unsweetened. The noon meal consisted of about a liter of soup, The soup was unsavory, and new prisoners were often unable to eat it, The Supper consisted of bread, The bread they got in the evening was supposed to cover any hunger in the morning as well, The low nutritional value of these meals were apparent, especially how much they were working the little rest. After some time in the camp, eating tiny amounts of calories and suffering from diarrhea, and crippling abdominal pain and, in consequence, many of them died from weakness. “Those who are healthy fast” In traditional Jewish practice, children under 13 are not expected to fast.

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The torture of the Holocaust began on January 30, 1933, which impacted millions of lives; resulting in more than 7,000,000 deaths of innocent prisoners of children, men, and women. But the torture and abuse didn’t end for years. Prisoners would have to experience forced labor and physical and mental abuse. Different genders of prisoners in the Holocaust were negatively impacted in different ways when it came to forced labor and being physically abused. In World War II, men and women prisoners who were brought to concentration camps were put into forced labor that included different types of work for the different genders.

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People who made it out of the holocaust may have survived, but at what cost. Survivors were left with horrors of their pasts and scars on their bodies that are daily reminders of what they have been through. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie talks about his personal experience while at the concentration camps. He includes all the horrors he went through and how dehumanized he felt. The article “Less Than Human: The psychology of cruelty” by David Livingstone Smith also explains the torture the inmates had to go through and the extent of just how awful this event was.

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After hours of forced labor under brutal and demanding conditions from the Nazi guards, the prisoners in the concentration camps lined up for one scoop of soup. The prisoners hoped for the best scoop; one filled with peas and not just the watery broth in order to push past the hunger for the rest of the day. The bodies of the prisoners withered away with the lack of key nutrients needed to remain in a healthy state. They did not know when their next meal would come and soup was the only element keeping them alive. The watery soup the Holocaust prisoner’s receive in Victor E. Frankl’s

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Hunger was one of the greatest problems; families would fight each other for food rations tearing everybody apart. For prisoners during the Holocaust, meal times were the most important times of the day. In the morning they would usually get a ‘meal’, which consisted of coffee or tea. For lunch they would have gotten watery soup, if they even got the opportunity to eat anything during lunchtime. That depended on if they worked or were busy and if their sergeant would let them eat.

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Stalin’s Gulags, also known as political prisoner camps, were some of the most horrifying sites on the planet. After being beaten and tortured, most of the prisoners died. The unbearable conditions of these camps were beyond unsuitable for human living conditions. The atmosphere was filthy, the food was hardly appealing enough to consider swallowing, in fact the only reason people even considered eating it was because it was all they had to survive. In all reality, many prisoners refused to eat which typically resulted in death or a grueling torture sentence.

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“Inmates were required to work for their wages in food. So little food was given, however, that many starved” (Britanica). For food, inmates were required to work otherwise, they got no food. Food was rationed in such little amounts many died of starvation or exhaustion from overworking. The bodies were burned in crematoriums that were often inside or very close to the camps.

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