Read Online Houses of Death (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr - Free Book Online

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Nazi Death Camps
    Germany, Poland, Austria

The scale of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, at extermination centres such as Auschwitz and Belzec, was so massive, and so horrifyingly brutal, that many people in Europe could not believe human beings were capable of such profound evil. These houses of death continue to serve as a reminder to us that such sickening events must not be allowed to happen, ever again.
     
    The Words Arbeit Macht Frei ( Work Will Set You Free) are written over the massive iron gates at the entrance to Auschwitz extermination camp. It was one of the last things seen by hundreds of thousands of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and opponents to Hitler’s government. The Nazis placed it there to lull the hordes entering the camp into believing that they were being brought there to work. They were, of course, being brought there to die. The extermination camps set up by Nazi Germany, in the 1940s, represent the ultimate houses of death. They existed purely to exterminate countless numbers of people as quickly and efficiently as possible.
    They were part of the plan for what the Nazis termed Die Endlösung der Judenfrage – the Final Solution of the Jewish Question – which was concocted and approved at the Nazi Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Control of the extermination programme was given to an enthusiastic young Third Reich Obersturmbannführer, Adolf Eichmann. He would organize the largest military operation the world has ever known – the mobilization of tens of thousands of trains to transport the Jews to their deaths.
    The Nazis already had camps. These were labour camps – Arbeitslager – that were built for the incarceration and forced labour of ‘enemies of the state’, and later included Jews and prisoners of war. Needless to say, the death rates were still extremely high in these places and inmates died from starvation, disease, exhaustion and extraordinary brutality. Until 1942, the Jews were sent to such concentration camps, places like Dachau and Belsen. From 1942, they went straight to the death camps, and more than half the approximately six million Jews killed in the war died in Hitler’s death camps.
    They were set-up in a number of locations – Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Maly Trostenets and Treblinka. The numbers who died in each of these camps are breathtaking: but may not even tell the whole story. 1,200,000 in Auschwitz; at least 700,000 in Treblinka; around 435,000 in Bełżec; circa 167,000 in Sobibór; between 170,000 and 360,000 at Chelmno; 200,000 at Majdanek and at least 65,000 at Maly Trostenets.
    Auschwitz and Chelmno were in parts of western Poland annexed by Germany. Chelmno was ideally located near the city of Lodz, Poland’s second-largest city, with a Jewish population of 200,000. At Chelmno, Jews were forced into vans into which tubes were inserted and fed exhaust fumes. It took 15 minutes for the job to be done, and the van would then drop the bodies in pre-dug graves before returning to the camp for the next group. Few people in Poland were even aware that it existed.
    Auschwitz-Birkenau is the best known of all the death camps. There were really three camps. At the first one the notorious Josef Mengele carried out medical experiments on twins, dwarves and other unfortunates. But it was Auschwitz II, under the command of the ruthless Rudolf Hoess, that was the extermination camp. The real number of people who died at Auschwitz will never be known, because the Nazis did not register the names of everyone who died there. Built in 1942, it consisted of gas chambers and crematoria for the disposal of the huge numbers of corpses. Around 20,000 were killed every day, resulting in so many corpses that they became a logistical problem.
    Trains would arrive daily from all over Europe. On disembarking, the prisoners would be separated into those who looked fit enough