The Horrible Treatment Of Prisoners During World War II

What rights should prisoners have and how should they be treated? Following World War I, many nations agreed the treatment of prisoners was unacceptable. As the community of nations worked to address the horrible treatment of prisoners, they drafted changes to the international treaties known as the Geneva Conventions. Many nations agreed to these standards of treatment for prisoners of war, including the German government. World War II was the first major conflict where these new standards of treatment were used. During World War II, the Germans under the direction of their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, also imprisoned millions from the general population including other Germans. These civilians often went to special camps called concentration
The prisoner of war camps were used to confine soldiers from the opposing military forces they captured during the World War II from 1939 to 1945. By the end of the war, over five million prisoners had been confined in prisoner of war camps. This ended because the war was over. The Concentration camps on the other hand were used to confine civilians who were mostly Jews from the occupied countries and Germany itself. These civilians were often taken from their homes at gun point with little or no possessions. While the largest concentration camps held 30,000 people at one time, more than 11 million people were confine in these special camps. By the end of the war, the Germans had imprisoned twice as many civilians in concentration camps as they did enemy soldiers in prisoner of war camps. This camp end because soldiers went in and stopped them this was followed by the end of the
This was very different from the prisoner of war camps considering they didn’t torture people just for the fun of it. They torture some of the prisoners to extract information during the war. Most of the forced labor was Russians and French. They would do labor such as German agriculture, factories and mines. However, the concentration camps were also used for medical experiments and mass execution. In the concentration camps there was 11 million people killed, six million of those were Jews. “The Jewish population of Europe was about 9.5 million in 1933. In 1950, the Jewish population of Europe as about 3.5 million.” That is 60 percent of the Jewish people living in Europe in 1933. The Nazi purposely tortured the people in the camps. One way was using them, like Guinea pigs, for human medical experiments. Some of their inhuman medical experiments consist of things like: hypothermia, genetics, diseases, and many more. These experiments torture them and eventually killed them. They were also used for forced labor. The forced labor was often pointless and humiliating, and they were imposed without proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest. “The Nazis also pursued a conscious policy of "annihilation through work," under which certain categories of prisoners were literally worked to death; in this policy, camp prisoners were forced to work under conditions