What Was The Cause Of Genocide In Germany During The 1940's

During the 1940’s there was genocide in Germany. The genocide is known as the Holocaust and over 6 million people were killed during this time. Adolf Hitler, the man who led the Nazi party in Germany, utilized multiple different tools to carry out the genocide. He used methods like gas chambers, gas trucks, death marches, and many more to exterminate anybody that the Nazi party considered impure but the most deadly place to be during the Holocaust was a concentration camp.
Concentration camps, also referred to as extermination camps or death camps, were basically prisons where “undesirables” would be sent if the Nazis captured them. Most people who were captured and put into a concentration camp accepted their fate because it was widely known that it was a death sentence. Upon arrival at the camp everybody is stripped completely naked and hosed down, the men and women are then separated and sent to face whatever torture is waiting within the camp. Some camps gassed people soon after their arrival while other camps tortured people until they eventually died from the damage to their bodies.
The everyday living conditions alone in many of the camps would be considered torture by today’s standards.
The prisoners in the camps would rarely get food and when they did it was hardly edible. Some people died to Typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice and other parasites, others died simply from starvation. A very commonly used method of torture was the death walk. The Nazi soldiers would force prisoners to strip completely nude in deep winter snow and force them to walk in groups until they literally dropped dead one by one. Another method is the gas truck where prisoners were piled into an airtight truck then the exhaust from the engine was redirected into the
truck.
The largest and most renowned concentration camp is Auschwitz. It has been reported that over 6,500 soldiers were staffed there. The camp was originally for political prisoners in Poland but when Germany annexed Poland Adolf Hitler gained control of the area. Birkenau was a camp designed to help reduce population at the main camp. Birkenau started off with a capacity of 50,000 POW’s and eventually expanded to be able to hold as many as 200,000. Eventually they even started developing new camps just to house each group of prisoners (Jews, gypsies, etc.).
The many methods of genocide and torture that the Nazis used ended with a body count of over 6 million people. After World War II the UN discovered evidence of the holocaust throughout all of Germany and Poland. The information that we have today is based on stories from survivors and former members of the Nazi regime. All of the survivors remember fearing the gas chambers and other methods of dehumanization; even some higher-ranking officers describe it as a horrible tool of genocide.