The Holocaust
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The Holocaust
The Holocaust was an atrocity of unparallel proportions that occurred
during WWII and left millions of Jewish, along with a multitude of others, dead. The Nazi Party regime, as led by dictator Adolf Hitler, who came to power as chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933 and reigned until 1945, aimed at systematically eliminating all people regarded as racially inferior or politically dangerous to their goal of one “pure” race. In addition to Jews, the Nazis systematically killed Gypsies, Slavs–particularly Poles and Soviet prisoners of war, other Germans determined to be traders, those who were physically handicapped, mentally retarded, or ill, homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, priests and ministers, members of labor unions, communists and other political opponents. By the end of the war, the Nazis had killed millions of men, women, and children, more than two-thirds of the European Jewish population, as many as twelve million or more people in all. Many of the Holocaust victims were killed by the SS soldiers at concentration, or death camps in specially designed gas chambers, and then incinerated, but the methods used by the Nazis to carry out these killings, varied just as greatly as the groups they discriminated against. Just as they killed all kinds of people from all walks of life, they used all kinds of methods to carry out these horrendous and inhumaine executions. The effects that the Holocaust had on every person that experienced its unsurpassed evil, whether they were Jewish or not, were eternal effects.
Quality of life in a concentration camp was without standards, to say the least. Jews and other deportees were packed into railroad boxcars that were similar to those used for cattle to be transported to the camps. Some of these cars were so crowded that people actually died standing up, because there was no place for them to fall. At the camps the prisoners were unloaded and stripped of everything of value. Clothing, jewelry, eyeglasses, shoes, and even gold teeth were confiscated from the arriving captives. After they were unloaded, they were separated into two groups. One of these groups would be lead to firing squads or, in some camps, gas chambers, to be dispatched as soon as possible. These people were usually women, children, and the elderly. The second group, consisting