what happened in auschwitz in night

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A summary of Part X (Section3) in Elie Wiesel's Night. A few found themselves on trial in post-war West Germany as part of the U.S. military trials held there, but this was the exception, not the norm. Kapos, called Funktionshäftling by the SS, were prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis to serve in leadership or administrative roles over others interned in the same Nazi concentration camp. A prisoner’s ability to please the Kapo or establish a rare rapport with him/her could, in many instances, meant the difference between life and death. Their role as prisoner functionaries within the Nazi concentration camp system was vital to its success but this role, like many in the Third Reich, is not without its complexities. The limited amount of food and extremely hard labor was intentionally meant to work and starve the prisoners to death.

Birkenau was built approximately 1.9 miles (3 km) away from Auschwitz I and was the real killing center of the Auschwitz death camp. Because their tenuous position depended on the satisfaction of the SS, many Kapos took extreme measures against their fellow prisoners to maintain their privileged positions. The new arrivals were then thrown into the cruel, hard, unfair, horrific world of camp life.

Some of the new prisoners never recovered from this news. Standing outside for hours at roll call, whether in intense heat or below freezing temperatures, was itself a torture.

Many of the warehouses were emptied, with their contents shipped back to Germany. After roll call, the prisoners would be marched to the place where they were to work for the day. Others were tried in East Germany and Poland but without much success. Overview of the Auschwitz trials of 1963–65 in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany. Also on the ramp, Nazi doctors would search among the new arrivals for anyone they might want to experiment upon. Wiesel relates in Night: In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl also tells of a Kapo known simply as "The Murderous Capo.". Auschwitz has become a symbol of death, the Holocaust, and the destruction of European Jewry. own words. Most Kapos were put in charge of a prisoner work gang, called Kommando. Their favorite choices were twins and dwarves, but also anyone who in any way looked physically unique, such as having different colored eyes, would be pulled from the line for experiments. Within their first week at Auschwitz, most new prisoners had discovered the fate of their loved ones that had been sent to the left. If you agree to save the information contained in … Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. Once the selections had been concluded, a select group of Auschwitz prisoners (part of "Kanada") gathered up all the belongings that had been left on the train and sorted them into huge piles, which were then stored in warehouses. There the SS later developed a huge concentration camp and extermination complex that included some 300 prison barracks; four large so-called Badeanstalten (German: “bathhouses”), in which prisoners were gassed to death; Leichenkeller (“corpse cellars”), in which their bodies were stored; and Einäscherungsöfen (“cremating ovens”). Jews, Gypsies (Roma), homosexuals, asocials, criminals, and prisoners of war were gathered, stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and sent to Auschwitz. In October 1941, work began on Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, located outside the nearby village of Brzezinka. Once everyone in the room was dead, special prisoners assigned this horrible task (Sonderkommandos) would air out the room and then remove the bodies. Others would claw at the doors until their fingers bled. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. The site and on the sides of the subsidiaries are used cookies. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! Many were shot along the way in what became known as the “death marches.” The 7,650 sick or starving prisoners who remained were found by arriving Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died there; 90 percent of them were Jews. Toilets in the barracks consisted of a bucket, which had usually overflowed by morning. Unbeknownst to the people in the two lines, the left line meant immediate death at the gas chambers and the right meant that they would become a prisoner of the camp. Auschwitz doctors tested methods of sterilization on the prisoners, using massive doses of radiation, uterine injections, and other barbaric procedures.

The pellets turned into poison gas once it contacted air. This camp housed prisoners and kapos, was the location of medical experiments, and the site of Block 11 (a place of severe torture) and the Black Wall (a place of execution). Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, ordered the establishment of the first camp, the prison camp, on April 27, 1940, and the first transport of Polish political prisoners arrived on June 14. Survival in Auschwitz came in stages. The people who were sent to the left, which was the majority of those who arrived at Auschwitz, were never told that they had been chosen for death. During most of the period from 1940 to 1945, the commandant of the central Auschwitz camps was SS-Hauptsturmführer (Capt.) On January 27, 1945, the Russians reached Auschwitz. The gas killed quickly, but it was not instantaneous. The young and the able-bodied were sent to work. Kapos were, in many instances, even crueler than the SS themselves. Each of these gas chambers could murder about 6,000 people a day. The site has been threatened by increased industrial activity in Oświęcim. While there were many SS who staffed the camps, their ranks were supplemented with local auxiliary troops and prisoners.

Although the industrial complex adjacent to Auschwitz was bombed, the death camp and its crematoria were left untouched, a subject of controversy more than 50 years later. (See Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?). Auschwitz, Polish Oświęcim, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination camp. Separated from family after three or more days on a train with no food or water, stripped of clothes, shaved of hair with numbers tattooed on their arms, the first night was often spent outdoors in a forest with the smell of the crematoria in the air. Auschwitz III (or "Buna-Monowitz") was built last as "housing" for the forced laborers at the Buna synthetic rubber factory in Monowitz. Clandestine photo of women being driven to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) in German-occupied Poland. The camp was liberated; these prisoners were now free. The privileges of being a Kapo varied from camp to camp but almost always resulted in better living conditions and a reduction in physical labor. While some prisoners worked inside factories, others worked outside doing hard labor. It was the Kapos job to brutally force prisoners to do forced labor, despite the prisoners being sick and starving. On January 18, 1945, some 60,000 prisoners were marched to Wodzisław Śląski, where they were put on freight trains (many in open cars) and sent westward to concentration camps away from the front. Auschwitz, near Oświęcim, southern Poland. Although Auschwitz I did have a gas chamber, the majority of the mass murdering occurred in Auschwitz II: Birkenau's four main gas chambers, each of which had its own crematorium.
It was in Birkenau where the dreaded selections were carried out on the ramp and where the sophisticated and camouflaged gas chambers laid in waiting. Kapos also received better clothing, better rations, and the ability to supervise labor rather than actively participate in it. Auschwitz II (or "Birkenau") was completed in early 1942. The entrance gates to the Auschwitz concentration camp, near Kraków, Poland; the sign reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Liberates”). Having been told that they were going to be sent to work, the masses of victims believed it when they were told they first needed to be disinfected and have showers. As the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz has become the emblematic site of the “final solution,” a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Michael Berenbaum—a graduate of Queens College (BA, 1967) and Florida State University (Ph.D., 1975) who also attended The Hebrew University and the Jewish Theological Seminary—is a writer,... What is the longest river in the Iberian Peninsula? Some of the titles deemed as Kapos included: At the time of liberation, some Kapos were beaten and killed by the fellow prisoners that they had spent months or years tormenting, but in most cases, Kapos moved on with their lives in a similar fashion to other victims of Nazi persecution. In the Nazi concentration camps, the term Kapo was first used at Dachau from which it spread to the other camps. They met with resistance leaders in Slovakia and compiled a detailed report including maps. Others were tried in East Germany and Poland but without much success. They were given striped prison outfits and a pair of shoes, all of which were usually the wrong size.

It was at Auschwitz that 1.1 million people were murdered, mostly Jews. After hours of hard work, the prisoners would be marched back to camp for another roll call.
Also among the dead were some 19,000 Roma who were held at the camp until the Nazis gassed them on July 31, 1944—the only other victim group gassed in family units alongside the Jews. Although many of the struggles they went through in Auschwitz were very similar, we get two different perspectives on what was happening. When the Nazis realized that the Russians were successfully pushing their way toward Germany in late 1944, they decided to start destroying evidence of their atrocities at Auschwitz. As this report made its way to Western intelligence services in the summer of 1944, there were requests to bomb Auschwitz. In 1996, however, the Polish government joined with other organizations in a large-scale effort to ensure its preservation.

The 45 other sub-camps also housed prisoners that were used for forced labor. Another camp (Buna-Monowitz), near the village of Dwory, later called Auschwitz III, became in May 1942 a slave-labour camp supplying workers for the nearby chemical and synthetic-rubber works of IG Farben. Some historians believe it was directly transferred from the Italian word “capo” for “boss,” while others point to more indirect roots in both German and French. Thousands of prisoners were also selected by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele, for medical experiments. At the entrance of Auschwitz, I stood the infamous sign that stated "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work makes one free"). Because the crematoria were overcrowded, bodies were burned in pyres fueled partly by the victims’ own fat. By the time of its liberation, Auschwitz had grown to include three large camps and 45 sub-camps. (Most of the prisoners would later die from starvation, exposure, forced labor, and/or torture.). All of their clothes and any remaining personal belongings were taken from them and their hair was shorn completely off. Best Answer Answered by Aslan on 4/9/2012 9:36 PM At the camp the prisoners are … Jennifer Rosenberg is a historian and writer who specializes in 20th-century history.

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