The Holocaust

The Holocaust

I cannot begin to describe how horrendous, embarrassing and outrageous the Holocaust was. The Holocaust was a terrible 12 years of genocide when 11, 000, 000 people were brutally killed by the Nazi party. The majority of targeted citizens were Jews and the majority of them went to the Concentration Camps and never came out. 

When the fascist came into power with Adolf Hitler as chancellor, they arrested a third of Jews alive during the 1930s-40s and murdered them, mainly in Concentration camps such as Auschwitz in Poland. In the Concentration camps, men were separated from women and the weak, mothers, pregnant women, old people and children were gassed in the notorious Gas Chambers. At least 1.1 million Jewish children were murdered.

Concentration Camps were a large place were people were imprisoned and forced to work with little food, water and facilities. The Concentration Camps were horrific with 11 million people having died during the Holocaust. 6 million were Jews but Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled people and gypsies were also targeted by the Nazis. At Treblinka Concentration Camp 870, 000 Jews were murdered with just 150 staff!    

Anne Frank, a teenage diarist, died in Bergen- Belsen Concentration Camp just weeks before it liberated by the British troops in 1945. Lili Henoch was a track and field athlete who was machine gunned to death along with her mother. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an anti- Nazi German pastor who was involved with an attempt to assassinate Hitler, but he was hanged 23 days before the German surrender. He is a perfect example that not all Germans were Nazis. Hana Brady was an ordinary 13 years old Jewish girl who was gassed by the Nazis, her story hit the media when a Japanese social worker discovered her suitcase at Auschwitz and showcased it to the world in 1999. 

For more stories from Holocaust survivors click here. 

I hope this has given you an idea of the horrors and tragedies of the Holocaust. ~ Beth