World War II is a terrible time. Those of the people who found her and remember the horrors that they had to endure do not like to remember that period of their lives. This is especially true for those unfortunates who saw the Nazi death camps with their own eyes.
A lot has been written and said about this phenomenon, but that doesn't make it any less terrible.
What is this?
This was the name of the places for the forced isolation of people objectionable to the ruling fascist regime. Unlike prisons, their creators were not guided by practically any norms of humanity. Anyone could end up in the death camps, including women, the elderly, and even children. As a rule, even those who survived in those inhuman conditions became hopelessly disabled.
Children who were prisoners of the camps got terrible mental disorders, being unable to forget all the horrors they witnessed.
What were they for, what were they?
In Germany of those years, these institutions were intended for terror and genocide againstboth civilians and prisoners of war. The townsfolk know them as "concentration camps", although this variety was just one of many. The main type was labor camps and death camps, in which people were killed literally by a conveyor belt. As events unfolded on all fronts, and in a way that was far from favorable for Nazi Germany, the popularity of these varieties increased.
What were they made for?
They were created immediately after the Nazi regime came to power. The primary task for them was the repression and physical destruction of all dissident people. Many believe that the Nazis started organizing them only with the outbreak of World War II, but this is far from the case: in the same Dachau, they opened the first “branch” back in 1933, when nothing reminded of Hitler’s crazy plans to subdue the entire peace.
By the beginning of the war, the death camps held within their walls more than 300 thousand anti-fascists, who were captured both in Germany itself and in the countries occupied by it. Most of them were built just the same in the conquered territories. At first, the Nazis pretended that they were building ordinary places for keeping prisoners of war, and many thought so almost until the end of the war. The truth turned out to be much worse: it turned out that the Nazis used these camps as places where millions of people were physically exterminated.
To this day we do not know and we will never be able to find outit is reliable how many people the Nazi executioners actually killed. In the final stages of the war, there were often cases when the selected, most combat-ready SS divisions covered the "utilization" of the camps to the last, which consisted in the complete destruction of all prisoners and documents that could tell the world about all the indescribable atrocities of the Nazis.
About their real purpose
The Americans and the British during the war were extremely active in pushing the idea that in fact the death camps of the Third Reich did not exist at all. Say, all these objects are ordinary prisons for prisoners of war. But this is far from true. These terrible places existed: their main purpose was the physical destruction of people. First of all, they killed Slavs, Gypsies and Jews, who were recognized as "inferior" people. In order to take human lives with maximum convenience, the builders took care of efficient gas chambers and crematoria.
Many death camps of the Third Reich were aimed at the round-the-clock and continuous destruction of people. When designing them, no importance was attached to the maintenance of people: it was assumed that the doomed prisoners would wait no more than a few hours for their turn. Through the crematoriums of these places every day (!) Passed several thousand people. The "death factories" include the following camps: Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka and some others. Of course, this list of death camps is far from complete.
How were the prisoners treated?
All prisoners becamecompletely powerless, their life was worth nothing, they could be killed at any time, just "in the mood." All aspects of the life of these unfortunates were strictly controlled. They did not stand on ceremony with violators: most often they were killed on the spot. But even this was far from the most terrible fate, since the Nazi doctors constantly needed test subjects for the next experiment.
How were the prisoners of the camps divided?
It should be noted that at first the prisoners were classified according to a variety of parameters, including both race and place of detention, the reason for arrest. Initially, all prisoners were divided into four large groups: anti-fascists (political opponents), those same representatives of "inferior races", as well as ordinary criminals and "potentially undesirable elements".
All prisoners from the second group eventually went to the Nazi death camps, where they were massively killed. At the slightest suspicion of unreliability, they were tortured by guards from among the SS, they were sent to the most difficult, dangerous and harmful work.
Among the same political prisoners sometimes came across even members of the nationalist party, who were accused of some serious "crimes against race", members of religious sects. You could even end up in a death camp for listening to a foreign news channel on the radio.
Homosexuals, people prone to panic, simply dissatisfied, were classified as "unreliable". Oddly enough, but the "purebred" criminals were in the best position, since theywere used by the administration as assistant overseers; numerous privileges applied to them.
Distinguishing signs of camp prisoners
It is common knowledge that in the camps people were assigned serial numbers. Much less is known about the fact that prisoners had to wear multi-colored triangles on the left side of the chest and on the right knee, as well as a number in the form of a patch on their clothes. Only in Auschwitz was it applied directly to the human body, in the form of a tattoo. Thus, a red triangle was intended for “political”, criminals received a green badge, all “unreliable” had a black triangle, homosexuals wore pink, and gypsies wore brown.
The requirements for the Jews were stricter. In addition to the usual classification triangle, they also relied on yellow, and they were required to sew on the “star of David” on their clothes. In addition, they especially singled out those Jews who were guilty of diluting the "Aryan blood", who dared to marry or marry a representative of the "true Aryan race." Their yellow triangles were bordered with black.
Prisoners of war were classified according to their country. So, the French were marked "F", the Poles were supposed to be the letter "P", etc. The letter "K" marked war criminals (Kriegsverbrecher), the sign "A" marked malicious violators of labor discipline (Arbeit - "work"). All people with mental disorders were required to have on their clothes a Blid patch, "fool". If the administration suspected someonea prisoner in preparation for the escape, a red and white target was applied to his clothes (on his chest and on his back), which allowed the guards to shoot at such unfortunates at the slightest suspicion of disloy alty on their part.
How many people were in the camps?
It is generally accepted that the Nazi death camps consisted of no more than three or four dozen objects, but the reality is much worse. Historians have established that the entire system of "corrective labor" institutions included more than 14 thousand (!) Various kinds of organizations, each of which played its role in the liquidation of millions of people. More than 18 million Europeans passed through their walls alone, with at least 11 million people killed.
When Hitlerism was finally defeated in the war, one of the most disgusting deeds of the Germans was precisely the German death camps. Their construction was condemned during the Nuremberg trials as "the gravest crime against humanity." Currently in Germany no distinction is made between people who were held in these camps and those who were imprisoned in "places equivalent to concentration, corrective labor institutions."
But there were such places among these places that even now the thought of them shudders the most seasoned researchers and historians. Take the Auschwitz death camp. According to the most conservative estimates, more than one and a half million people died within its walls. But their number included most of all adults, while in some places the Nazi monsters did not disdain to kill thousandscompletely defenseless children, the oldest of whom was only 12 years old.
Kurtenhof
But one of the most terrifying places was the Salaspils death camp. He received his monstrous fame due to the fact that it contained many underage prisoners. He was in Latvia, which "the valiant soldiers of the Reich liberated from the yoke of the Soviet invaders."
The “liberated” was extremely successful: in this camp alone, at least 100,000 people were martyred. This estimate is clearly underestimated, but the truth will never be established: in 1944, all camp archives were meticulously destroyed during the evacuation.
What happened here?
The Salaspils death camp became famous for the incredible enormity of the crimes committed here. So, a particularly common method of killing children was to completely pump out blood from them, which was then used in German hospitals and hospitals for military personnel. They also tested various methods of transplantology.
After the war, near the territory where this children's death camp was located, they found a strange piece of land that was literally saturated with some kind of oily substance. The researchers who began to study it were terrified: in a huge pit, the earth in which they were mixed with human ashes, they found unburned remains of bones. A lot.
They all belonged to children five to nine years old. As it turned out later, almost all of them were "blood donors", bodieswhich were pumped out literally dry.
Other "experiments"
Infectious diseases raged in the camp, the main one being measles. Really inhuman experiments were carried out on the children who fell ill with her: they were frozen, starved, limbs were amputated to "set the limits of the human body." In addition, the "experimenters" washed the unfortunate with ice water.
In this case, the infection quickly went deep into the body, the children died in terrible agony, and the agony sometimes lasted for several days.
Like all death camps (the photo of which is in the article), this one was extremely actively used by German "doctors" to test new vaccines and antimicrobials. New antidotes were tested on children, for which they were massively poisoned with arsenic. They found out the resistance of causative agents of gastrointestinal diseases to antimicrobial drugs that existed at that time, for which young prisoners were infected with typhoid fever, dysentery and other diseases.
Conclusions
Any war is inherently extremely cruel and senseless. It does not solve contradictions, but only leads to the accumulation of completely new ones. But World War II reminded that some war crimes have no statute of limitations or grounds for forgiveness.
About the death camps, in which millions of lives were taken, we must always remember. In no case should one forget about such monstrous crimes against human nature itself, since this would be a betrayal of the memory of theirnumerous, often nameless victims.
