World War II 6

A detailed Summary of World War II 6

As a person looks at the last thousand years of history, many events come to mind. To be more specific, many world-changing events have occurred. Many of them have good explanations, or just reason as to why they happened. There were also a handful of events that had no rhyme or reason. These are the events the world may never understand. In the writer's mind, these are the events that changed the world the most. There is one particular event that seems to stand out when considering only the events of the 1900's.

The events of World War II are broad and abundant, from the advances in warfare and technology to the cruelty of using genocide to gain power. Genocide took a major role in the occurrences during the war. It involved persecution of Jews and other minorities. This is the event during the war that appalls the writer. Why the Nazis would put the Jewish people through such devastation is something the world may never know. What we do know is how they did it.

It began as a proclamation by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. His proclamation was that Germans were a superior race destined to rule the world. Hitler drilled this thought into the minds of his fellow Germans until they believed it

Upon reaching the camp, the following took place:

"The bolts crack, the doors fall open. A wave of fresh air rushed inside the train. People... inhumanly crammed, buried under incredible heaps of luggage, suitcases, trunks, packages, crates, bundles of every description (everything that had been their past and was to start their future). Monstrously squeezed together, they have fainted from heat, suffocated, crushed one another. Now they push towards the opened doors, breathing like fish cast out on the sand."

The same author offers an account of the crematorium at Auschwitz.

"The people gassed here were simply buried in mass graves which had been dug nearby. When, in the summer of 1942, the hot sun began to burn, the corpses started to swell and the earth's crust to burst open. A black, evil-smelling mass oozed out and polluted the ground-water in the vicinity. One day we were ordered to take several barrels of chlorinated lime there. Large quantities of this chemical were spread over the decomposing bodies, but to no avail. For, when in October 1942 we returned to the pits with several containers of oil, I managed to speak to a few prisoners of the Sonderkommando there. The majority were Slovak Jews, a few came from France. They were busy digging up and burning decomposing corpses. This ghoulish work took place in an area enveloped in black smoke and acrid fumes. At the edge of the mass grave lay a heap of blue-black bodies covered with maggots. They were flung onto trucks by a group of prisoners. A second group moved these to a pit where the bodies were burnt."

In addition to the delousing, many prisoners had their heads shaved. In some of the camps, the prisoners were issued clothing with numbers and colored triangles to represent their nationality. Jews were a group apart, with yellow triangles on their clothing.

Overall, the prisoners were malnourished. Rations varied from camp to camp and with the expected workload of the prisoners. Author Alexander Donat describes a typical day's menu.

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Approximate Word count = 2020
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History