Noel Heath
12/21/11
ELA: Night By: Elie Wiesel Term II
The rail cars were often strategically located
at a distance from the passenger terminals,
so that this scene would not cause mass
confusion.
Each car held more than 120 people,
and many froze or suffocated to death
or died from disease during the trip to
the camps.
The dead were not removed from the
cars during the journey because the
Nazi government insisted that each
body entering a car be accounted for
at the destination.
More SS Lies
To further persuade the prisoners that nothing harmful was
happening, the SS told them with small talk about camp life.
Fearing that the word "disinfectant" might harm their children,
many mothers hid their infants beneath their piled clothes.
Camp Commandant Höss reported that the "men of the Special
Forces were particularly on the look-out for this," and
encouraged the women to take their children into the "shower
room.“
Some women would suddenly "give the most terrible shrieks
while undressing, or tear their hair, or scream like maniacs,“ so
the SS immediately took them away for immediate execution by
shooting.
At the core of the camp was a huge
new gas chamber complex disguised
as shower rooms with the capacity to
kill over 2,000 people at one time.
Nazi Photographer Mr. Strangle
witnessed the murder of Jews in one of
the gas chambers in Auschwitz for his
records.
There are only a few living witnesses
left to testify to the scenes on arrival
here at the camp.
The "success" of these experiments led
to Zyklon B for all the gas chambers at
the Auschwitz complex. Near Birkenau,
the SS initially converted two
farmhouses for use as gas chambers.
“Provisional” gas chamber I went into
operation in January 1942 and was
later dismantled.
Provisional gas chamber II operated
from June 1942 through the fall of
1944. The SS judged these facilities to
be inadequate for the scale of gassing
they planned at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The use of gas vans were an attempt to
help with the “Final Solution” of the
Jews.
When all the Jewish prisoners at Semlin had been killed,
the gas van returned to Germany and Semlin became a
temporary detention camp for prisoners before they were
transported to other labor camps in Germany and Norway.
After several failed attempts by local
Nazi officials to have the inmates
deported to a concentration camp in
the East, the authorities in Berlin
dispatched a mobile gas van to help.
The problem is not one of overloading
but of off-road maneuverability on all
terrains, which is severely diminished
in this van.
To facilitate the cleaning of the vehicle,
an opening was made in the floor to
allow for drainage.
The upper part of the elbow pipe was
fitted with a sieve to avoid obstruction.
These were constant problems for the
gas vans.
The initial, formal killings of the Final Solution were
undertaken by the SS Task Forces death squads in
June 1941. The initial extermination method of shooting
people in burial pits proved poor, so in late 1941, the
Nazis established camps specifically for mass
extermination via gas chambers.
Some able-bodied prisoners delivered to the death camp
were not immediately killed, but were forced into labor units
to work at the extermination process, removing corpses from
the gas chambers and burning them.
Because the extermination camps were physically small (only
several hundred meters long and wide) and equipped with
minimal housing and support installations, the Nazis
deceived the prisoners upon their arrival, telling them that
they were at a temporary transit stop, and soon would
continue to a work camp farther east.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionande
thics/episodes/april-242009/holocaust-by-bullets/2756/
This clip is about a French Catholic
priest whose grandfather’s World War II
story . It led him to seek out witnesses
of the Nazi massacre of Jews in the
Ukraine.
•Remember.org
•PBS.org
•Vshmm.org
•Roadohforum.yuku.com