Holocaust Research

I was given the task of finding some things that happened during the Holocaust. After being in a play about the Holocaust, visiting Holocaust museums, and learning about it in school, I know that there had to be hundreds. I believe that the Holocaust truley began when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The terror for Jewish people followed quickly. TheIt started with people destroying Jewish stores. Although it must have been terrible, no one had any idea of what was to come. That is when the Jewish community started to loose their priveledges. First, they were not allowed to own land, then they could not have health insurance, then went their right to serve in the military, finally, Hitler took pretty much all of their rights away when he wrote the Nuremberg laws. They were a number of laws that prohibited Jews from doing pretty much anything. As if that wasn't enough the Nazis demanded that any Jewish people had to register wealth and property, Jews over age 15 had to apply for identity cards from the police, which any policeman could ask for, at any time, for no reason whatsoever. THen they had all Jewish women add "Sarah" and Jewish men to add "Israel" to their names on their passports, the Nazis then forced them to wear a red J. Imagine being a Jew at this time, you could'nt work, because they had been banned from almost all kinds of work, the children were not allowed to go to school. You were forced to be relocated to Jewish houses, could not own radios, or be outside from 8 p.m. to 9 a.m. That was just the beginning. Soon, Jews began dissapearing, never to be seen again. They had been deported to concentration camps along with gypsies, black people, homosexuals and mentally disabled people, where they faced horrors beyond our imagination. After a long ride on freight trains, where there was no room to move, they arrived at the camps. There, they were either killed instantly, by being told they were getting showers, and then being put into gas chambers instead. Or forced to work until they were dead. Not only that, but I learned that the Nazis conducted several expiriments on their captives that were held in death camps like: Auchswitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Natzweiler. The tests that the nazis conducted were inhumane and awful. They put people in the freezing cold,to find out first, to establish how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death and second how to best resuscitate the frozen victim. These people did awful, unspeakable tests on twins. I'll spare you the details, but know this, they were gruesome. Over 6 million people died, and several were very near-death when the Americans finally came to release the prisoners from the death camps. Beleive it or not, those things listed above were only a portion of what happened during the Holocaust. It was an unbelievable thing that happened, and we will never forget it.

Sources:

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/deadlymedicine/

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html

http://www.deathcamps.info/FAQ.htm