Jeffrey Brown

Professor

Composition

3-2-2015

When The Past Repeats
We have all heard the phrase “the past repeats itself” throughout our entire lives. Everyone from our parents, to our elders, to our professors. It seems everyone has heard it at one point at or another, and if not; it is easy to realize at just a glimpse at our history of the human race. Both sides what we label as “good” and other “bad”, are involved in this everlasting loop, showing that even the pure evils we never thought could reprise their role in evils neverending twist of fate have their own slot. With the corralling of human beings into camps, surrounded by fences and trapping those concealed in a man made Hell, it seems that it would be a “one time thing”, but in reality? The past is repeating itself as we know it.
In World War II, the human race saw a genocide of those of Jewish descent, those of homosexuality, disability, and many others. It started in 1933 when Hitler and his Nazi party changed the course of history with speeches filled with propaganda, and a mindset of the most evil intentions. After this rise of power, detention facilities were set up for those deemed “socially unacceptable”. Those trapped within these camps with the label of “socially unacceptable” first consisted of Gypsies, German Communist, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Social Democrats, and those of “asocial behavior”. The parties definition of “socially unacceptable” soon expanded five years later in 1938 when Germanys seizure of Austria. It was during this annexation of Austria where the Nazis imprisoned German and Austrian Jews into the German concentration camps in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.
What laid ahead for the German and Austrian Jews was a conjoining path that will be shared with those already trapped within these fences laced with barbedwire. After the invasion of Poland, camps turned into labor camps, where everyone was divided by “suitable to work” and “unsuitable to work”. This would divide families of course, and made that separation permanent when those whom were deemed useless to the labor forces, would be placed inside gas chambers; killing them painfully and slowly. Meanwhile the rest were put to work or even worse. Those whom were sent to perform labor would often die from exposure, starvation, dehydration, or exhaustion, or gunshots while the camps started to rapidly and effectively expand. While more and more were killed from the effects of labor, which consisted of assembly lines of all kinds, there were also some activities of graphic, violent, and horrific experiments performed on prisoners and their anatomy. Switching the prime attention to the Jews, it was then The Final Solution was put into full throttle. The Final Solution was described as the full destruction of Jews, and was attempted by establishing killing centers within Poland, being that Poland held the largest population of those Jewish. As one may gather from the camp centers title, the killing centers were designed and built for nothing less than mass murder; a slaughterhouse for those Jewish and those with Jewish relatives, a extreme difference from the other camps that served as detention and labor centers. Also earning the name “Death Factories”, these centers were ran by German SS and police officers, and is believed to of killed more than 2,700,000 Jews, using methods of poisonous gases, asphyxiation (suffocation), or simply shooting the prisoners. The first center opened its gates of Hell in December of 1941 and was named Chelmno. Jews as well as Gypsies were exterminated in mobile gas vans as a primary method. The following year, in 1942, the Nazi Party opened up three new centers; Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. It was when these three new camps were established that the goal was to finally murder all of the Jews within Poland. This operation was known as Operation Reinhard. With the Operation