Miranda Watts
Mrs. Adams
World History
7 November 2012
Research Project
Auschwitz
The Holocaust was a horrific time period where unthinkable crimes were committed against the Jews, Gypsies, and other racial groups. No one would have ever imagined the thousands of helpless people that were massacred during Hitler’s rein Jew’s silent pleas and prayers would be unheard until the liberation day came. In the meantime, thousands of Jews and other racial groups were sent from ghettos to concentration camps, one of them being Auschwitz. Several forms of extermination came about over time to speed up the process. Life at a death camp was either cut short or they squeezed every drop of life out of you. On top of all of this, experiments on dwarfs, twins, and other misfits were carried out by Joseph Mengele.
Before the Nazis started extensively shuffling Jews into ghettos, political investigations took place. Supposedly everyone was jealous of the Jews because many of them had prosperous businesses. According to Alfred Caro, Nazi’s began breaking into homes and stealing items for “investigation.” To continue their investigations, one member a household had to report to Berlin. Unable to hide any longer, Caro went to save his family from any harm. He stayed in Berlin for two days before being transported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. No investigation ever took place. At the camp they were kicked, degraded, and the Nazis “did everything to make life misery,” stated by Alfred Caro. Surprisingly enough, he was only at the camp for six weeks before the Nazis let him leave. Some people from Sachsenhausen were later transferred to Auschwitz.
While Alfred Caro was taken for Political investigation, Joseph Morton experienced life in a ghetto first hand. Joseph was placed into a ghetto as a child, although he does not remember the name of it. According to Morton, “the Nazis spared no time in rounding up all the Jews. They started putting Jews in a Ghetto on Wednesday and arrived on a Friday.” Approximately 250,000 Jews were in a ghetto starting in 1940, with numerous Gypsies being placed into separate ghettos. Upon arrival into the ghetto, there were 3 or 4 hanging dead men. This set the example of what would happen to you if you did not obey, and what the Nazis were capable of. Once they rounded up the majority of the Jews and had them into a ghetto, the doors were closed off with wired walls. People were taken frequently from the ghetto to work on the crematories for Auschwitz or to be tortured just for being Jewish. Often, forms of torture involved sticking a Jews head into a barrel of crap. In the ghettos, Jews were assigned as police officers, who were to enforce laws inside the Ghetto. It was interesting that the Jews themselves were in charge of each other instead of the SS guards. Morton stated, “there was no problem getting a Jew to work for the Nazi, what kind of rules could they have, everybody was interested to have a meal in front of them, to have something to eat.” Besides being caged up like