The World between Two Wars: Western Front

The terrifying situation of Jews in Poland

This period of time was a real horrible tragedy, in which the Nazi regime wanted to exterminate the entire Jewish people, by killing millions of them. Not only adults but also children and babies, just because of the fact they were of a different race, considered sub-humans and not part of the Arian race. All these people were abused, many died of hunger, and there were just a few who survived. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and following the agreement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the USSR invaded Poland form the east, the Polish army surrounded. So Hilter, as he wanted took control of all the Jewish that lived there. Many of them had to live on the ghettos, but time after, when the last step for the final solution took place they were killed in the extermination camps. This is called Holocaust.

Poland was where the German Nazi program for the extermination of Jews, the "Final Solution" took place, mainly because at that time it was where the majority of Europe's Jews lived (excluding the Soviet Union). The number of people killed, including Jewish people and gypsies, because of this extermination is definitely enormous. It is know that of the remaining Jews in Germany after 1941, only about ten thousand survived the Holocaust.

As we know millions of Jews live in the Eastern Europe and Nazism was an anti-Semitic ideology. Hitler wanted to destroy the Slavic elite, enslave the workers and make the land and natural resources available to the superior race. While other "Aryan" nations in Northern and Western Europe were almost conquered and were forced to accept German leadership, one group must be totally eradicated: the Jews. So the final solution had to start.

With the invasion of Poland more than two million Polish Jews came under German control, and deportations to the ghettos and concentration camps in Poland began. The Germans managed this enormous Jewish population by forcing them to live in marked-off sections of towns and cities the Nazis called “ghettos” o “Jewish residential quarters”.

These ghettos were city districts in which the Germans concentrated Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions, suffering of hunger, diseases and also forced labor. The Germans created at least 1,000 ghettos on occupied territories. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, the Polish capital, where almost half a million Jews were confined.

Then these ghettos are "liquidated" and the remaining population shouted, so another 900,000 Jews were killed. But for the Nazi leadership, this wasn’t enough. While the mobile killing units were still working, an even more terrible plan was created: the construction of killing centers in occupied Poland, to transport all remaining Jews under German control in Europe to these death camps and kill them with gas.

With the exception of Italy, the German and allied forces carry out a ruthless campaign of mass killings and deportations in the occupied territories themselves.

In the beginning of the systematic mass murder of Jews, Nazis used mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen. This squad consisted of four units of between 500 and 900 men each which followed the invading German troops into the Soviet Union. The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish.

Concentration camps prisiones
had to wear colored triangles
in their cloth.

By that time, about one million Jews were already dead. But the methods employed so far, like mass shooting, starvation and slave labor, were considered ineffective. Also, the Nazis wanted to bring the planned extermination to an end while the war was still going in their favor.

In 1941 six extermination camps were already built or modified: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Lublin-Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Here Jews, Eastern Europeans, gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped were brought and murdered. These camps were located on the rail network so that the victims could be easily transported to them. The system of camps was expanded over the course of the German occupation of Poland and their purposes were different; some served as transit camps, some as forced labor camps and some as death camps. While in the death camps, the victims were usually killed shortly after arrival, in the other camps able-bodied Jews were worked and beaten to death. After experimenting with mobile gassing units, permanent gas chambers are installed together with crematoria.

Deportations began in September 1941 with Jews from Germany and Austria. As the killing centers were not ready, the victims were dumped into overcrowded "ghettos" close to the death camps. By the summer of 1942, the gas chambers were working.

In Western European cities, Jews were ordered to report to collection points. They were taken by train to transit camps and from there transported in cattle trains across Europe to the extermination camps. In occupied Poland the ghettos were emptied one by one in 1942. Mass deportations continued until January 1945, when the Jews of Hungary were transported to Auschwitz. More than 3 million people die in the camps.

The killing of millions of Jews and other "non-Aryans" in the Holocaust is the greatest crime against humanity recorded in history. In total 6 million murders happened in these camps. However, the Nazis destroyed all the records that show the number of people they had murdered, but the survivors of the extermination camps have given an accurate portrayal of what ‘life’ was like in these places. The death camps were seen as factories which had to make profits.

For many years there has been an accepted figure for the number of Jews murdered - six million. As a result of recently found evidence, this figure is now being upgraded and some historians have put the figure as high as 7 to 8 million. To this day mass graves are still found in Russia of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and so the final figure may never be truly known.

The way they were treated is unimaginable, but as simple as breath, they kill someone.

Here are two of the many documentaries about the holocaust, but please be careful many of them containg strong and shocking pictures.