Holocaust: Nazi's building complexes

As I had previously told you, World War II is one of my favorite topics, so you can assume that I'm more than delighted with doing this research.

Going back to the topic, the Nazis developed a series of buildings (structures, or architectural designs?) in order to control even more the Jews:

1. Ghettos: the term ghetto comes from the name of a Jewish community established in Venice, around 1516. Though ghettos had been created many years before the war, the Nazis used them to isolate and segregate the Jews. In an order commanded by Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo's chief, on September 1939, Jews living in Poland were taken from their small villages to the larger cities, in order to be "watched" in a more efficient way by this same secret police department. Ghettos were used as a transitional zone to arrive to concentration camps, but in 1942, when the "Final Solution" was implemented, Ghettos were destroyed and their inhabitants were immediately taken to death camps (except in Hungary, where Jews started to move to ghettos until 1944).
   Ghettos were literally four gigantic walls (with some buildings inside them); they had a terrible overpopulation, which caused hunger, and a great amount of health problems; they lacked public services and the winters were too harsh to survive in poor health conditions. This means that ghettos were just another way to exterminate Jews in a painful and slower way.
   Though there were more than 400 ghettos in Europe, one of the most important ones was the Warsaw Ghetto, where more than 5,000 people lost their lives.
   
   
   
   http://www.fortunecity.es/sopa/pulgas/22/gueto-varsovia.jpg
   
   
2. Concentration Camps: they have existed for centuries, all of them with the same purpose - to confine a determined group of people, forcing them to work under inhumane conditions. Focusing on the Nazi German concentration camps, they were established long before the war started officially: in 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis got power in the country.
   Nazi concentration camps were home to a big fraction of the population, since not only Jews were prisoners, but also communists, socialists, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses, among others. They usually had bunks for people to sleep, the food each person received (if any) was minimal, and all people (complying with certain conditions, such as age, health status, etc.) worked under stress and pressure.
   One of the most famous concentration camps is Bergen-Belsen (Germany), which was established in 1940, though it was only until 1944 that it started to function as a regular concentration camp. More than 10,000 people died inside the camp, including Anne Frank.
   
   
   
   http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Bergen_Belsen_Liberation_05.jpg

The Nazis also implemented another type of camps, a bit different from the concentration camps, these were the death camps (that I mentioned previously, when talking about the ghettos). These camps were created in 1941, and even though the Final Solution took place one year later, the camps had been designed with the same purpose, which was, among other points:

• Immediate death for those who were unable to work or the very young, the old, and the weak.
• Eventual death for the remnant.

This way, the death camps were the easy way to exterminate [mostly] Jews in massive quantities. One of the most famous ways to perform this plan is the gas chamber. Gas chambers functioned by introducing a deadly poisonous gas into a hermetically sealed room, and used (regularly) either carbon monoxide (CO) or Hydrogen Cyanide (HCN); this last one was delivered to the chambers under the number of Zyklon-B, and its deathly power is such that one milligram per body weight is enough to kill a human being (so if a person weighted 100 Kg, it would only need 100 mg of HCN to die, and that is less than a gram, which is quite scary and horrible in my opinion).
The death camps were: Belzec (Poland), Chelmno (Poland), Sobibor (Poland), and Treblinka (Poland).

http://www.7is7.com/otto/travel/photos/20031019/auschwitz_auschwitz1gaschamber.html

Some other camps worked as both, a concentration and a death camp, just like the probably most famous camp of all: Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland as well). It was established under the direction of Heinrich Himmler (chief of Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi guards), 1940. This place is synonym of one of the greatest crimes against any human, it not only killed people, it not only made them work under terrible conditions, but they also used a determined sector of the population (mostly twins and dwarfs) to produce a series of medical experiments, carried out my a man called Josef Mengele (from whom I will write about in another post). It is estimated that between 1.5 and 4 million people died in Auschwitz, until the Allies liberated the camp in 1945. A year later, in the remaining zone of the camp, a museum was funded.

http://www.hollow-hill.com/sabina/images/auschwitz-corpses.jpg

In my opinion, the Nazis had a very brilliant system to control the population they despised the most; nevertheless, this is not a justification for any of their acts and their ease to attempt against mankind. What the did inside those places must be the nearest a live human being has ever been from hell, and their survivors are the greatest representation of strength and courage. I truly hope this doesn't occur ever again, no person deserves to be treated this way.

---> My sources:

• http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blchart.htm
• http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_intro.html
• http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.final.html
• http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/witnessLegacyTeacher/glossary.html
• http://www.luketravels.com/auschwitz/
• http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=es&ModuleId=10005224
• http://isurvived.org/Bergen-Belsen_liberation.html
• http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERconcentration.htm
• http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761577899/Concentration_Camp.html
• http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=es&ModuleId=10007019
• http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/warsaw%20ghetto.html
• http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/TIMELINE/ghettos.htm
• http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=es&ModuleId=10005752
• http://www.rossel.net/Holocaust07.htm