In the Holocaust book were reading the Nazis were planning on killing all the Jews before the Russians liberated them. Is this true? If so how were they going to plan the kills?
By this time in the war, most European Jews who still lived were in concentration or death camps. The "final solution," that is, the way the Nazis were killing Jews was in huge gas chambers. They herded the Jewish men, women, and children into large rooms that were supposed to look like shower rooms. But instead of water, the overhead fixtures had streams of poisonous gas.
Wouldnt they know they were poisones tho? or did no one survive to tell them?
I think most of the victims knew what was coming. But the Nazis shot or beat anyone who resisted going into the gas chambers. There was no escape.
o ok ty sue!
You're very welcome, Logan. :-)
Yes, it is true that the Nazis under Adolf Hitler's regime had a systematic plan to exterminate the Jewish population during the Holocaust. They aimed to annihilate the Jews as part of their larger ideological goal of establishing a pure Aryan race.
To understand how they planned these mass killings, it is crucial to look at the Nazi's implementation of the "Final Solution," which was the euphemism they used for the genocide of Jews. The plan involved several stages and methods:
1. Identification and Isolation: The Nazis began by identifying and registering Jews, often through the use of census data, as well as through various discriminatory measures such as forced registration, wearing of yellow stars, and ghettoization. Jews were segregated from the rest of the population and confined to crowded and unsanitary ghettos in major cities, leading to extreme deprivation and death due to disease and starvation.
2. Deportation: In order to concentrate the Jewish population and facilitate their extermination, the Nazis organized mass deportations of Jews from ghettos to extermination camps. Trains were the primary means of transportation, with Jews packed into cattle cars under horrific conditions for days or even weeks.
3. Extermination Camps: Upon arrival at extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibor, Jews were subjected to a pseudo-selection process. This involved SS officers conducting hasty inspections and separating individuals into two groups: those fit for labor and those deemed unfit (including the elderly, disabled, and children). The latter group would be sent immediately to gas chambers disguised as showers, where they were killed using poisonous gases like Zyklon B.
4. Mass Shootings: Apart from extermination camps, the Nazis also employed mass shootings as an execution method, particularly in territories occupied by the German army, primarily in Eastern Europe. Victims, often forced to dig their own graves, would be shot en masse by Nazi death squads known as Einsatzgruppen.
It's essential to remember that these actions were carried out with meticulous planning by the Nazi leadership, including high-ranking SS officials such as Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann. Implementation varied depending on the location, but the overall intention was to eliminate every single Jew they could identify.
It is important to study and understand this horrific chapter of history to ensure that such atrocities are never repeated and to honor the memory of the victims.