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Example research essay topic: Prisoners Of War Concentration Camps - 1,397 words

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... The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoretically possible to cremate about 12, 000 corpses in twenty four hours or 4, 380, 000 a year.

But the well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Auschwitz in 1944. In August the total cremation reached a peak one day of 24, 000, but still a bottleneck occurred. Camp authorities needed an economic and fast method of corpse disposal, so they again dug six huge pits beside Crematorium Five and reopened old pits in the wood. Thus, late in 1944, pit burning became the chief method of corpse disposal. The pits had indentations at one end from which human fat drained off. To keep the pits burning, the stokers poured oil, alcohol, and large quantities of boiling human fat over the bodies: The sizzling fat was scooped out with buckets on a long curved rod and poured all over the pit causing flames to leap up amid much crackling and hissing...

The air reeked of oil, fat, benzol and burnt flesh. Auschwitz lay thirty miles west of Cracow, Poland's fifth largest city, and was on the direct railroad line to German Upper Silesia. Before the German attack in September 1939, Auschwitz had been a Polish army camp. In May 1940, Rudolf Franz Hotels the adjutant at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was detailed with thirty men to establish a new compound at Auschwitz. Until the early spring of 1941, Auschwitz, containing nine thousand inmates, was an installation approximately the same size as earlier German concentration camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald. Then, as Hitler prepared the assault on Russia, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and German police, came to Auschwitz and told Ho " ss that the camp would have to be expanded to accommodate a large population of 130, 000 - 100, 000 of them Soviet prisoners of war.

The inhabitants of seven villages standing on the swampy, malarial ground between the Sure and the Vistula rivers west of Auschwitz were to be dispossessed and removed as farm laborers to Germany. Since this area was thickly covered with birch trees, the Germans called the new part of the concentration camp Birkenau ('in the birches'). Weczler's transport arrived in Auschwitz after midnight on April 15 - arrivals were usually timed so that the twelve thousand residents of the adjoining town would not be witness to their coming. Stumbling stiff and bewildered out of the cars into the glare of spotlights, the men were lined up in a column of five.

Carrying their heavy luggage - for they had been told to come well equipped - they were marched a mile to a building, where they were ordered to strip. Their heads and bodies were shaved roughly, they were given showers, and then were disinfected with Lysol. Each man had a number tattooed onto his left breast, a procedure so painful that many passed out. (Later, to simplify processing, the Germans changed the location of the tattoos to inmates' left arms. ) It was ten o'clock in the morning before the operation was completed. Outfitted with wooden clogs and Russian uniforms daubed with red paint, Weczler and his compatriots were taken to Birkenau. There he learned that only 150 of the twelve thousand Russian prisoners of war detailed in December 1941 to work on the camp's construction had survived the winter. Quartered in half-finished, unheated buildings, they had died of exposure, starvation, and disease.

The Birkenau camp, a mile long and half-mile wide, was encompassed, like Auschwitz, by two rings of electrified barbed wire. Along these, watchtowers were placed every 150 yards. Only a few buildings had so far been completed, though the ultimate goal was to expand the camp to an area covering some two hundred square miles. The men were awakened at three o'clock every morning and marched off at four to clear land and work on the construction of factories of Siemens, Germany's largest electrical manufacturer; I. G. Farben, the nation's leading chemical company; and the Deutsche Aurustungswerke (German Defense Works), an SS enterprise.

Jews not capable of labor were executed. Except for a half-hour break at noon, when the prisoners each received a bowl of filthy carrot, cabbage, or turnip soup, the work continued uninterrupted until 6 PM. For supper, the men received one ounce - a little over one slice - of moldy bread made from ersatz flour and sawdust. They slept in almost windowless barracks with steeply pitched roofs resembling stables. Tiers of balconies, honeycombed with cells two and one-half feet high, each shared by three men, ran along the walls, giving the building the appearance of a giant beehive. Lice and fleas tortured the men.

Rats were so bold they gnawed at the toes and fingers of sleepers and stole carefully preserved crumbs of bread out of their pockets. A third of the prisoners died every week - the sick and injured were taken to the infirmary, where they were granted two to three days to recover or expire. If they did neither, they were spritzed - given a fatal injection of phenol directly into the heart. At the end of two weeks, only 150 of the 640 men Weczler had arrived with were still alive. By August 15, all but 159 of the 2, 722 on the first four transports from Slovakia were dead. (Conot, 3 - 5) Not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Party secretary until May 1941. " Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg.

New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. Auschwitz-Birkenau (in the formerly polish, in 1939 adjoined to the "Reich" upper eastern Silesian area, south eastern of Kattowitz): The extermination camp in Birkenau, established in the second half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz, existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas chambers and from the end of June 1943 in four additional large gassing-rooms gassings with Zyklon B have been undertaken. Up until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000 gypsies have been murdered by gas. In April 1943, all the camp's prisoners are deported.

Abe and the other prisoners once again board cattle cars. They are packed so tightly into the railroad cars that they can't even squat to sit, much less lie down to sleep. They ride for two days with no food, no water, no toilet facilities -- with only dirty straw on the floor. They finally arrive at their destination, glad to finally be breathing fresh air when the cattle car doors are pulled open. Instead they are greeted with shouts of anger, with guns and bayonets pointed at them, and with guards holding back police dogs ready to tear them apart. A stench fills the air.

They are at Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz complex, called by some "the mother of all concentration camps. " In this illustration, you can see the coming together of many tracks that span all of Europe. Auschwitz was the end of the line for millions of Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other innocents. Abe spends almost two years in this most infamous of concentration camps. The average prisoner only survived eight weeks in Auschwitz. Abe learns the ins and outs of survival in Auschwitz. He steals from the Nazis and trades these "organized" goods with Polish citizens when he works outside the gates of the camp.

Abe tells his own version of the now famous story of the Polish dancer named Horowitz, who bravely attacks an SS guard named Schillinger while he is trying to force her to undress in the gas chamber, disguised as a shower. She kills Schillinger with his own gun and wounds another guard before she is machine-gunned to her own death. Abe also describes how the underground resistance movement operated in Auschwitz, including his own involvement. He tells of his one-sided love for another now famous heroine, Room Robot, who is hanged with three other women for her role in the Birkenau Sonderkommando Uprising, just weeks before all three Auschwitz camps are evacuated. Bibliography:


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Research essay sample on Prisoners Of War Concentration Camps

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