Imagine being woken up in the morning by Nazi soldiers breaking into your house, forcing you to leave your belongings behind, and ordering you to a camp where you would most likely die. This harsh situation was all too real for many families during Hitler’s reign around 1933. Adolf Hitler, who served as chancellor from 1933 to 1945, was the leader of an anti-Semitism group known as the Nazi Party. The Nazi’s goal was to purify the human race by incarcerating and executing individuals from the following groups: Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped, among others. The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was established on March 22, 1933. What started as a camp designed for political prisoners quickly turned
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Because of the large number of prisoners moving in and out of the camp during its operation, in addition to the lack of record keeping, the exact number of deaths is unknown. With the first wave of prisoners, most were tagged by numbers either on skin or on uniforms, made it easy to get a good estimate. Jennifer L. Goss wrote in her historical article:
The first buildings in the Dachau concentration camp complex consisted of the remnants of an old WWI munitions factory that was located in the northeastern portion of the town. These buildings, with a capacity of about 5,000 prisoners, served as the main camp structures until 1937, when prisoners were forced to expand the camp and demolish the original buildings. (Goss, …show more content…
Though many schools teach about the events that took place during Hitler’s reign, nobody can truly comprehend how traumatic life for the prisoners was during that time. With that being said, think about the 20 students going on the trip compared to the Anne Frank family. Of the four members of the Frank family who were taken to Auschwitz, only one survived through the end of the war. Based on the ratio of the Frank’s family survival, only five students from our group of 20 would have possibly survived the horrors of the Holocaust. As mentioned above, there was a wide variety of prisoner backgrounds in Dachau. Everyone in the group traveling abroad have different backgrounds, interests, and religions; many of which originated from this era. Visiting Dachau will be very a beneficial experience that we can relate back to our majors. With both of us going into the medical field, visiting Dachau will put into perspective why we want to go into the medical field. In our majors, nursing and radiology, our main goals are to help people feel better or help them stay alive. Dachau’s goal, being a concentration camp, was to kill off people. By the goals being complete opposites, they relate in the most basic way. Also within Dachau, medical experiments took place on live prisoners. Today, students would never imagine of practicing medicine and surgeries on live
Because of the large number of prisoners moving in and out of the camp during its operation, in addition to the lack of record keeping, the exact number of deaths is unknown. With the first wave of prisoners, most were tagged by numbers either on skin or on uniforms, made it easy to get a good estimate. Jennifer L. Goss wrote in her historical article:
The first buildings in the Dachau concentration camp complex consisted of the remnants of an old WWI munitions factory that was located in the northeastern portion of the town. These buildings, with a capacity of about 5,000 prisoners, served as the main camp structures until 1937, when prisoners were forced to expand the camp and demolish the original buildings. (Goss, …show more content…
Though many schools teach about the events that took place during Hitler’s reign, nobody can truly comprehend how traumatic life for the prisoners was during that time. With that being said, think about the 20 students going on the trip compared to the Anne Frank family. Of the four members of the Frank family who were taken to Auschwitz, only one survived through the end of the war. Based on the ratio of the Frank’s family survival, only five students from our group of 20 would have possibly survived the horrors of the Holocaust. As mentioned above, there was a wide variety of prisoner backgrounds in Dachau. Everyone in the group traveling abroad have different backgrounds, interests, and religions; many of which originated from this era. Visiting Dachau will be very a beneficial experience that we can relate back to our majors. With both of us going into the medical field, visiting Dachau will put into perspective why we want to go into the medical field. In our majors, nursing and radiology, our main goals are to help people feel better or help them stay alive. Dachau’s goal, being a concentration camp, was to kill off people. By the goals being complete opposites, they relate in the most basic way. Also within Dachau, medical experiments took place on live prisoners. Today, students would never imagine of practicing medicine and surgeries on live