First Concentration Camp Essay

In 1933 Germany opened its first concentration camp. By 1945 11 million undesirables to the Nazi regime had been callously murdered in camps. Human beings were brutally beaten, starved, raped, shot, and buried alive for 12 years. By 1945 the Allies were advancing deep into German soil. As the americans and British stumbled upon the concentration camps, they began to discover the horrors of the racist totalitarian rule. Although the survivors were free to leave their confinements, they had not awoken from the nightmare. Notorious for its savagery, Buchenwald held around 56,000 prisoners who work 12 hours a day at the local munitions factory. As Herder vividly described “The bodies of human beings were stacked like cordwood” (Herder 3). When the Americans arrived there were no Germans present at the camp, but the prisoners were overjoyed, “barely able to believe that they would be delivered from a Nazi camp where the only deliverance had been death” (Cosgrove 1). They began to set up a hospital and provided food for the inmates. The US “sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave” (Herder 5). For the gaunt haggard survivors, although jubilant with freedom, many were either to sick to leave or had nowhere to go. Many died from overeating after years of malnutrition. When the mayor and his wife marched into the …show more content…
Many had no homes to return to, no family to reunite with, and no new homes to settle down in. Everyone who had been freed from the camps or ghettos had no papers or identification they could use to prove their identity, therefore no country could accept them. Organizations attempted to help people, but their effects were minimal. In 1948, Israel was proclaimed a state and provided homes for hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. In the end, many found new lives and were able to move on, but never forgot their