The Holocaust was the systematic killing of people of Jewish culture. That does not mean that everyone else was safe. They also targeted homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies (people of Romanian culture) slavic people (Polish and Lithuanians) and communists. There were many people the Nazi party targeted.
The word Holocaust comes from two greek words, holos (whole) and kaustos (burned) (Holocaust encyclopedia). In early 1933, the Jewish population in Europe stood at 9 million. At the end of 1945, the Nazi's had killed 2 out of 3 Jews in europe. However, Jews were the priority target of the Nazi's agenda “The Final solution”(Holocaust encyclopedia). Romanians as well as mentally ill were …show more content…
It tingles me, gives me a fine feeling. Just as beautiful, in fact, as shooting at someone.”(Darkest atrocities of the Nazis laid bare in the secretly recorded conversations of German prisoners of war). This is another example of a monster created from the holocaust, normal people doing horrible things. They not only treated it as a sport or an activity, but as a social gathering as depicted in a transcript from Lieutenant Mueller-Riesenberg. He wrote, “The S.S. invited us over for a Jew-shoot. The whole troop went off with their weapons and joined in. Everyone was allowed to pick which one they wanted to shoot.” (Darkest atrocities of the Nazis laid bare in the secretly recorded conversations of German prisoners of …show more content…
Life never got any easier due to the constant threat of something as simple as blinking could get you sent to the death camps, or just put to death on the spot by firing squad. That didn’t mean people didn’t try to revolt. Multiple resistance movements happened throughout World War II in German occupied territories. Some were successful in small victories, while others were completely and utterly annihilated. If not annihilated, they were captured and put to work in the labour camps until they died from exhaustion and lack of nutrients. Labour camps or “death camps”, as the occupants referred to them, were strung throughout the German occupied territories as well as located in Germany itself. Many were constructed in Poland and France temporally. The Germans didn’t care where they built them, they just wanted as many as they could pump out to contain their prisoners. They were killing people by the hundreds on a daily basis, rain or shine, people never saw the smoke stacks inside of the the death camps go out. Like a well oiled machine, they never stopped. Even when the war was over some Nazi scientists still tried to destroy evidence of what happened in the labour and death camps, still believing their cause was the just