How It Started
The German skill in adapting the 20th century techniques of mass production was applied in engineering the Final Solution. Murder operations began there on December 8, 1941, & continued intermittently until January 1945. In 1941, the engineers of the Final Solution utilized these same principles to cheaply & efficiently murder millions of Jews & other undesirables. The plants established to carry out this mass murder, were the death camps . The Jews of Europe were systematically murdered in the extermination camps as part of the Final Solution. In some of the camps permanent gas chambers were erected to kill them off easily. Practically all of the deportees, men, women and children were sent straight to their deaths.
Deportation to the Extermination Camps
Jews deported from ghettos and concentration camps to the death camps were unaware of what they were facing. The Nazi planners of the operation told the victims that they were being resettled for labour, issued them work permits, told them to bring along their tools and to exchange their German marks for foreign currency. Food was also used to coax starving Jews onto the trains. Once the trains arrived at the death camps, trucks were available to transport those who were too weak to walk directly to the gas chambers. The others were told that they would have to be deloused and enter the baths. The victims were separated by sex and told to remove their clothes. The baths were in reality the gas chambers. The shower heads in the baths were actually the inlets for poison gas.
Auschwitz Extermination Camp
Auschwitz, the largest of the concentration and extermination camps established on Polish soil, served concurrently as a labour camp and as a centre for the rapid extermination of Jews. Chosen as the central location for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Extermination was carried out in gas chambers which held 2,000 people at a time.
With the introduction of a cyanide-based gas called Zyklon B, all 2,000
occupants could be killed in five minutes. As a result of this technological
advancement Auschwitz was able to process the death of 12,000 victims daily.
Before the bodies were removed by workers with gas masks & burned, the teeth of the victims were stripped for gold, which was melted
down & shipped back to Germany. Innocent victims were exploited & desecrated to a degree unknown in human history. Auschwitz was also used as the site for medical
experimentation. Many of these experiments had little scientific value but were
only exercises to discover how much torture a victim could endure until death.
By the end of 1944, an estimated two-&-a-half million Jews had died at
Auschwitz.