Nikolas dietz

2/9/17
The Holocaust

How many concentration camps were built in total during the Holocaust? There were
over 40,000 concentration camps built during the Holocaust (1933-1939). Concentration camps
where one way that Hitler/Germans killed the Jews during what was called the The Final
Solution, his plan to rid Germany of Jews. There was an estimated 6 million European Jews
killed during the time period of the Holocaust, as well as other groups like gypsies, Jehovah's
Witnesses, criminals, the mentally ill and people accused of being homosexual. Of the six
million Jews killed, 1.5 million were children. These deaths represented two-thirds of
European Jews and one-third of all world Jews. The term Holocaust covers the time of January
30, 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany until May 8, 1945, when the war ended.
The first concentration camp was built soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in town of
Dachau.
The Holocaust camps or the nazi camps were where they held the Jews or the enemies.
The first camp was Dachau, established March 22, 1933. It was for political prisoners, not Jews,
even though some of the people there were Jewish. Later, the Germans decided to focus on
getting rid of the Jews. Germans would arrest Jews and take them to the camps. In 1939, the
Jews were forced to live in areas called ghettos. Life was awful, food was scarce, poor
running water and people were overcrowded. The Germans were trying to starve the Jews.
Many children were orphaned and had nowhere to live. The nazis would get the Jews to the
camps by capturing them, sending them there on train or driving them to the camps. When the
Jews were at the camps they would be put in some sheds/house with other people where there
was no room left. Some of the camps were slave labor camps, some transit camps, others
concentration camps and their subcamps, and still others the notorious death camps. Some camps
combined all of these functions or a few of them.
Many young, healthy men were not killed, but were forced into slave labor. Germany
needed men to help with their war and keep their factories running. The men were forced to
work all day without food or rest. They were literally worked to death.
 The Holocaust was a very bad time period in history. There was no political or economic
reasons for the Holocaust. Jews were killed just because they were Jews. The Holocaust should
have happened. There was nothing beneficial from the Holocaust.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/an-introductory-history-of-the-holocaust