Holocost

9 Pages 2357 Words

World War II erupted on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. It took mere days for Germany to emerge victorious, and the Nazis began to enslave the Poles and destroy their culture, deemed "subhuman." The first step was to eliminate the leaders. Nazis massacred many university professors, artists, writers, politicians, and Catholic priests. Large group of the Polish people were resettled to make room for the "superior" Germans. German families began to move in to the newly annexed land. Thousands of Poles and Polish Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps. (The model concentration camp was Dachau, which was established March 20, 1933 in an abandoned munitions factory.) Fifty-thousand " Aryan-looking" Polish children were kidnapped and taken to be adopted by German families. Many were later rejected as incapable of "Germanization" and send to special children's camps, where death by starvation, lethal injection, and disease was all very possible.

During the beginning of the war, Hitler authorized an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed "incurable." State hospitals filled out questionnaires on their patients, which were then reviewed by a special commission of physicians who would simply decide if the subject lived or died. Those marked for death were sent to one of six death camps in Germany and Austria, where special gas chambers killed them. Public protests in 1941 forced the Nazis to continue this "euthanasia" program in secret. Babies, small children, and others were killed afterwards by lethal injection, pills, or forced starvation. Their bodies were burned in crematoria.

The mass murder of the European Jewry and other persecuted groups was thus preceded by the "euthanasia" program, which had all the elements needed for the later genocides in the Nazi death camps: an express decision to kill, specially trained personnel, the equipment for the deadly gas, and the use of the euphemistic te...