- Hitler's rise to power led to the slaughter of millions as concentration camps revealed the Nazi empire's true evil. Rarely-seen archive recounts the atrocities.
- Allies knew about concentration camps as the war was going on.
Apr 1945, the war in Europe is coming to a closer. Soviets are advancing to Berlin from the East and Allied armies from the west. The Allied army encounter weak people dressed in striped uniforms, who tell them to get to Buchenwald. They look like POws, but they are not. 4 soldiers follow the men. They are not prepared for what they see. a house of horrors. Stench beyond belief. Starving bodies of 21,000 men and boys. Jews, Russians, gypsies, political prisoners. This is Buchenwald, a giant Nazi concentration camp. It was not unique. Across Germany, they discover camp after camp. Dead and dying women and children, corpses piled up on trains. crematoria brimming with charred remains. gas chambers for mass exterminations. How much did Allies already know about this?
In 1939, Hitler had announced Nazi policy to work towards the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. The hatred started decades before. Germany lost WW I, was forced to cede territory and humiliated at the Versailles conference, including war reparations of $30 Bn. Hitler was Austrian by birth and served in the Bavarian army. He was passionately angry about Germany's humiliation and position. He met white Russian emigrating from Russia, who tell stories of how Balsheviks conspired with Jews to overthrow the Czars and establish a communist society.
Hitler blames Germany's condition on the Jews, who had brought Russia to its knees. Hitler joins a small National Socialists, or the Nazi party. Hitler seizes the opportunity of the great depression in 1929 to come to power in 1933, promising jobs, infrastructure and to make the country self-sufficient. By pushing his Bolshevik-Jew theory, he gives the people a target for all their problems. Public embraces his reasoning. Germans were worried about communism taking over. Support for the Nazi party soars. Coming to power, Hitler bans all political parties immediately. He begins a program to forcibly re-educate the undesirables. They are placed into concentration camps and forced to perform hard work. With the death of President Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler takes the title of Fuhrer, or Leader of Germany. From then on, it was a dictatorship, pure and simple. Hitler formalizes his Aryan master race theory and starts a formal program of racial profiling. White supremacy was already an established concept, such as slavery in US. Hitler added that a master race could be bred by weeding out the impure races.
The actual tasks falls to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Himmler believed in the mission of Aryan racial superiority. He took over the camps in 1934. He expanded their use to remove the racially inferior. Jews become prime targets. There are 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, 1% of the population. Hitler perpetrates the lie that Jews had influence. The public turns against them. Hitler then appoints Joseph Goebbels as the head of Propaganda and its his mission to bring the public opinion to favor Hitler's solution for the Jews. All out war against the Jews was not possible. Goebbels uses the film and radio to spread a lie that Germans are doing badly as Jews are doing too well. Jews have too much power. Goebbels organizes a 1 day boycott of Jewish businesses. Books were burnt, anything written by a foreign or Jewish author. Persecution of Jews was step by step, cumulative. At Nuremberg in 1935, Hitler brings a racial law to ban marriage between Jews and Germans. Another law defined who qualified as a German, and who didn't.
From this point, the restrictions on Jews grow. They cant have pets or radios or cars. The jobs from Jews fired went to Germans. The public watched and accepted the persecution. The foreign public doesn't trust the reports, and they dismiss it as anti-German propaganda. But anti-semitism grows across Europe as Italy and Poland adopt similar policies. Britain has its own fascist party and US has discrimination as well. 800 Jews sailed to Cuba to escape Nazis in 1938. They were not allowed in. So they sail to US in Miami. But the state department is full of anti Semites and refuses to offload anyone. The ship is forced to return to Germany where Jews are forced into concentration camps.
In 1938, a Polish Jew kills a German diplomat in Paris. Hitler gets an excuse to hit at the Jews directly. businesses were destroyed and women raped. Germans cheered. The event was called Kristallnacht. The events finally make front page news abroad and are broadly condemned. But US and Europe fundamentally do nothing. They refuse to impose economic sanctions or open their doors to fleeing Jews. Nazis make it difficult to leave by imposing hefty emigration taxes. Nazis then start seizing Jewish properties. Those who escape, find themselves penniless and stateless. Even the other European countries don't want Jews and don't give them worker rights etc.. In Germany, 30,000 Jews are rounded up and sent to concentration camps. 10,000 end up in Buchenwald. It was built in 1937 for political prisoners.
Hitler launches his invasions to gain living space for Germans. He planned his invasions East (Slavs, Poles and Russian) and thought it legitimate since a superior race has the right to occupy an inferior one. 1st Sep 1939, Hitler invades Poland. Hitler also persecutes the physically and the mentally ill. He orders doctors to grant mercy deaths. 6 asylums are fitted with gas chambers to kill patients with chemical poisons. But the newly occupied territories posed another problem: an excess of Jews. Germans create ghettos in occupied cities. Many Jews die from disease or starvation. From ghettos, people are transferred to the camps, where conditions are worse. Jews are worked till death, flogged and hanged if they were of no use.
SS set up thousands of slave labor camps through mainland Europe. Germans benefited from free labor. June 22 1941, Hitler invades Soviet Union. Before this Nazi treated enemy soldiers in accordance with international law. But operation Barbarossa, marked a change. Hitler was determined to kill all Soviet Jews. SS troops followed the army, rounded up the Jews, and shot them. Women, children, elderly, no one was spared. At Babi Yar, just outside Kiev in Ukarine, a mass grave of 34,000 Jews was found. Himmler introduces mobile gas van when he hears that his officers are experiencing effects of these mass slaughters (including drug use and alcoholism) The killing process is industrialized. But vans were slow. Gas chambers were introduced to kill thousands of people within 10-15 mins. When Germany lost the battle of Moscow, Hitler and Himmler accelerate the extermination of Jews as punishment for the entire race. On 20th Jan 1942, 15 high ranking Nazis sign off on the implementation of the "final solution", the killing of 11 million Jews. from across the occupied territory, thousands of Jews are sent by train to 6 purpose built killing centers. All centers are in the East of Poland. It was out of sight from the German people. 2.8 Million Jews were killed in the gas chambers. In Dec 1942, 16 Allied Govt reps meet in London and condemn the exterminations. The west knew, but they were busy fighting a war. Germany was 50 miles from Cairo and middle east oil was about to fall in their hands. The war had to be won first. 2 yrs go by before D-Day landings. On 23rd July 1944 Soviets reach the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland. They find evidence of industrialized murder. mass crematoria ovens. 3 large gas chambers and 553 cans of Ziklon B poison. Germans used even the human hair from the Jews. The claims from Soviets are so shocking that Western media doesn't believe them and considers this a Soviet propaganda hoax
By Jan 1945, Soviets are advancing on other camps. Nazi start removing inmates, by forcing them on death marches. Many are forced onto trains to Buchenwald. People start to die on trains. Humans start to eat humans. By Apr 1945, US troops are advancing into Germany. They discover a labor camp at Ohrdruf. They see the Nazi atrocities first hand. Piles of corpses. 3000 corpses just outside the camp, set afire. Buchenwald starts clearing the camp, but the Jews resist. On Apr 11th, prisoners seize control of the camp. On Apr 12th, Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley visit Ohrdruf. Patton threw up. Press is invited. People in Germany profess ignorance of what was happening in their own backyard. There were 44,000 slave labor sites, concentration camps and ghettos. 6 million Jews and 11 million PoWs and civilians were killed.
36,000 Nazis were charged with war crimes by the UN. But the anti-Semitic elements in the US state department was against the war crimes tribunal. They manage to make the charge-sheets secret and countries trying to prosecute them, could not access their own files. Many Nazis walked free, without facing justice for their crimes. Soviet rise is given as the justification. US pressure many states to abandon trials in exchange for aid. Even in the UK, Gestapo men in custody were allowed to walk free.
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