Page 101 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

920 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The fools among the people will say:What has turned them
from their qiblah which they had? Say: The East and the
West belong only to Allah;He guides whom He likes
to the right path. • QURAN 2.142

gas chambers did not realize they were headed to their stealing or trading food and clothing. The very young
deaths, and it did not occur to them to resist. and old had little chance of survival; more than a million
The numbers of bodies being buried eventually grew so children were murdered in the Holocaust.Women were
large that the mass graves were overflowing. Ovens were more likely to be killed than men, because they were less
installed in some camps to cremate the dead. After the able to perform hard labor and because they could not
Jews were killed,camp inmates were forced to extract gold be allowed to live and produce more Jews.
from the teeth of the corpses,as well as confiscate money, Despite the overwhelming odds, lack of training and
jewelry, and anything else of value, which was then deliv- weapons, and their usually weak physical condition,
ered to the German Reichsbank. Other personal items, Jews did engage in acts of resistance, such as joining
such as clocks, wallets, and clothes, were cleaned and armed partisan groups, participating in the uprising in
delivered to German troops. The best of the loot was the Warsaw ghetto, attempting to escape from Sobibor,
reserved for SS officers. and blowing up the crematorium at Auschwitz. Prisoners
Jews who were not immediately killed were segregated who refused to give in to the dehumanization of the
by sex, their personal possessions taken away, and their camps displayed a different type of resistance, secretly
heads shaved.They were issued prison uniforms and, at organizing religious services or classes.
Auschwitz (after 1941), had numbers tattooed on their
arms. Prisoners were fed starvation rations and brutal- The Failure to Act
ized by guards. Many reports of what was happening to the Jews ap-
Because the Germans believed Jews were inferior and peared in media abroad, but they were often buried deep
essentially subhuman, they felt no hesitation about using in the newspaper and written in a way that detracted
them for cruel experiments. At Auschwitz, the Germans from their credibility. Most people could not believe that
experimented with sterilization techniques. At other hundreds of thousands of people could be murdered in
camps, the Nazis broke bones over and over again to see a single place.
how many times it could be done before the bone would The US. government knew what was happening to the
no longer heal. Prisoners were exposed to extreme heat Jews in Germany throughout the 1930s and learned
and cold to determine the maximum and minimum tem- about the Final Solution by 1942. Roosevelt was urged
peratures at which people could survive, and experiments to use the military to slow down or try to stop Hitler’s
were conducted to determine the effects of atmospheric killing machine, but defense officials rejected suggestions
pressure on the body. to bomb the concentration camps. Roosevelt believed the
Jews were not only murdered in concentration camps. best way to save the Jews was to devote all the nation’s
At the entrance to camps such as Auschwitz, a sign read, resources to winning the war. Undoubtedly, the Allied vic-
Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Labor wins freedom.” Thousands tory saved Europe and millions of lives, but 6 million Jew-
of prisoners were literally worked to death. Others died ish lives were still lost in part because U.S. officials made
working in German industrial factories owned by large it difficult and sometimes impossible for Jews—except
companies such as IG Farben (which produced synthetic those who were famous or could help the war effort—to
rubber and fuel) and Krupp (which produced fuses). enter the country to escape Hitler. Late in the war, Roo-
sevelt created the War Refugee Board, which took mod-
Survival and Resistance est measures to rescue Jews, but it was too little too late.
It took luck and determination to survive in the camps or
in hiding. People lived underground in caves for years, Rescuers
escaped through latrines, and hid inside monasteries, The Holocaust was only possible because of the com-
pretending to be non-Jews. Prisoners in the camps had to plicity of ordinary citizens. Besides the perpetrators and
stay healthy enough to work, and that often required bystanders, however, thousands of people acted coura-