Labor was one of the means used to destroy prisoners as all worked at least 11 hours daily and most worked on leveling the ground, erecting new buildings, laying roads, and digging ditches, all extremely physically demanding jobs, where little to no rest was provided. Most experienced "Muzulman", a state of extreme physical exhaustion that ended in death, majority of which was due to the lack of calories taken in every day. Prisoners recieved three meals a day, where the physically demanding jobs got 1,700 calories per day. To put that into perspective the average moderately active man needs 2,400 to 2,800 calories per day, which is over 1,000 calories more than these Jewish people recieved, and their level of activity was twice as extreme. Jews experienced a deep throbbing pain that begged to be resolved-- starvation. Their bodies were cannabalizing what little reserves it had until there was nothing but skin and bones. How? How could such cruelties go on as these foul Nazis watched with no remorse and let these people die in such a horrible place of such horrible causes? They died in a cold, dark barrack with nothing to live for and yet it was seen by these Nazis as a service to the Aryan race.
How Many?
How many of these camps existed? Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? Think again. Over 20,000 of these camps existed across 15 European countries, each with the same goal in mind. Each with an unjust desire to destroy and rid the world of a founding and beautiful culture in the absolute cruelest way possible.
Nowhere was this greater than the most notorious and largest of all concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau (its front gates depicted below). This camp was a place of death, a place of spiritual torture where you knew where your fate rested as your boxcar rolled onto the premises, and that same stench stained your nostrils. Auschwitz may have been the most notorious, but each of these camps had the same conditions, ones that were unfit for an animal, and the same goal of extermination. Over 700 people were assigned to each barrack which lacked any source of heat or sanitary facilities, like bathrooms. Rooves leaked, rats crawled across floors and a scent of death, and sickness spread through the air.
Never Forget
We will never truly know why 6 million innocent Jewish people had to die at the hands of the Nazis. We will never know what ran through these peoples' heads in their last moments. We will never know the pain they felt. We will never know. Nazi camps were liberated in the ending days of the Holocaust as the few were forced to march into the interior of Germany. Nazis destroyed concentration camps as they left, in order to hide the evidence of mass murder, but they overlooked the most devious thing, the gas chambers in which the many were tricked and killed through asphyxiation. They were cowards. Cowards who could not even take responsibility for the single most horrific incident in human history. Their actions were gratuitous and the Jews never recieved justice in its rawest form. Though we cannot change the past, today we can memorialize the 11 million people in total who passed, and change the future.