From 1939 to 1945, people — especially the Jews — across Europe lived in the fear and the terror of the Nazis. The Jews, in addition to handicapped people and other ethnic groups, were shamefully massacred by the Germans. They were sent to concentration camps, prohibited to go to certain places and treated with hate and anger.
Those six years of terror and war around the world are a part of the History that we should never forget. On 27 January 2025, International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, people across the world will remember the atrocities that happened 85 years ago and that were created by one man : Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. As people might think, he didn’t take power by force as most dictators do. In fact, he became the chancellor of Germany legally following the election of his party. To achieve his goal to be elected, Hitler promised to the German citizens that he would make the country better by improving the economy that was falling down because of the Great Depression, and by “removing” the Jews from Germany that were held responsible for the economic situation and the loss in World War I.
For many Germans, the defeat was hard to swallow and so was it for Hitler. The “stab-in-the-back” legend, meaning that Germany did not lose the war on the battlefield but through betrayal, became popular in nationalist and conservative circles, blaming the Jews, Social Democrats and Communists. As the Jews were blamed by the nationalists for the decline and the weakness of Germany, more and more Germans started to believe and support those antisemitic ideologies, agreeing that, without the Jews, the country would be better. On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland marked the start of the Second World War and the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
After the invasion of Poland, the Nazi authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Ghettos were small areas where Jews and Roma—European ethnic group whose ancestry comes from India and Pakistan—were confined and separated from the rest of the population. Many of those areas were enclosed by barbed wire with entrances guarded by local and German police as well as SS members. The Jews were also required to wear the yellow badge—also known as the yellow patch, the Jewish badge or the Yellow star—especially in certain non-Jewish societies to distinguish them from the non-Jewish population. The living conditions in the ghettos were very hard. In addition to the limited food that the Jews had access to, the density of population in the ghettos was extreme which created a lot of different diseases that many Jews couldn’t take care of because of the poverty and the lack of medical assistance that they had to face. This situation brought another deadly factor to the life of the ghetto’s residents: typhus.
The results were truly horrific — 92,000 Jewish residents died between 1940 and 1942 of starvation, diseases and the cold which accounted for nearly 20% of the entire population. The dreadful conditions forced many Jews to escape, facing the danger that they would be killed by the Nazis if they were seen.
In 1942, the SS started the mass deportation of the Jews in the aim of emptying the ghettos. Jews were transported by trains from the ghettos to the six camps located in occupied Poland : Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin. In reality, concentration camps were established in 1933 when Hitler took power.
The first one was called Dachau and was located outside of Munich, Germany. The camps were used to imprison political opponents and to make them work in horrible conditions—known as forced labor—or kill them. The six camps in Poland were called “extermination camps” by the Nazis because most of the deportees were immediately murdered in large groups by poisonous gas. These gassing operations were made in gas chambers. Gas chambers were large rooms where Jews were told to go “to take a shower”. While waiting for water to come out of the ceiling, the Jews naked in front of everyone were more humiliated than ever. They were fearing for their life but still hopeful to have a little warm water to wash their body and warm themselves up. After a few minutes, the gas would start to propagate inside the chamber, making the Jews realize that they weren’t there to take an actual shower but that they were slowly dying.
Along the way between the ghettos and the concentration or extermination camps, Jews were highly concentrated for days in cattle trucks with no light, no food and no water. It was hard to breathe and when others were fighting for their lives, some were already dead, leaving a macabre vision and a dreadful smell. Once they had arrived at their destination, the Jews were immediately separated from their family, leaving their loved-ones in the hands of the Germans without knowing if they would ever see them again. Weaken by starvation, the cold or the heat, or the disease that they had developed, the deportees had to walk for many miles at a steady pace to the camp.
The Nazis didn’t have any pity. They would shoot anyone who fell or wasn’t capable of continuing. Immediately after their arrival at the camp, the hair of the Jews were shaved, their personal belongings were taken and a number was tattooed on their arm. From now on, they weren’t recognized by their name but by a number.
Life in the camps was truly hell and so inhuman that it’s almost impossible to imagine it. The deportees were sleeping in crowded barracks containing toilets in the middle, allowing the prisoners to see others using them and breaking the concept of privacy. The Nazis made them work long hours—on average 11 hours per day—by extreme cold or heat with inadequate equipment such as clothes, medicine or food. There was little or no time for rest and breaks which has contributed to the increase of death rates in labour camps.
Regarding nutrition, they received three meals per day. However, the portions were very small and tasteless which made them have a poor nutritional value. The combination of insufficient nutrition and hard labor has contributed to the destruction of the organism, making the deportees lose a lot of weight and look like skeletons.
One of the most famous concentration camps is probably the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau located in Southern Poland. All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Shoah. It was established in 1940 by the Nazis and has become over the years the biggest Nazi concentration camp. Historians estimate that around 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz in the less than five years of its existence. The majority, around one million, were Jews. The rest of the victims were Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet POWs and other prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds.
During the height of deportations to the camp in 1943-44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day. Today, the camp remains open as a museum and a memorial. People from all over the world have been travelling to Poland to visit this place full of horrific history. The museum provides explanations about the war and what Jews have lived as well as pictures, and all this is immersed in the real and awful decor of the concentration camps. Henry Appel, an Auschwitz survivor, stated that “There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself… and that is if the world forgets that there was such a place.” The Director of the camp talks about “a responsibility toward future generations” to preserve Auschwitz and to keep sharing the story.
In total, over the six years of the Second World War, around six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. In the killing centers alone, 2.7 million Jews were killed by the Germans. Demographic studies on Jewish Holocaust reveal approximately 245,000 Holocaust survivors are still living across more than 90 countries. According to the research, 49% reside in Israel and 18% reside in North America. Since this tragedy, the testimonies of the survivors of the Nazis have been important and relayed by the press, hoping that no one will ever forget what happened 85 years ago and that humans will learn from the errors of the past.