06—Nazi camps, experiments and gassings.

The first concentration camps were established in Germany in 1933. Between 1933 and 1945, some 40,000 camps were set up and used for imprisonment, forced labour and massacres.

Speech by Hitler to the Reichstag in the Berlin Sportpalast, 30 January 1942

We are aware that the war can only end with the extermination of the Aryans or with the disappearance of the Jews from Europe.On September 1, 1939, in the Reichstag, I declared that the result of this war would be the extermination of the Jews. This time, for the first time, the Jewish law of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' will be applied.

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The first concentration camps were established in Germany in 1933.Between 1933 and 1945, some 40,000 camps were set up and used for imprisonment, forced labour and massacres. At first, the main target groups were political enemies, communists, socialists and social democrats, but later the number of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled and Jehovah's Witnesses increased. The latter were set up as a 'last resort', with the aim of killing as many persecuted people as quickly as possible.

The Nazis began experimenting with gassing as early as 1939, testing the deadly poisons mainly on mentally and physically handicapped German children and adults. The first death camp was set up in 1941, using trucks as mobile gas chambers. They herded people into the back of the trucks and then introduced exhaust fumes. They started using the truck method mainly because it was too psychologically demanding for the German soldiers to kill women and children face to face.

In 1942, the Germans set up gas chambers in several camps, where they herded in groups of people who had been dragged there in cattle cars. People had no idea where they were walking into. After being released from the wagons, everyone had to strip naked for a 'cleansing shower' and hang all their clothes and valuables on a rack. The soldiers even told them to note the number of their teeth, as this would help them find their belongings more quickly after the shower - so they did everything they could to make people believe they would not die. They were then put into a huge bathroom, but instead of water, Zyklon-B granules came out of the shower. The people died in 4-5 minutes. Towards the end of the war, the Nazis used less and more mixed gas, so dying could take up to 12 minutes. 

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

In the camps, prisoners were regularly experimented on. Josef Mengele and other "pseudo-doctors" subjected Jews, Gypsies and gays alike to horrific torture. A disease called water cancer developed in people who were abnormally malnourished and consumed contaminated water. In spite of adults' efforts to protect them, many young gypsy children were unable to resist the lure of water. They caught the disease and Mengele subjected the sick children to inhumane experiments. When his work was done, he simply murdered the children and preserved their body parts. His other obsession was identical twins: he injected chemicals, chloroform, into the children as an experiment, usually resulting in death or paralysis. The SS doctors often gave people salt water to drink to see how long they could survive. Gypsy women were injected with harmful substances to render them infertile, and other people were almost frozen to death, wondering when they would wake up after such a shock. 

The gas chambers, the experiments and the gassings had been heard about for years, but for a long time the world could not believe the horrors of what was happening in the German camps.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

(https://ujkor.hu/content/felboncoltam-oket-igen-tenyleg-egeszsegesek-voltak-josef-mengele-altudomanyos-kiserletei-auschwitzban)

The recollections of György and Márton Lusztig, who fell into Mengele's hands at the age of 17:

We were standing (naked), he (Mengele) was talking. Then they took blood. A lot. They kept draining our blood. Two or three times a week. Occasionally a big vial would be filled with the blood drawn. Then they gave us some kind of injection (in the buttocks). (...) Whenever we went, we always got an injection. (...) Meanwhile, we were constantly staring at those glass jars on the shelves. (...) Lungs, intestines, human liver and kidneys (were in them). Each jar had a label on it and a note saying where it came from and what it contained. They were twins, we would have been there too, because Mengele eventually killed his victims, but he didn't have time for us...

BERNÁTH GÁBOR-BRASSÓI VIVIEN-ORSÓS JULIANNA.

The European Roma Holocaust. Public Foundation for Research on Central and Eastern European History and Society, 2015, 87.

Zsuzsa Horváth's recollection of the Ravensbrück camp in 2000 (Zsuzsa was deported at the end of 1944, a few days before her 14th birthday. She survived the Holocaust): 

They put us in the cold, it was a kind of bath, they used a hose to pour cold water on us. It was so humiliating, the screaming that was there. Everyone was screaming as loud as they could. And the other thing was when they took us for examination. They were these women's examinations. (...) I can't tell you the pain I felt! It was the biggest humiliation.