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What acts of hate, violence, or death do they engage in? “Inside the gates of these camps, Nazi guards had systematically murdered approximately six million Jews… at least five million additional victims were slaughtered in the camps, including Roma, mentally disabled, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others considered to be enemies of the Nazis” (Price 53). Hitler believed in Antisemitism, which is a hatred of hostility to Jews, and when he rose to power he and the Nazi Party instituted a series of measure aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jewish citizens. Some measures included:
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In 1944, Nazis forced Jews who resided in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to be deported to labor and death camps in Poland. At the age of 15, Elie Wiesel, a famous writer and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust, which took the lives of more than 6 million Jews. Wiesel lived in the camps under deplorable, inhumane conditions, gradually starving, and was ultimately freed from Buchenwald in 1945. Of his relatives, only he and two of his sisters survived.
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Real Life Account |
Alexander Werth, part of a Soviet Troop who witnessed a guided tour of the facility, “There were six concrete boxes - gas-chambers - side by side. 'Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here simultaneously,' one of the guides said. The people (men one time, women another time, children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes - about five yards square - and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box - and it was completely dark there, except for a small light in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door - the process of gassing began. First some hot air was pumped in from the ceiling and then the pretty pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody was dead. . ."
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