Death marches are not your typical joyful march. It is a sinister word with a sinister meaning, and can still bring shivers to the bone to those who experienced it and had survived. The Holocaust was the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. The Nazis believed that Germans were superior in comparison to other races, especially Jews, and so they built concentration camps to imprison and kill the Jews, homosexuals and other “racial enemies” of the Germans. The Soviets and the Allies, who were the liberators of the prisoners and the enemies of the Nazis, advanced to Germany and started liberating concentration camps, which drove Nazis to evacuate the prisoners. Death marches were ruthless evacuations that were held for the benefit of the Nazis. The …show more content…
Thousands of prisoners died from starvation, cold or exhaustion. The marches were usually held in winter, and prisoners had to walk miles with little rest while SS guards swapped groups to rest. Any prisoners that fell or lagged behind were shot and left on the road. The prisoners scooped up snow to drink, and were given little food throughout the march. They could not save the food to make it last longer and had to eat it at once for fear of other stronger captives stealing it (Ancona-Vincent). They were constantly cold because they wore thin clothes, but if they were lucky, they could take a blanket with them on the march. Even if the prisoners had a blanket, it was still not enough to block the cold. The prisoners that had survived the march arrived at concentration camps. Due to the countless evacuations, camps were fit to burst, and epidemics like typhus, a disease transmitted by fleas or lice, festered. Eventually Allies and Soviets invaded deeper into Germany. They discovered numerous concentration camps, some already evacuated and some still containing prisoners. They freed all the prisoners and also liberated the marches they came across. Even though the war was nearly at its end, death marches continued to happen. The Nazis surrendered on May 7th 1945 and on May 1st 1945, only a week before, prisoners who marched from Neuengamme, a concentration camp, to the North Sea coastline were put onto ships (United States Holocaust
The soldiers also slept in small canvas that was weak and didn 't, provide any protection from the snow. This resulted in them having diarrhea, dysentery, and fevers. With so many sicknesses going around about 2,000 out of 12,000 people died. George Washington tried to encourage the farmers to sell some of their food to the soldiers because they were short on supplies. He even gave out flyers of lists of
This was a common source of disease and other health problems. Once people died, corpses were left lying around all day until someone finally took them from the camp(Ransom). Along with these problems prisoners had to deal with fellow prisoners who looted and stole. Some prisoners died because they lost their food, clothing or other possessions. These terrible conditions killed thousands of
The German soldiers forced many prisoners out of one camp and made them run to an abandoned town, and if they stopped running or fell, the soldiers would shoot them. When at the town they let the prisoners die, and they didn’t give them any place to sleep or keep warm in the snow. They shoved all of them onto a train where all they had was a blanket each, but snow covered them so it didn’t do any good. “A thick layer of snow was accumulating on our blankets”( pg. 96). Also, they didn’t give them any food, and if they did it would be just bread pieces that they threw into the car for their own amusement.
The freezing soldiers lay around on the cold hard ground; some are wrapped in their tattered rags while others are vomiting, having fatigue and starving from lack of food. Despite these grim conditions, however, their ambitions towards freedom disguised their miserable life in camp. The winter of 1777 at Valley Forge was tough for Washington and his men. They lived in extremely poor weather conditions with a deficient amount of resources to stay alive. Diseases were also spreading, and the army was in desperate need of money if they even wanted to dream of defeating Britain.
The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865. It was a war fought within the newly born United States of America, between the Confederacy (South) and the Union (North). Jefferson Davis was the president for the Confederacy and Abraham Lincoln was the president for the Union. The southern economy was largely based on slaves and the crops they produced. On the other hand, the northern economy depended on industry.
Oftentimes, when some prisoners lost hope, they purposely went near the wall to put an end to their lives. The extreme Southern weather proved to be disastrous for many captives as no shelter and clothing was provided for most of them, Ransom explained these conditions to be “Very cold and men suffer terribly with hardly any clothing on some of them”. Lack of shelter and strength also made them targets for ferocious animals such as vermins. Not only that, the prisoners had to go without food
During the Holocaust, six million Jews were sent to their deaths. Nevertheless, in the Holocaust literature, one can find the glimpse of joy. In 1933, in Germany, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party created a German Empire & Jews were no place in Hitler’s vision. Love & Laughter were two of the main things that made Jews and other people forget the time happening in the Holocaust, including nature. Almost 2,700,000 Jews were sent to extermination camps such as, Treblinka and Chelmno, where they were lately killed.
Wiesel tells us how he and all of the other prisoners were forced to run. He also told us how he and the rest of his block formed a rank and they had to march through the cold snowy night most of them did not even have shoes. On page 82, Wiesel wrote, “I ran outside to look for him. The snow was piled high, the blocks’ windows veiled in frost. Holding a shoe in my hand, for I could not put it on my foot, I ran, feeling neither pain nor cold.”
Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage and eventually, death. During the Holocaust, thousands of people died from starvation and the malnutrition it causes. Normally, the effects of starvation are bad enough, not including the many other atrocities that took place during the Holocaust, and eventually, starvation became one of those many atrocities.
Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack of action was due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also a result of the general incomprehension with the news of the Holocaust. In Auschwitz more than 2 million people were murdered. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. During June 6, 1944, D-Day was declared in glorification of the U.S.A and other Allied Forces defeating most Hitler’s government.
Expository Report “We must do something, we can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse, we must revolt”. These are the words from many men surrounding Elie Wiesel as he entered Auschwitz, calling out for rebellious toward the Germans harsh conditions. Of course they had no idea what they were getting themselves into, many thought that there was nothing wrong until boarding the cattle train that would send them off to their final resting place. Life during the holocaust was torturous to say the least, so much so that some 6,000,000 lives were taken during this time in Jewish descent alone. People of the Jewish descent did not have it easy; they either were forced out of their homes into concentration camps, or they would hide out only to be found and killed of they remained in their settlements.
The Nazi officers wanted the Jewish men to march like they were animals, and to not stop until they deemed fit. The Jewish were also marching in freezing weather, and had no food or drink while they were marching. They were expected to be like machines, and if they failed as machines, they were simply finished off by the SS. Elie described, “When the SS were tired, they were replaced. But no one replaced us.
The Holocaust is a time in history when millions of people were persecuted in Europe by being sent to live in ghettos and eventually being deported to concentration camps where they were systematically annihilated until the Allied forces liberated the remaining survivors. The Jews were moved to the ghettos, because Hitler pushed the Jews to move to the east, then they concore move of the east and move them more to the east. Then “there was no more room for them to move to the east, so they built ghettos for them to live” (Byers 32). But his true intentions were to “separate the Jewish people from manly Germans and also other races” (Allen 37).
World War II is said to be the worst conflict in human history. About fifty to eighty million people died all together. There were concentration camps run by the Germans and there were essentially two wars raging. The two wars were the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific, which was Japan against the United States. World War II went on for six years and would destroy more land and property around the world and kill more people than any other war before.
Daily Life at Concentration Camps Starving, cold, unclothed, sick, and hard working people were all put in concentration camps and treated horribly. The Jewish workers worked hard all day everyday or else they would get killed. The way the Nazi’s treated the Jews was extremely bad, the Jews would not get food, clothes, beds, and other necessities. There were all types of camps that had all kinds of jobs, you were assigned a job and didn 't get to pick a job. The Jews had a very compact schedule, they were busy all day, never any time to waste.