The text reads:
Millions Are Murdered in Death Camps
When Germany invaded Poland and the Soviet Union, the Nazis gained control of large territories that were home to millions of Jews. Under Nazi rule, Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, and other Polish cities were forced to live in crowded, walled ghettos. Nazis also constructed additional concentration camps in Poland and Eastern Europe.
At first, the murder of Jews and other prisoners tended to be more arbitrary than systematic. But at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Nazi leaders made the decision to move toward Hitler's "Final Solution." Reinhard Heydrich, an SS leader known as "the man with an iron heart," outlined a plan to exterminate about 11,000,000 Jews. Although the minutes of the meeting do not use the word "kill," everyone there understood that killing was their goal.
Many concentration camps, especially in Poland, were designated as death camps, where prisoners were systematically exterminated. The largest death camp was Auschwitz in southern Poland. Others included Treblinka, Maid-enek, Sobibor, Belsec, and Chelmno. Prisoners from various parts of the Reich were transported by trains to the death camps and murdered. Nazis forced prisoners into death chambers and pumped in carbon monoxide or crammed the prisoners into showerlike facilities and released the insecticide Zyklon B.
Some concentration camps that the Nazis converted into death camps did not have gassing equipment. In these camps, Nazi guards shot hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Nazi "Action Groups" that followed the army into Eastern Europe also shot several million Jews and buried them in ditches.
In fully functioning death camps, the bodies of murdered prisoners were further desecrated. Human fat was turned into soap; human hair was woven into wigs, slippers, and mattresses; cash, gold fillings, wedding rings, and other valuables were stripped off the victims. After the Nazis had taken what they wanted, they burned the bodies in crematoriums.
By 1945, about 6 million European Jews had been murdered. But Jews were not the only victims. As many as 5 million others lay dead, including neary 2 million non-Jewish Poles. While many survivors lived with constant nighe mares of the experience, or with the sorrow and guilt of being the last members of their families, many others determined to rebuild their lives and families i the United States, Israel, or elsewhere and continue to be productive citizens.
Source: Pg. 495-496; United States History, Reconstruction to the Present, Oklahoma Edition, ©️2014
I would like to discuss one of these topics with my professor, in order to get an exterminationist view on the topic. Personally, I would enjoy to see his response to Simon Wiesenthal’s 5 million number
, but does anyone have a suggestion on which event would the hardest to explain from an exterminationist point of view? LS
