Children
were treated as cruelly as
adults, often used for experiments. |
The
"Final Solution" inflicted on the Jewish race by the Nazis
for racial purity was the most horrendous and evil deception that
mankind would ever witness. The fanatical Third Reich would now
eliminate all who opposed them by killing millions in their extermination
camps.
Those of their own nationality that were mentally and physically
handicapped were not exempt from the horror to come (in one clinic
alone, Haddamar in Germany they killed over seventy thousand) The
Nazi objective was to breed a pure Aryan race, and gradually after
a hundred or so years breed out the genetic defects in the German
people. The cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi's was to murder all
who they thought would be a threat, it surpassed no bounds.
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The so called
food ration they received daily, was potato soup, one piece of bread,
some weak coffee fluid, a spoonful of marmalade, and a pitiful slice
of cold sausage... that was a generous day. As food became very
scarce, they had to live and work on an average of 160 calories
a day (a bag of potato crisps, by today's equivalent) In all of
the death camps hunger claimed the lives of many, many thousands
of prisoners, their emaciated corpses were strewn everywhere, they
died where they fell until the bodies were dragged away to be cremated.
While this horror was evident to all, the S.S. ate heartily as food
was more than abundant to those of the killing squads.
In Natzwieler, and Mathhausen many of the inmates were sent down
the quarries to work, to hack away at the solid rock day after day
until their hands bled, then push the barrow loads of rocks up and
down the slopes hour after hour, with the S.S. beating them if found
to be weakening. Their feet bleeding profusely
from the sores caused by wearing the heavy wooden clogs.This most
inhumane suffering caused misery and despair, many gave up, thus
incurring the wrath of the guards who shot them on the spot.
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The oven where thousands of bodies were disposed of. |
The gallows at Struthof.
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In
all weathers they slaved away, soaked to the skin, burned by the relentless
sun, frozen to their pitiful bony bodies by the blinding snowstorms
that swept down on them.
If the forced work did not kill them, then the rampaging illnesses
that spread like wildfire through the camp would…Typhus, dysentery,
oedemas, pneumonia, abscesses, phlegmons, pulmonary diseases, and
the frequent beatings caused their bodies
to be coloured black and blue, the terrible pain that they suffered
and the misery of this living death every day must have been unbearable!
Those who became too weak to work were dragged to the medical centre,
once there it was certain an injection of petrol would be given and
death would be agonising.
Many were hanged in the camp square on the gallows,
or taken down the steps and shot in the back of the head, giving delight
to the mass of S.S. watching, then they would be dragged down the
stone stairs to the crematorium and burnt. It was as bestial as that! |
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