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Nazi Death Camps Paper

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Nazi Death Camps
Nazi Death Camps
Arbeit Macht Frei
Arbeit Macht Frei
2012
Joseph Frimpong
Western Civilization 2
11/2/2012
2012
Joseph Frimpong
Western Civilization 2
11/2/2012

Arbeit macht frei; when translated into English means labor makes you free. This was the first thing many Jews in the 1940’s saw as the banner above the gates of the place they’d likely die read. (Wachsmann) German soldiers fed Jews false hope, thinking that the harder they worked the closer freedom would be when in reality freedom could only come with death. The world changed forever when an estimated 20,946,000 people died due to the world war ignited by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Third Reich was the name for Nazi Germany under Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) when it was a totalitarian state. Totalitarianism is a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever necessary. (Dictionary) Soldiers were killed in battle, Civilians in cross fire, and by starvation but nothing compares to the systematic execution and elimination demonstrated by the Third Reich sponsored death camps. Before the organized concentration camps that are well known throughout the world to have killed a countless number of people there were camps built in the early 1930’s when the Nazi’s first came into power. Earlier camps were temporary and were set up to confine, interrogate, torture, and weaken the Nazis' political opponents under the control of the Gestapo. The camps built later by The Reich between 1939 and 1942 were used to hold large groups of prisoners without trial including Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and prisoners of war. They were built killing centers for efficient means of mass murder unlike concentration camps which served as detention and labor centers. Millions of Jews and

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