When Hitler realized how efficient the prison was at Brandenburg, he ordered that many of the existing concentration camps be fitted with gas chambers. The town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Poland was selected to be the main death camp for Jewish people. Rudolf Hoess was chosen to be the Kommandant of Auschwitz and to instructed to oversee the killing that went on there. As Himmler told Hoess, “The Fuhrer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to carry out this order…I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose.” (Gilber 138). With this came the order for ghettos to be evacuated and the Jewish inhabitants be brought to Auschwitz to be put to death. By the end of the Second World War, Auschwitz could process over 9,000 bodies each day.
At first, the Nazis used carbon monoxide as they had in the Euthanasia centers, and at a camp called Chelmno, in which great vans were constructed with carbon monoxide tubes, to kill the Jews. Soon, experiments in 1941 found that Zyklon-B, a common industrial strength plant disinfectant, killed people much quicker than the carbon monoxide. Less Zyklon-B was needed to kill the same number of people as carbon monoxide.
On January 20th, 1942, the Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate how to finish carrying out the Final Solution. This conference also let many of the military leaders of the Nazi party know the details about the plan for the Jews. At the conference, the fate of over eleven million Jews was discussed. Evacuations of Jews to designated areas and where they were to be exterminated was planned among the military leaders. Plans for every country’s Jewish population in Europe were laid out. The SS did not want the Jews to reappear after the exterminations were finished because a few Jews had survived. A series of four camps were to be built for extermination purposes only. The names of these camps were Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Chelmno (mentioned earlier). These camps were all located in Eastern Poland, for reasons of conspicuousness. The prisoners would immediately be processed on arrival at these camps. Yet, these camps all used carbon monoxide gas, which was very inefficient (Keegan 149).
To get rid of the evidence of the genocide that was happening, the Nazis had slave labor units dig up the mass graves throughout Europe and burn the bodies, or what was left of the bodies, effectively destroying all of the evidence of the mass killings. These special units worked throughout the year of 1943. The same would happen when a concentration camp was shut down or moved: everything would be burned, bulldozed, and cleaned. Trees would then be planted, making it seem as if nothing had ever been there. This is one reason that it was very hard to confirm the mass executions that were reportedly going on in Europe.
When the Jews arrived at the death camps, their valuables were immediately confiscated. This included all gold, silver, or items of any worth. These items were then sent to soldiers on the front lines to reward them for their hard work. By September 26, 1942, over 800 boxcars had left Auschwitz with confiscated items headed towards the SS Headquarters of the Economic Administration. Soldiers even sorted through the bodies of the freshly gassed Jews looking for gold teeth, which they would pull out of the body’s mouth with a set of pliers. The hair was even cut off the heads of the women and was used to stuff mattresses and cushions. Clothes and artificial limbs were also taken from the Jews before they were put to death. The Nazis would then send the clothes to German families, and give the artificial limbs to German soldiers who needed them (Source #5).
To get the Jews to the concentration camps, the SS loaded them onto boxcars pulled by trains. For this, the ghettos were placed near railroad tracks. Although when the ghettos were first made, the purpose of the placement so near the railroad tracks was to make it very easy for the SS to transport the Jewish prisoners wherever they were needed. Hitler knew that eventually he would move the Jews in masses from certain areas of Europe. The death camps became the locations he intended to move the Jewish population to.
The location of these ghettos made it simple to quickly move a huge number of Jews from one area of Europe to another. Many of the Jews died on the way to the camps due to lack of oxygen, water, and food. These bodies were usually thrown out of the boxcars when the train stopped. When the Jews arrived at the concentration camps, they were either killed immediately or made to work in a forced labor camp until they were to weak to work any longer, and then they were executed (Source #4).
The Nazis encountered almost no resistance when they loaded the boxcars with Jews to send them to their deaths. This was because none of the Jewish people knew what awaited them at the end of the line. The Jews were told that they were simply being relocated. A good part of the time, the Jews were even allowed to bring a few items on board with them, to reassure them that they were sincerely being moved to another part of Europe. In the end, the Nazis would kill the Jews and steal their possessions. Rarely did a Jew escape this death. Because of this, word about the death camps RARELY ever made it to the isolated ghettos.
By the end of the Second World War, many nations had become controlled by Germany and were forced to conduct the operations Hitler was employing against the Jews. Romania, Italy and Hungary all participated and aided the Germans, only because they were forced to, and threatened that if they didn t participate, they would also meet their death (Gilber 198).
The reason the Allies did not try to stop or interfere with Hitler’s Final Solution was mostly because they did not have any proof he was carrying it out. The Allies knew Hitler was moving people in large amounts, but they did not know where or why. The first inspection of a concentration camp was in June of 1944. The Red Cross inspected Theresienstadt, a camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia that was thoroughly prepared by the Nazis before their arrival. The Red Cross gave the camp a good report. This hindered the rumors of mistreatment and mass execution in the Nazi-controlled areas.
The camps were slowly liberated one by one as the Allied forces pushed from both sides of Germany. In the concentration camps, soldiers from the Allied nations often found thousands of emaciated, starving Jews among piles of dead bodies the stench of death was imminent and over-bearing (Source #5)
Even in the last hours of the war, the Nazis tried to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution. As the Allies approached Auschwitz, the guards forced the 25,000 Jews to evacuate the compound and walk over 100 miles in the snow, barefooted. Most of these prisoners ended up in the Buchenwald camp, in Germany, much farther west of the advancing Soviet army. Eventually these prisoners were liberated, but many died on the long trek. On May 1st, 1945, World War II was over, with Germany signing an unconditional surrender. The day before though, Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide by consuming cyanide capsules (Keegan 198).
In conclusion, The Nazi regime’s solution to the problem of what to do with the Jews was to try and kill every last one of them. At first, Hitler took it slow, but as the war progressed, the insanity grew, and so did Hitler s plot. He was out of control. What it comes down to is that Hitler walked the fine line between genius and insanity. His speeches were brilliant, but the results were weak and poor. His idea about the Holocaust was skewed. Was this a man without any morals? This is a question that will continue to plague mankind for history. What really was wrong with Adolph Hitler ?