AboutDylan Pemberton Expertise My area of interest is the holocaust with particular reference to the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp. I can answer most questions regarding the lead up to and the ultimate deployment of 'The Final Solution' including the Wannsee Conference, ghetto liquidations, the Nuremberg Trials, post-war 'Nazi Hunting' by the likes of Simon Weisenthal etc. My knowledge / experience is perhaps best suited to someone who - for example - had a homework / coursework assignment in this area as opposed to a professional interest in which case there are, naturally, recognised experts and historians available.
Experience Lifelong interest in ensuring the events of the holocaust are never forgotten, visits to Auschwitz Birkenau and extensive literature on the subject.
Education/Credentials 10 GCSE's, several A-Levels, BTEC National Diploma Graphic Design, 15 years senior level business experience.
Expert: Dylan Pemberton Date: 4/15/2008 Subject: A jews perspective
Question Hi Dylan, i wanted to know how jews were taken to concentration camps. Were they just sitting in there houses and Nazi guards just brake down their door and throw them in a car? Also, where were teenaged jews put? When they would throw them in ovens, how did it work? Would they just pick a group of boys and kill them?
Answer Well, the jews (and other persecuted groups) were largely taken to the camps by train - always in appalling conditions and a lot of the time; many of the 'passengers' died on the journey.
There were a raft of different ways the jews were made to get on the trains including (but not limited to):
(1) Brute force - dragging people from their homes and forcing them onto trains. Since the majority of jews were herded into 'ghettos' and made to all live together in horrendous squalor in small, segregated areas (and they were usually trained in from all over to reach these ghettos) it became easier and easier for the Germans to 'liquidate' the ghettos and get people onto the trains (since the people were congregated together and basically trapped).
(2) Trickery - Jews would often be tricked into getting onto the trains with the false promise that they were for example being evacuated to the east were they would be put to work but gain better conditions and the chance to escape the desperation of the ghettos. Once on the trains, they were transported to the concentration and extermination camps, usually meaning to their doom.
(3)Passive aggression - The Nazis would often supply the Jewish leaders within a ghetto with a quota for a number of people who they demanded turn up for transportation at a given time. This therefore put selection / fate into the hands of the Jews themselves which was perhaps the most sinister of all ways. If the community leaders etc. refused, it would result in a much greater retribution for the whole community as way of punishment and especially for those given the onerous task of making the selection of their own people. In many cases, these people showed great bravery by putting themselves and their families top of the list and / or doing whatever they could to save the most vulnerable groups.
Teenage jews were treated no differently, nor were younger children, women, the elderly or the infirm - the nazis were equally evil in their appalling discrimination.
People were not typically thrown into the ovens, they were usually tricked - they would arrive at the death camps and be ushered into buildings where they were told they would be taking a shower or a de-licing process when in fact, they were entering a gas chamber. Once dead, the nazis - who had already plundered their homes, their possessions and anything else of value, would search the bodies for anything of value (including removing gold teeth etc) then in many of the camps cremate the evidence in industrial ovens and dispose of the ashes.
Of course, many people were aware of their fate when they arrived at camps like Treblinka but the weakened, frightened people could do little when herded into the death chambers by snarling nazis with whips and clubs, vicious dogs etc., it was a very clinical, evil and well organised machinery of death that the Nazis operated, perfected over a period of time.
And people weren't just gassed I may add; whole villages were rounded up, taken to fields, made to dig their own graves and shot, people were worked to death, murdered indiscriminantly for the most trivial reasons in their own homes etc.
At least 6m jews were butchered by the Nazis in a relatively short period of time with some estimates exceeding 10m. Millions more were persecuted and traumatised by the horror of Nazi germany.
There are many, many books available on the subject and I would urge you too check out books like Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees and an even more informative and all encompassing book; The Holocaust - The Jewish Tragedy by Martin Gilbert.
