Hitlers reignHitler was fully responsible for the mass executions in Poland in 1939 and 1940. He was also associated in setting up plans for a Jewish reservation in Poland and he backed the Madagascar plan. He was continually preoccupied with further deportations and deportation plans. In 1941 Hitler ordered the mass killing of the Jewish-Bolshevist intelligentsia and the elimination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians. In Germany concentration camps were set up after 1933 to detain without legal procedure Jews, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. During World War II extermination, or death, camps were established for the sole purpose of killing men, women, and children. In the most notorious camps - Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany - more than 6 million people, mostly Jews and Poles, were killed in gas chambers. Millions of others were also interned during the war, and a large proportion died of gross mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease. The Holocaust represents 11 million lives that abruptly ended, the extermination of people not for who they were but for what they were. Groups such as handicaps, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents and others were persecuted by the Nazis because of their religious/political beliefs, physical defects. |