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Raveena Nagra
Mr. Hawkins
Modern World History-P, Period 4
7 April 2016
The Killing Centers
In the time of 1939-1945, it was a world of chaos and havoc. Through the times of
World War II, many people were dying and wounded. In six years there were 60 million,
an average of 10 million a year, dead individuals worldwide. The most memorable event
that occurred in World War II was the Holocaust and all of the gruesome and cruel deeds
that Hitler promoted and acted upon. The Holocaust was the genocide of Jews and other
minorities that Hitler and the Nazi party viewed as inferior and a growing need to
eliminate them from the face of the earth. The Holocaust included camps called killing
centers. Killing centers held torturous executions, the mass murdering of innocent
civilians, and all in different areas.
The killing centers, aka exterminations camps or death camps, were each set up to
kill in multiple different ways. After World War II it was determined that German SS
and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by
asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting(ushmm). Depending on the camp, they
either shot or poisoned the Jews to get the most efficient way of obliterating them from
the planet. This torture was never told to the Jews but they were tricked into it by being
told they were going to shower or do work. Hundreds of thousands more being killed in
trucks, in which the exhaust pipes had been reconfigured to pump carbon monoxide
gas into sealed paneled spaces behind the cabs of the vehicles(ushmm). These men,

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women, and children already knew that they were being sent forcefully to labor camps,
but little did they know they wouldnt even make it to see the labor camps. The Germans
didnt want any more slave labor but just more and more minority death. The Holocaust
was a competition to see which camp could kill the most innocent people. The death
camps were improving and making concrete walls for the gas chambers which enabled
the SS to kill up to 1,200 Jews at a time(jewishvirtuallibrary). In any category other
than death, improvement would be positive, but to improve how to efficiently kill
innocent people is always cruel. Now every three hours they could kill 1,200 Jews
meaning that in a day they could end up killing 9,600 men, women, and children. The
killing centers were using different gas methods and physical shooting to eliminate the
minority groups that consisted of more than just Jews.
The minority groups being murdered for who they were in World War II were
more than just Jews alone. In World War II about 600,000 Jews were murdered at
Belzec and probably dozen thousands of Gypsies(jewishvirtuallibrary). The Nazis
targeted the Gypsies because they were thought to be inferior since they never had a
permanent home. The reasons still do not make it okay to look at Social Darwinism and
take it into our own hands to evolve our own race. Getting rid of the inferior wouldnt
make the world any different because they werent interfering in the first place. The
victims of a mass murdering event, Operation Reinhard, included Polish, German,
Austrian, Dutch, French, Czech, and Slovak Jews as well as Roma (Gypsies), Soviet
prisoners of war, and Poles (ushmm). They even killed their own locals if they were
protesting or helping Jews and other minority groups escape and hide. Their main goal
was to get rid of all Jews but they also threw in the small scraps that they thought would

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be an easy target. Historys research has stated that less than than 170,000 prisoners
passed through the main camp at Lublin/Majdanek, nearly half of whom were Jews
and most of the rest Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet civilians, and Czechs
(ushmm). In other words, many of these minority groups and Jews had to go to
Majdanek before going onto the extermination camps. These minority groups were being
discriminated against even before the war but the way exaggerated each ones
discrimination and racism. The innocent civilians were being mass murdered but
everyone was separated and scattered through Poland at several central camps.
There were three main camps that had great power because of the high death rate
from their gas chambers and other ways of murdering the innocent. The first killing
center was Chelmno the pilot extermination project rude and crude, conferring
death by three gas vans, borrowed from the Eastern Front. No crematoria, just mass
graves in the woods(remember). Since this was one of the first extermination camp,
they were very primitive and still learning the best ways, like the burning of the bodies.
Chelmno was in Poland near the very forested rural towns to keep it in secrecy from the
public. Next there was Belzec which was very terrible and only left two survivors of
Belzec, neither of whom is still alive(remember). They were extremely successful in
murdering since they learned from the mistakes of all of the other major failure of
previous death camps. They managed to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in one
camp due to their use of gas chambers and the burning of the bodies to have more room
and still keep secrecy. In the mother center camp of them all, Auschwitz, newly arrived
persons classified by the SS physicians as unfit for labor were sent to the gas
chambers: these included the ill, the elderly, pregnant women and

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children(jewishvirtuallibrary). There were more than a million people sent to
Auschwitz and only forty percent of them were even registered and given a serial
number. The rest of the civilians were to be put into forced labor or be put to death in
showers, aka gas chambers. Auschwitz was a murdering machine and the most well
known killing center. Each and every worker at these killing centers were to promise
lifetime secrecy about what occurred behind closed doors, but some didnt follow the
rules after the liberation of killing centers and we got ahold of very important accounts of
facts. The many camps spread through Poland whose sole use was killing exemplified
how horrific World War II and the Holocaust were.
Torturous executions, the mass murdering of innocent civilians, and all in
different areas were three phrases that described killing centers. The killing centers were
one way of a society getting rid of another. In the past and even after the Holocaust there
were genocides. The other genocides were done less extremely. Every society has their
ups and downs but some have more extreme downs. The Holocaust was a drastic down
for both innocent civilians and Hitler because many were killed but no goal was
achieved. Society always picks scapegoats to blame for the problems and the Germans
chose the Jewish people for their loss in World War I. Killing centers are, thankfully, a
thing of the past.