Ruiz 1

Wynter Ruiz
Mr. Hawkins
Modern World History P ~ Period 3
10 April 2016
The Killing Centers
The Holocaust was a terrible thing for the Jews and many, it was a time of death and
disease for many innocent human beings. The Nazi ideals and Hitlers persuasiveness gave birth
to a hatred of non-Aryans throughout Germany. The Nazis were responsible for the death of
millions upon millions of innocent people, and they did this strategically, with killing centers.
There were many different killing centers and they all used different methods of genocide.
Everything about these centers was inhumane and cruel to the Jewish people, and depressing.
The first killing center to be developed was the Chelmno killing center, developed in
December 8th 1941, and this is where they developed the rules of the killing centers. After
deportation trains arrived at the killing centers, guards ordered the deportees to get out
and form a line. The victims then went through a selection process. Men were separated
from the women and children. (Evidence 2) The reason that this selection process was done
this way, was to separate families. They did this so they could find women with small children,
and kill them first. Next, A Nazi, usually an SS physician, looked quickly at each person to
decide if he or she was healthy and strong enough for forced labor. This SS officer then
pointed to the left or right; victims did not know that individuals were being selected to live
or die (Evidence 2) When people were not strong enough to do labor, they were sent to gas
chambers, but claimed that the chambers were in fact showers to remove any lice. The Nazis at
this camp used engine exhaust to gas the Jews inside. The Nazis destroyed Chelmno in
September 1944. They tried to erase all evidence of mass murder. They ordered the digging

Ruiz 2
up and cremation of all the bodies from the mass graves. (Evidence 1) The Nazis did this
because they knew they would be tried in court about their transgressions. Which they were, in
the Nuremburg trials which lasted from November 20th, 1945 to October 1st, 1946. There were
plenty of other killing centers besides Chelmno, and some more cruel than others.
One of the worst and largest camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the
largest of the killing centers, has four large gas chambers using Zyklon B (crystalline
hydrogen cyanide) as the killing agent. (Evidence 2) Zyklon B was one of the many terrible
gases that was actually developed by a Jewish man. It is estimated to have killed two million
Jews and it only took five to ten minutes to kill a large amount of people. Unlike Chelmno and
the Operation Reinhard killing centers, Auschwitz-Birkenau also functioned as a forcedlabor camp and as a holding pen for groups of Jewish and Gypsy (Roma and Sinti)
families (Evidence 3) The labor at killing centers often consisted of working at many of the
plants and factories used to develop weapons and goods for the German military. They were not
paid and it was essentially slavery, and often those in forced labor were worked to death.
During the deportation of Hungarian Jews in the spring of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau
reached peak killing capacity: The SS gassed as many as 6,000 Jews each day. By
November 1944 the SS had killed more than a million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma,
Poles, and soviet prisoners of war. (Evidence 3) Everything about Auschwitz-Birkenau was
truly depressing and horrific, it was arguably one of the worst camps and destroyed innocent
peoples lives, and took their lives. People were forced to work and die at terrible rates at this
camp just like all the others, at the hands of the Nazis. Not all methods that the Nazis used to kill
Jews were in Germany, but sometimes they used an organized operation

Ruiz 3
This organized operation was Operation Reinhard. It became the code name for the
German plan to murder the approximately two millions Jews residing in the so-called
Generalgouvernement (Government General). The Generalgouvernement was a part of
German-occupied Poland. (Evidence 3) This plan consisted of making three different killing
centers, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II. All of these would be built in the Warsaw district, in
Poland. The victims of the Operation Reinhard killing centers included Polish, German,
Austrian, Dutch, French, Czech, and Slovak Jews as well as Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of
war, and Poles. (Evidence 3) Most of the prisoners in the killing centers were killed by being
locked in gas chambers, pumped with carbon monoxide, a gas that deprives all your organs of
oxygen until you die. Also a small number of prisoners were killed by firing squads. Small
numbers of prisoners were selected from each transport to support the main function of the
camps: the killing of human beings. (Evidence 3) These prisoners were in charge of taking
the corpses from the gas chambers after the deed was done, and burying them. This was often a
scary and a large health risk for those taking the bodies out, not to mention the fear and sadness
of having to hold the corpse of someone who could possibly be a family member or close friend.
All of the goals and transgressions of the Nazis were horrible and heartbreaking things, they
killed five to six million Jews throughout the Holocaust using these camps.
The killing centers were unique in how they killed their prisoners, and who their
prisoners were. There were six camps overall, all for the purpose of killing and disposing of
Jews. The whole plan of killing centers is evil and life ruining for many different races and
cultures, just because of the Nazis prejudice. These killing centers were responsible for the
deaths of millions upon millions of innocent people. There was no remorse, if they were a

Ruiz 4
mother, an infant, or elderly, they were still murdered. Everything about the holocaust is horrible,
and we can only hope that history will never repeat itself this drastically.