The horror of the Nazi genocide
The world could not believe that the marketable murderous madness that was watching was the work of humans. The unbelievable horror and death machine devised by the Nazis was the most gruesome materialization of ideology which was based on the all-powerful state Hitler.
When the Allied troops were releasing one after another - a succession of terrifying visions - the concentration camps built by the Third Reich, the news of the extermination of more than 10 million people of all ages, races and creeds fell like a heavy stone on the conscience of mankind. One question, one, echoing the spirit of all: how could such cruelty?
Known the extent of crime committed by the Nazis in charge of little use to establish timing differences on the degree of generalization of their murderous behavior. One is that since Hitler's rise to power until his death, the methods used in concentration camps and the number of people in them were imprisoned or lost their lives changed significantly.
The Nazi regime used the prison camps as a Machiavellian system, designed to meet diverse needs, be they politically motivated or, subsequently, economic. There was thus the war the only reason for the mass deportation of individuals to spread the field a bit all over Europe.
In March 1933, two months ago about his coming to power, Hitler seized the inauguration of the first two camps (Dachau and Oranienburg) to define its usefulness:
The brutality inspires respect. The masses who need them to instil fear, that convert a mole fearful and submissive. I do not want the concentration camps to become familiar with pensions. Terror is the most effective policy instruments ... The discontented and unruly when they know what awaits them in concentration camps, think twice before you challenge us. Agrediremos our opponents with a ferocious brutality, not hesitating to spar them the interest of the nation.
This means that the concentration camps emerged in order to suppress any attempt at political opposition. At SA - the Sturm Abletung, Section assault - fell in a primeita phase, the control fields. A mission stopped at 30 June 1934, the famous Night of Long Knives, when this body is practically annihilated. Were created to replace the dreaded SS.
The war and the extermination
Before the war, the Nazis sent to Lager - name given to the fields - all the opponents of the regime, whether conservative or communist, or a small number of citizens. Only in the wake of Kristallnacht, the November 10, 1938, and the annexation of Austria, the Jews will join the political prisoners.
The fierce persecution and paranoid to the Jewish people only manifests itself in a more violent after the conquest of Poland, giving body to the directives contained in the action for peace - that was the name given to those directives - that was intended to annihilate the Polish intelligentsia, for order to prevent their influence on the population. The Führer wanted, and the words are yours, keep a low standard of living slaves cheap.
This concept of economic exploitation of the inhabitants of occupied countries, will, in 1942, a turning point in German policy of use of fields. Until then the use of prisoners as manpower for manufacturing arms or national interest was formally prevented. From September this year (1942), the German military effort led to a change in philosophy - the extermination by work - which resulted in the massive annihilation of prisoners.
The first benificiados with this change were the SS men, who thereafter became the real masters of this almost inexhaustible manpower, handling it and using it at their whim. Them becomes dependent on the recruitment of forced laborers, essential to the productive German.
The food, of poor quality and almost nonexistent, emerges as the leading cause of death of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, which, amazingly enough is left up the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, greatly distressed. The spiral of killings reached in 1944, the astonishing figure monthly 30 000 dead.
The Allied advance on two fronts, East and West, and the collapse of the Reich's economy seem to have even more elouquecido the Nazi leaders. The exterminínio became, in the words of prórpio Himmler, a compelling need in the many concentration camps.
The methods used then were based on the assumption that terror was the best way to deny the personality of the individual and the handle. Since then, with the fields at risk of falling into enemy hands, the death quantitatively replaces the principle of punishment. Rather than punishing urge to exterminate a large number of huimanos beings starving, dying and wounded that to stay alive, will soon ask the winners to do justice.
Ten million dead
One enters the phase of intensive use of gas chambers, the so-called scientific experiments, the sophistication of the methods of torture employed, finally, the pathology of the executor.
To evaluate, in exact figures, the extent of the genocide, is an almost impossible task. Even knowing that the SS officers were the accounts of the daily massacres, they have left to destroy incriminating documents before fleeing or being caught.
It is estimated also that the number of Jews killed has approximately six million, while the remaining four million to reach 10 million identified as being the total number of victims, are divided by all the countries occupied by individuals of all creeds, races, social classes and ethnicities. In short, in his tour of Europe, the Nazis left behind an indelible mark of terror.
So it was in Dachau, near Munich a field originally intended for political prisoners, Buchenwald, the factory of corpses, in Schsenhausen, near Berlin, in Mauthausen, with its infamousscale of death, in Auschwitz, turned into a graveyard for the Jewish population of Poland. Or, a list too long in Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Mecklenburg, Treblinka, Sobidor, Majdanek, Stutthof, Salapsis ...
The list of responsible
The main Nazi leaders - Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Goebbels - were already dead when the war ended. The main ringleaders of the concentration camps - as Hoes, Eike, Best, Glücks, Koch and Kramer - opted for suicide or were tried and executed at the end of Nuremberg trials or other trials conducted especially as, for example, the process of Eichmann .
The hunt for Nazi war criminals remained in the post-war position of associations created especially for this purpose, composed by Jewish survivors is supported by the Israeli regime. Even today it is estimated that over 200,000 of the charge of genocide - from military and industrial - have been judged just over 35,000.
The responsibility should not, contrary to what came to be suggested in the postwar period, be attributed to the entire German people, the overwhelming majority repodiavam what went on in concentration camps. Only fools and unconscious, by the way and ruin most of the Nazi leadership, must bear the blame and the burden of millions of corpses. The German people, that would gradually becoming aware of what was happening in the camps, could do little or nothing to counter the collective greatest crime in human history.
The english version of this article will be available soon. In the meanwhile, the text above was the result of a Google translation from portuguese version to english.