Extermination Camps
You may think that extermination camps refer to death camps. Well, they don't. Every concentration camp was a "death camp" to some point. You would die no matter what camp you were sent to. You were to work in labor camps, but eventually killed. You were to starve to death in prison camps. But extermination camps had one meaning and one meaning only........ to kill as many as possible.
Adolf Hitler knew he wasn't going to win the war. Russia had defeated him and the Americans were getting more and more involved. Hitler knew he was going to be stopped; so near the end of the war, Hitler started the extermination camps. There were six extermination camps. The only point at these camps were to kill as many people as possible. These six camps were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and the biggest of all, Auschwitz.
Chelmno
Chelmno was the first extermination camp built outside the smalled isolated village of Chelmno in Poland. It was nicknamed the Palace, and it was far enough away from any cities so what happened inside the camp would keep secret. All people from the town of Chelmno, Poland, except a few men who were used to build the entrance to the extermination camp, were removed. The extermination process was to start as soon as possible.
Chelmno's first day of work started on December 8, 1941. Jews and other victims from near-by villages thought they were being dislocated from the war. SS officers dressed in doctor outfits would greet them at the gates. The officers would keep specfic records of what the victims brought, and then have the victims leave their pocessions and to follow the path to the trucks that would lead them to a shower.
Chelmno didn't have a gas chamber. Instead, the victims were to get into one of five vans that could hold up to 150 people. The seemingly harmless vans had the look of a Red Cross van, in order to make them look more friendly. These vans functioned like any other van, only the carbon monoxide was let out in the back of the van, where the victims were held. By the end of the ride, everyone in the back would have died.
After it could be sure that everyone was dead in the back on of the van, Jewish prisoners from the Sonderkommando would remove the bodies from the van and stack them inside a huge pit with the previous victims. After a while, the SS was forced to install a creatorium due to the horrible smell. The SS then asked the Jewish prisoners to dig up the already deag bodies and to then burn them into ashes.
Most of the victims of Chelmno came from the nearby ghetto, Lodz. Besides the few months that it was reopened near the end of the war, Chelmno was only open for 15 month, starting in December 1941 and ending in March 1943. An estimated 340,000 lifes were taken at the Palace. These 340,000 included at least 5,000 Gypsies, 100,000 Jews, and thousands of other races of innocent people.
Belzec
March 17, 1942 was when the extermination camp Belzec was opened. This was just three months after Chelmno was opened. Belzec was located near many ghettos in the provinces of Lublin and Lvov western Poland.
Belzec had three wooden gas chambers that were disguised as bathhouses and could hold up to 750 people each. In June of that same year, the wooden gas chambers were replaced by six brick ones that could hold more victims. Carbon monoixde was also used in Belzec, but when they ran out or if the gas wasn't pumped in properly, car fuel exhaust was used.
This camp at many tenchnical difficulties. When he gas chamber weren't functionly properly and if no cars were around to use their exhaust, the victims would stay in their cattle cars for extra hours without any food or water.
Although the many problems Belzec with functionly, it somehow lasted for eight months, until November 1942. In these months, and estimated 500,000 people lost their lifes. Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando spent another seven months digging up the buried bodies on the Belzec ground and burning there remains in a creamatoruim.
Sobibor
Solibor was the third extermination camp that opened. The camp opened in May 1942 and was concealed from the public by thick trees in the forests of Poland. Approximently 34,313 Jews came to this camp from Holland alone. Only 19 of them went back home.
This camp was modeled just like Belzec. The only major difference was that it was ran better. Once a group of large victims arrived, 20-80 of them were separated from the rest. These few people were allowed to live for a week or so to do tasks to help the camp, such as moving dead bodies and creamating them. Even some women were used to sew clothing and blankets for the SS officers. They were all killed in the end though. Two hundred fifty thousand were killed at Sobibor.
Treblinka
The last camp that did nothing but complete extermination was Treblinka. This camp was the biggest camp opened so far, and was only fifty miles away from the huge Polish city, which had turned into a ghetto, Warsaw. The labor camp that was already located in Treblinka became Treblinka I, when Treblinka II was built as a extermination camp. It opened on July 23, 1942. People from the Warsaw ghetto thought they were being relocated here for safety. The SS officers thought their three small gas chambers would be enough for the people of Warsaw. They were wrong. When they saw the completely filled train of victims arrive at the entrance, the SS decided just to shoot them all down as they got out.
By March of the next year, ten new gas chambers were ready to kill more victims. These chambers could hold up to 200 people each. The camp was running very efficeintly at this time. The SS officers wanted to disguise the look of Trelinka from it's victims for as long as possible. To do this, the SS officers made the entrance look like a train station. The road that led to the chambers were covered by little shops and stores. The secret couldn't be kept from them for long though. Throughout the deaths in cattle cars and gas chambers, 800,000 died at Treblinka.
Resources:
The Holocaust Camps, by Ann Byers
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/TIMELINE/camps.htm
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~lzamosc/gchelmno.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Sonderkommando.html
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005191
http://www.auschwitz.dk/sobibor/
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/treblinka.html
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