Introduction
“Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State” is one of the most voracious and informative documentaries on the Holocaust. It presents the inner establishment of the Nazi realization of Hitler’s “final solution.” It was the accomplishment of the systematic genocide of Jews. This salient picture reveals the thoroughly researched chronicle of the “death factory”, its foundation and development, and nowadays historical evidence of survivors and perpetrators. The film examines the characteristics of the infamous Holocaust engineers like Himmler, Höss, and Mengele known as “death doctors”. Using historical photographs, computer models of the camps, interviews with victims and offenders the filmmakers create the truthful image of Auschwitz. This essay is intended to describe the inner workings of the concentration camps, the system of implementation of the annihilation of millions of European Jews, horrible experiments under prisoners, and mass murders. Everyone should know about this crime as the historical lesson of what should never be repeated.
The Nazi ideology
The film reveals the military ideology of Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hitler. The Nazi ideology was based on Nazism and racism. Nazis insist on the superiority of the so-called Aryan race. The other nations were qualified as “mongrel races”. Hitler claimed that “great nations” were developed from homogeneous populations of “great races”. These nations naturally grew from “races” with “natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits” (BBC – History). The “weakest nations” were called “mongrel races”, because they had weak cultures, were divided between themselves, and spread all over the world. The Nazis reckoned among them mainly Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anti-socials. They proclaimed that all the “mongrel races” should be wiped off the face of the earth. One of the architects of the Nazi death machine was Himmler. He controlled the work of the concentration camp system.
Auschwitz description
Auschwitz was the complex of Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The camp was based in the Polish town of Oswiecim, renamed by Nazi Germany Auschwitz. It consisted of three large camps and 45 sub-camps. The first camp was called Stammlager. The German term “Stalag”, the short form of Stammlager, was used for prisoner-of-war camps. The second camp was called Birkenau by the name of Polish village Brzezinka in its German translation. The third camp was called Buna-Monowitz. It was built in Germany, as in 1942 some of the Polish territories were annexed to Germany. The camp’s long-term goal was the extirpation of “mongrel races” in Europe. It is a fact that death was the inevitable outcome for most people taken in Auschwitz.
Genocide methods
The film shows us the horrible pictures of genocide methods, which were practiced by fascists on the occupied territories. A lot of people died because of overwork, diseases, and starvation in ghettos and labor camps. The everyday food portion for prisoners was too small to survive. The Nazis did not distribute any more food, because the final goal was death. The situation was worsened by diseases. Death was gradual and unavoidable. Every day a lot of prisoners were taken into the trains and removed out of the ghetto. SS commandos shot Jews and dumped them into huge pits. First Jews were said that they would be taken into a safe place. They were to take all the necessary and valuable things. At the place, they left their things and were sent to death by shooting or in gas chambers and gas vans. Then those trains were called condemned men carriage.
Extermination system
“Factories of Death” shows the complex extermination system of Nazis. The great number of prisoners was killed in gas van and gas chambers. The gas van was a wagon with an airtight compartment. People in it were suffocated with exhaust gas or poisoned with carbon monoxide. For a larger number of people, there were stationary gas chambers. They were used as “euthanasia programs” for the extermination of physically challenged and mentally incapable people and political prisoners, “lives not worthy to live” (Proctor, 191). Some of them were designed to kill more than two thousand victims at once. In 1942, three stationary gas chambers were built. When the train with prisoners arrived, few of them were chosen to work in the so-called Sonderkommando. The rest were stripped, and their hair was cut. Then they were pushed into the gas chambers to be killed. When they all were dead, Sonderkommando would carry out the bodies of the victims and bury them in a mass grave. Later the Nazis built large crematoria ovens, where they got rid of the bodies of the victim after different biological experiments. Human experimentation was developed in concentration camps during the Nazi regime. One of the leaders of the medical crimes was Mengele, known as “doctor death”. He arranged genetic experiments on twin children. The purpose was to find the method of human body manipulation. The victims of the experiments naturally were doomed to death.
Conclusion
Laurence Rees, writer, and producer of “Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State”, in his interview said, “What greater purpose can history have than to try and lead people toward a possible understanding of how this crime could ever have happened? Without an understanding of how it happened, you can’t begin to look around the world and think why it might happen again” (KCET). The film is aimed to show the terror of the Nazi genocide, for that it never appeared in human history.
Bibliography
Noakes, Jeremy. “Hitler and ‘Lebensraum’ in the East.” BBC – History, 2004. Web.
Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, Harvard, 1988.
Rees, Laurence. Interview. Community Television of Southern California (KCET), 2005. Web.