10 Heartbreaking Details Surrounding The Horrors Holocaust Victims Endured Inside Concentration Camps

6 /10 Slow Food To No Food

The concentration camps were not meant to sustain life, even for labor. The conditions were kept to a bare minimum where no one could survive for long.

Food was nearly nonexistent. The Nazis controlled all rations and often neglected to distribute them properly or keep the food for themselves while the prisoners were wasted away.

Malnutrition was one of the leading “natural” deaths in the camps, along with sickness.

5 /10 Plague Of Death

When people died from exposure or exhaustion, or if they were executed by a firing squad or killed in any way, the Nazis had only one solution for them.

They did not see their prisoners as human and did not respect their bodies in life or death. Mass graves were located on campgrounds where hundreds of corpses would be piled together, lacking all distinction to rot away in the open air.

4 /10 Uncountable

There are only estimates as to how many died, but some complex numbers do remain.

Most of the Nazi bookkeeping was destroyed during the closing years of the war or kept so secret it has never been found.

One thing that was found was shoes. The dead bodies were looted, and their shoes were left behind as they were filed into their final resting places of gas chambers.

Mounds and mounds of shoes remained when the camps were liberated, showing just how many lives had been lost.

3 /10 Human Experimentation

The Nazis were known for many evils, one of which was the fascination with modern-day mad science. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” as he was known, freely experimented on prisoners at the camps, as they would die no matter what.

He performed surgeries on living people and subjected them to horrific tests for the sake of research that, thankfully, never saw the light of day.

2 /10 Halls Of Death

The final room most of the prisoners visited was a gas chamber. They were stripped down and crammed together with minimal clothing and were subjected to poisonous gas until all were dead.

Once cleared, the Nazis cleaned the chamber out and cremated the bodies. This is where the term Holocaust came from. It’s a Greek word that means “to sacrifice by burning.”

The erasure of the dead and the loss of their ashes to the dirt and wind was the worst crime of the Nazi guards, and they did it nearly daily.

1 /10 Remembering Regret

Today, the Holocaust is synonymous with the horrors of war, but it was covered up while the war was happening.

The guards forcibly wrote letters from the camp prisoners to give the illusion that they were merely working off their crimes or debts in peace.

The world knew about Hitler’s march through Europe, but not about the terrible killing yards and halls of sickly people.

It wasn’t until the war ended and the camps were liberated that the world finally knew what was happening behind the front lines.

We remember it today not just for the lessons about what war does to the innocent, but also to know that these things can happen in our own countries without anyone learning the truth.