World War II was the center of many of humanity’s modern war tragedies.
There had been conflicts in the past that brought global attention and scale. Just a decade prior, the War to End All Wars was held; it was called the Great War, which no one would ever top.
Unfortunately, the end of that conflict only brought about the beginning of a new one as the world was torn apart again.
There was no shortage of victims and no absence of war crimes, and much of it happened behind enemy lines.
Everyone knows what the Holocaust was. The word, meaning “mass destruction by fire,” was a mere understatement to what happened during Nazi Germany’s attempted genocide of the Jewish population of Europe.
The deaths alone weren’t the worst part of the fatal ordeal. Before the Jewish people were brought to the concentration camps to die, they suffered first.
10 /10 The Crime Of Being Born
It is estimated that over 6 million people were killed as a result of the Holocaust.
These people were predominantly arrested for their race, and the most persecuted among them were Jewish migrants and ancestral Jewish people from Eastern Europe.
The Nazi party directed much of Germany’s former economic and social failings onto the Jewish people as an excuse to freely persecute them under their draconic SS police force.
During the years of the war, those found guilty of certain crimes or who were just not German were rounded up and sent to the camps.
9 /10 Five Years Of Hell
The camp system was in operation from early 1940, just a year after the war officially broke out. Nazi Germany began rapidly expanding into foreign territory during that time, where many of its most devastating camps were founded.
The most prominent of them all was Auschwitz, which was in Polish land under Nazi occupation. The camp was liberated in January of 1945.
Out of the 1.3 million people sent there, only 7,000 were present at the time of the camp’s liberation.
In the many death chambers, the rest died there or in the death march that the Nazis led to keep their prisoners interred in their land.