Your house. Your belongings. Your family. Your properties. Everything has been lost. Only your race remains, accompanied by a freshly tattooed identification number imprinted on your arm. You have lost your name, now you will be identified only through the meaningless numbers and letters imprinted on your arm by the Nazis. You will be recognized as Jew-A-15510. That is your new name. If only your name was the only thing that had changed; unfortunately, the remainder of your life had also changed as you took your first step into the dark, thick walls of Nazi concentration camps; or rather the Nazi Death Factories. From the moment Nazis gained power, jewish oppression escalated. Hitler truly lived upto the Nazi ideology which at its core, was anti-semetic. Between 1933 and 1938, over four hundred anti-semetic laws were passed. The state gradually stole everything from the jews. From not being able to uptake jobs in civil service through the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service or own farms or any land through the Hereditary Farm Law 1933, the Nazis' cruelty knew no end. The Nuremberg law quite literally stripped jews of their german citizenship and made them stateless in their own country. In 1938, a series of violent attacks of purely anti-semetic nature occurred, history records them as 'Kristallnacht'. Over 7,500 businesses were damaged by the hitler youth, jewish synagogues were burnt and 25,000 jewish men arrested and sent off to perish in concentration camps. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing squads that actively participated in this state-sponsored mass annihilation of an entire race. This deathly squad had pure hitler fanatics in its members with blinded commitment to the extremist Nazi ideology. The Einsatzgruppen were beyond monstrous in their tasks. They secretly organized jewish massacres and forcefully undressed jewish women before executing them by firing bullets into their heads. Prior to World War II, Nazis encouraged the mass emigration of jews to other areas and even planned forced deportation for them. However, in 1941, they declared these to be infeasible and instead created mass jewish extermination camps. They made 44,000 incarceration sites, declaring that these camps were the only way for Germany to gain 'racial purity'. In 1934, Hitler appointed himself as the“Fuhrer,” becoming Germany’s supreme ruler and set off to make the Germans the 'superior race' that they were through the concept of “Lebensraum,” or living space, which meant that there was no room for the jews. It was time for ethnic cleansing. Approximately 6 million Jewish people were slaughtered during the Holocaust, and nearly a third of them died within the span of three months during the killing campaign Operation Reinhard. Two-thirds of all Jewish population in Europe during World War II was annihilated by the Nazi regime. In addition, millions of other individuals were also killed during the Holocaust, including Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, queer people, and people with disabilities
The horrors of Auschwitz; the largest concentration camp which hosts the largest numbers for jewish exterminations, even now leave us traumatised. In 1943, the eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to further persecute jewish prisoners. His infamous experiments ranged from injecting anything into jewish twins' blood from petrol to chloroform, whichever caused greater pain. His vicious nature earned him the well-deserved title of "Angel of Death''. Only a handful of people survived Auschwitz. This jewish mass cemetery is now a centre for jewish pilgrims to pay tribute to their two million ancestors who perished under Nazi oppression during the Holocaust. Henri Kichka, who lost his family to the Holocaust, is one of the few Auschwitz survivors, he talked about how he was a skeleton in that camp and '90% dead'. Upon being asked how he lived through this oppressive camp, he told the BBC that "You did not live through Auschwitz. The place itself is death,". He further said "It is the only concentration in the history of the world where a million people died, the only one, Auschwitz. It was horrible and now I am one of the last survivors." The German Holocaust will always be one of the darkest hours of humanity. The six million lives lost will always be remembered as will the horrific deeds of the Nazis. Learning from this experience, we should prevent history from repeating itself. In recent times, we are seeing more instances of ethnic cleansing, from Bosnia to Myanmar to Palestine to Kashmir.It is high time we take initiative for ourselves and stand up to this injustice. Humanity cannot afford another Holocaust.
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