"Es ist vorbei"- Liberation of the Camps, Part 2 Quiz

Answer: Gross-Rosen

125,000 prisoners passed through the gates of Gross-Rosen starting in the Summer of 1940, when it was a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen. It became an independent camp on May 1, 1941. As with many other camps, it had several satellites, and forced labor through mining granite was its main output. Along with Natzweiler-Struthof, it served as a camp for those people who were rounded up as part of Hitler's "Nacht und Nebel" decree. ("Night and Fog" decree).

These particular prisoners normally did not survive any longer than two months within the camp.

When the Red Army approached, the prisoners were forced to march westwards. Any who were too weak to walk were killed, as well as those who faltered along the way. Gross-Rosen claimed the lives of over 40,000 human beings by the time it was liberated. Thankfully, the satellite camp of Bruennlitz was a safe haven for the over 1,100 people saved by Schindler.

Answer: Belzec

The first of the Operation Reinhard camps set up in Poland, Belzec opened it gates on March 17, 1942. The first victims to be gassed were Jews from Lvov and Lublin. The camp ran so efficiently that it shut down operations in December of that same year, its last transport bringing Jews from Krakow and Radom. The last 300 prisoners left after the gassing was finished were sent to Sobibor. As part of Aktion 1005, a group of Sonderkommandos were made to dig up the mass graves and burn the dead in 1943, another act by the Nazis to try to obliterate their crimes. Anything that could still be of use was sent to Majdanek, and the gas chambers, crematoria, and sorting barracks were dismantled. The area was then put to use as a farm.

No real memorial existed for this camp until 1998, when archaeologists were able to identify remains of several buildings and railway sidings. Thirty mass graves were also uncovered, the largest of which was 210 feet by 60 feet. After the war, local inhabitants plundered the mass graves hoping to unearth anything of value that might have been buried. (This disgusting practice also happened at the other 2 Operation Reinhard camps) In 2004, a new large monument was erected on the spot where the camp once stood, and any buildings that had been constructed on the site were demolished in memory of the dead.

Chaim Herszman and Rudolf Reder were the only prisoners to escape the death camp. As was the case with many Holocaust survivors, Herszman was killed by hostile Poles after the war.

Answer: Flossenbuerg

May 1938 saw the establishment of this camp in Bavaria near the Czech border. 96,000 people passed through the gates, 30,000 did not return. Along with the majority of the German camps, this one was set up near a granite quarry where the inmates would be worked to death.

Its workforce consisted mainly of Resistance members, German criminals, homosexuals, and Russian prisoners. In late 1944 the camp became a training ground for a large number of female SS guards, who would go on to lead the female satellite camps such as Dresden and Helmbrechts. Flossenbuerg held several high profile members of German Resistance, such as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and former Abwehr members Hans Oster and Wilhelm Canaris, who had been implicated in the July 1944 bomb plot. Alongside them stood Hjalmar Schacht, former President of the Reichsbank.

As the Americans drew near, all of these men but Schacht were executed. In April of 1945, 22,000 inmates were forced to march towards Dachau. When the camp was liberated on April 23, 1945, only around 1,600 sick and dying inmates were left.

Answer: Neuengamme

56,000 prisoners of Neuengamme would not live to see the British liberation, the vast majority of them were Russian. The main job of the inmates was the production of bricks and armaments. As the war turned against Germany, several thousand were forced to dig anti-tank ditches, and to clear rubble and bodies from bombed cities. In early April, one of the worst death marches in history began as Neuengamme was evacuated. On April 26, 1945, around 10,000 inmates were loaded onto a ship called the SS Cap Arcona and brought into the Bay of Luebeck, along with three other ships of other camp prisoners. All four were tragically sunk on May 3 by the RAF. Only 500 survived. Neuengamme is one of the best preserved of the camps, and part of it still functions as a working prison.

Among the casualties of the camp was Fritz Pfeffer, better known as Albert Dussel, one of the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex with Anne Frank. He died on December 20, 1944 of exhaustion and starvation.

Answer: Auschwitz

The largest and most lethal camp of the Third Reich had been established on May 26, 1940 near the Polish town of Oswięcim. It was the first camp to use Zyklon-B pesticide as a quick method to kill human beings. Auschwitz had three main camps: Auschwitz itself was the main administration center and housed many prisoners 'selected' for work. Birkenau, established in 1941, was the killing center. Two-thirds of those who arrived in transports were sent immediately to Birkenau's four gas chambers, or picked out for use in Dr. Josef Mengele's twisted experimentation. Monowitz, operational since 1942, was the main work camp, where prisoners would make synthetic rubber for I.G. Farben. Birkenau doctors would periodically inspect Monowitz and send those they deemed too unhealthy to work to the gas chambers. At any given time, the highest number of inmates working in the vast complex was around 155,000, fairly small in comparison to the estimated 1.2 million people who died in the camp.

One of the greatest controversies that arose during the war was the feasibility of bombing Auschwitz. Reports made to the Allies from 1941-1944 with regards to the extreme conditions and death toll at the camp were dismissed as exaggerations. It was only when two escapees gave exact, almost identical details about the camp did the Allies begin to take the allegations seriously. A Slovakian Rabbi wrote a letter to Winston Churchill begging him to bomb the camp, and Churchill seemed prepared to go ahead with an operation to do just that, but he was otherwise convinced that nothing would be strategically gained by it, more prisoners would be harmed than helped, and it would divert airpower away from where it was truly needed. At this point, the Allies thought that winning the war as quickly as possible was the best way to deal with stopping the killing. Even the railways weren't bombed, though they were the machinery that kept the Holocaust running till the very end with the efficient transport of prisoners to the camps. Heated debate about this continues to this day.

When the Red Army arrived, around 7,500 prisoners were still alive, including Anne Frank's father Otto, the sole survivor the Secret Annex. His entire family along with the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer had been brought to the camp after their deportation from Westerbork in the Netherlands. Herman van Pels was gassed in either September or October of 1944, after hurting his hand while performing hard labor. Otto's wife Edith suffered an emotional breakdown after her daughters were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Witnesses say she seemed to forget her daughters were gone; whenever she was offered food she refused, saying that Anne and Margot should have it. She died of starvation in January of 1945.

Answer: Treblinka

The deadliest of the Operation Reinhard camps, Treblinka's gas chambers took the lives of close to 800,000 people. The first shipment to the camp was one of 310,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. 20-25 SS guards and close to 200 Ukranians staffed the camp. After arriving, the victims were lined up and told they were to be given a hot shower before continuing their journey to labor camps in the Ukraine. They were told that because of typhus outbreaks in other camps, their clothes would be disinfected, and the long hair on the women would need to be cut. A select few of the arrivals would be chosen to work in the sorting barracks, the hair-cutting barracks, or as part of the Sonderkommando. The rest would be shepherded to a covered area where they were told to undress. They were then forced to run as quickly as possible down a narrow tube cynically called the Himmelstraße, or "Road to Heaven". The women were sent to the hair cutting barracks before rejoining the men to meet their fates in the gas chambers. In August of 1943, the prisoners revolted, spraying kerosene on several of the buildings and torching them. Several of them had seized small arms and killed a good number of Germans, but out of 1,500 prisoners in the camp, only 40 survived the revolt. The remaining prisoners were shot, and over the next 3 months the camp was levelled and planted with lupins.

Operation Reinhard officially ended on October 19, 1943. By then, most of Poland's Jews were gone.

Answer: Stutthof

Stutthof was built near the city of Danzig (now called Gdansk) on September 2, 1939 - just one day after the German invasion. Many of the prisoners worked for the German Equipment Works, local brickyards, agricultural areas, or the camp's private workshops. When armaments production became critical to the Reich, a Focke-Wulf factory was built on the grounds. Stutthof eventually came to encompass over 105 satellite camps. The intolerable working conditions, as well as typhus, gassings, and lethal injections claimed the lives of close to 85,000 prisoners out of the 110,000 thought to have been deported there.

At the time of the camp's initial evacuation in January of 1945 there were about 50,000 inmates. 5,000 were sent into the coast of the Baltic Sea and machine-gunned. The rest were marched towards the city of Lauenburg when they were cut off by the Soviets and forced to march back to the camp. By April, the rest of the prisoners were either shot in the sea or sent by boat to other camps, many of them drowning along the way. 100 prisoners who had managed to hide were all that met the Red Army when they arrived on May 9, 1945.

Answer: Ravensbrueck

With the help of Count Folke Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, more than 15,000 Concentration Camp victims were allowed into neutral territory. 7,500 of these were inmates from Ravensbrueck, the only camp built specifically for female prisoners, and in operation since May 15, 1939. (A small camp for men was added later.)

Ravensbrueck served as the main training center for female SS guards, among them such notorious sadists as Irma Grese, the youngest camp guard executed by the Allies, and Hermine Braunsteiner, who was deported from the US in 1980 to stand trial for her crimes. It was also the site of large-scale medical experimentation. Tests were conducted on the efficiency of sulfonamide drugs, in which prisoners' arms and legs would be slashed to the nerves and muscles, usually severing them. Foreign material such as wood splinters, glass, and bits of metal were then rubbed onto the wounds to simulate combat conditions. Limbs were broken as well. Other prisoners were forced to have bones or muscles removed from their bodies to see whether or not transplantation of these tissues was feasible. Up to 150 Gypsy women were sterilized as well, after signing consent forms that falsely guaranteed freedom if they underwent the procedure. Other inmates worked in nearby V-2 rocket factories, produced textiles and electrical components, or were shot, gassed or hanged.

When the Russians were within hours of reaching the camp, the SS decided to eliminate as many prisoners as possible to prevent anyone from testifying about the horrors that had been forced upon them. To this end, around 20,000 women, children, and men were marched towards Mecklenburg. The Soviets reached the camp to find less than 3500 sick and undernourished prisoners. Those who had survived the Death March were liberated in the following hours by a Soviet Recon Unit. 90,000 prisoners did not survive to see this day.

Answer: Gypsies

Gypsies were originally thought to be members of the original Aryan race, and were initially not persecuted. But the Nazis came to see their nomadic lifestyle as an affront to their ideals, and they became a marked people. Slavs had always been on the Nazis' Wanted Lists, as their inferiority to the Germanic race had never been questioned. Granted, if the people of Slavic nations cooperated with the Nazis, such as the brutal Croatian Ustasa, the Hlinka Guard of Slovakia, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the thousands of Ukranian SS members, they were more than happy to work with them. (Provided these collaborators gave them plenty of their own people to work to death for the Nazi machinery.) Nazis disliked the secretive nature of the Freemasons. Propaganda filmstrips and pictures depicted Masonic altars covered with human skeletons and other occult references. (Interesting stuff coming from a group of people who drew so much of their OWN practices from ancient occult and pagan rituals.) Jehovah's Witnesses were mainly singled out for their refusal to salute the Nazi flag, swear allegiance to Hitler, or report when called up for service in the Armed Forces.

However, they were also possibly the only persecuted group that could freely choose whether they wanted to live or die. They only had to sign a form renouncing their religion. Few of them did so.

Answer: Lithuania

Most people would probably think Poland suffered the heaviest losses of its Jewish community during the war, and they did indeed suffer heavily, losing 88% of the 3,300,000 Jews who lived in the country. Greece's Jewish population was reduced by 80%, 65,000 dying in camps, ghettos, or by other means. Germany lost 130,000 Jews, just over 55% of those still in the country at the start of World War II. By contrast, Lithuania was almost completely "Judenrein" ("cleansed" of Jews). Only 6% of its Jewish population survived to see the liberation.

There were hundreds of concentration, slave labor, and extermination camps in German-controlled territory during the war, to list them all would take several dozen quizzes. Here are just a few:

Breendonk-a particularly harsh transit/labor camp in Belgium.
Jasenovac-An extermination camp in the Fascist State of Croatia, run by the ruthless Ustasa.
Janowska-A ghetto/labor/concentration camp located in the Ukraine, where Simon Wiesenthal was interned before being moved to Mauthausen.
Sachsenhausen-A camp located near the town of Oranienbuerg that housed over 2,000 Jews arrested after Kristallnacht.
Trawniki-A Polish training camp for SS volunteers from occupied territories, most of them Ukranians.
Plaszow-The labor camp where Amon Goeth shot at prisoners for sport from the balcony of his villa, and where Oskar Schindler began his rescue of 1,100 Jews.