Holocost

9 Pages 2357 Words

rms like "euthanasia" which psychologically distance the killers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the killings from the public.

Germany continued their conquest of most of Europe in 1940, crushing Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France handily. June 22, 1941 saw the Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their peace. They neared Moscow by September. Italy, Romania, and Hungary all had joined the Axis Powers by this time, led by Germany. The Allied Powers consisted of the British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

In the months following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, Communists, and Gypsies were killed in mass executions, the vast majority of the victims being Jewish. Mobile killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, carried out these murders at improvised sites throughout the Soviet Union, following behind the advancing German army. The most famous (or infamous, as the case may be), is Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jewish, were murdered. The killers used language to distance themselves, referring to these executions as "special actions," or "special treatments," so that they could distance themselves from it; many drank to help ease their minds. Keep in mind that these killing squads were not angry rioters, nor gangs of street thugs, but ordinary people who were "just following orders," indeed, Nazi training taught that this was a task of eliminating enemies of the state, not a racist plot. Entire communities were literally erased. Tow!
ns disappeared. German execution of the handicapped and institutionalized made its way into the Soviet Union as well. As a result, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered.

Major changes in the concentration camp system were brought about as a result of World War II. Floods of prisoners in larger numbers, deported from German-occupied coun...