The same thing is going on in the USA........
Concentration and labor camps
The Third Reich first used concentration camps as places of unlawful incarceration of political opponents and other "enemies of the state". Large numbers of Jews were not sent there until after Kristallnacht in November 1938.[172]Although death rates were high, the camps were not designed as killing centers.[173] After war broke out in 1939, new camps were established, some outside Germany in occupied Europe.[174] In January 1945, the SS reports had over 700,000 prisoners in their control, of which close to half had died by the end of May 1945 according to most historians.[175] Most wartime prisoners of the camps were not Germans but belonged to countries under German occupation.[176] It is estimated that the Germans established over 42,000 detention sites throughout Europe, including ghettos, concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labour camps, and extermination camps.[177]
After 1942, the economic functions of the camps, previously secondary to their penal and terror functions, came to the fore. Forced labour of camp prisoners became commonplace and companies utilized their cheap labour.[172] The guards became much more brutal, and the death rate increased as the guards not only beat and starved prisoners, but killed them more frequently.[176] Extermination through labour was a policy—camp inmates would literally be worked to death, or to physical exhaustion, at which point they would be gassed or shot.[178] The Germans estimated the average prisoner's lifespan in a concentration camp at three months, due to lack of food and clothing, constant epidemics, and frequent punishments for the most minor transgressions.[179] The shifts were long and often involved exposure to dangerous materials.[180]
Prisoner transportation between camps was often carried out in freight cars with the prisoners packed very tightly. Long delays would take place, with the prisoners confined in the cars on sidings for days.[181] In mid-1942 labor camps began requiring newly arrived prisoners to be placed in quarantine for four weeks.[182] Some camps tattooed prisoners with an identification number on arrival, but not all did.[183] Prisoners wore colored triangles on their uniforms, with the color of the triangle denoting the reason for their incarceration. Red signified a political prisoner, Jehovah's Witnesses had purple triangles, "asocials" and criminals wore black or green. Badges were pink for gay men and yellow for Jews.[184] Jews had a second yellow triangle that was worn with their original triangle, with the two forming a six-pointed star.[185][186]
Ghettos
After invading Poland, the Germans established ghettos in the incorporated territories and General Government to confine Jews.[134] The ghettos were formed and closed off from the outside world at different times and for different reasons.[187][188] For example, the Łódź ghetto was closed in April 1940,[134] to force the Jews inside to give up money and valuables;[189] the Warsaw ghetto was closed for health considerations (for the people outside, not inside, the ghetto),[190] but this did not happen until November 1940;[134] and the Kraków ghetto was not established until March 1941.[191] The Warsaw Ghetto contained 380,000 people[134] and was the largest ghetto in Poland; the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest,[192] holding between 160,000[193] to 223,000.[194] Because of the long drawn-out process of establishing ghettos, it is unlikely that they were originally considered part of a systematic attempt to eliminate Jews completely.[195]
The Germans required each ghetto to be run by a Judenrat, or Jewish council.[196] Councils were responsible for a ghetto's day-to-day operations, including distributing food, water, heat, medical care, and shelter. The Germans also required councils to confiscate property, organize forced labor, and, finally, facilitate deportations to extermination camps.[197] The councils' basic strategy was one of trying to minimize losses, by cooperating with German authorities, bribing officials, and petitioning for better conditions or clemency.[198]
Eventually, the Germans ordered the councils to compile lists of names of deportees to be sent for "resettlement".[199] Although most ghetto councils complied with these orders,[200] many councils tried to send the least useful workers or those unable to work.[201] Leaders who refused these orders were shot. Some individuals or even complete councils committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[202] Others, like Chaim Rumkowski, who became the "dedicated autocrat" of Łódź,[203] argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved and that therefore others had to be sacrificed.[204] The councils' actions in facilitating Germany's persecution and murder of ghetto inhabitants was important to the Germans.[205] When cooperation crumbled, as happened in the Warsaw ghetto after the Jewish Combat Organisation displaced the council's authority, the Germans lost control.[206]
Ghettos were intended to be temporary until the Jews were deported to other locations, which never happened. Instead, the inhabitants were sent to extermination camps. The ghettos were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons serving as instruments of "slow, passive murder."[207] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 30% of Warsaw's population, it occupied only 2.5% of the city's area, averaging over 9 people per room.[208] Between 1940 and 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed many in the ghettos.[209] Over 43,000 Warsaw ghetto residents, or one in ten of the total population, died in 1941;[210] in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[207]
Himmler ordered the closing of ghettos in Poland in mid-July 1942, with most inhabitants going to extermination camps. Those Jews needed for war production would be confined at concentration camps.[211] The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 22 July; over the almost two months of the Aktion, until 12 September, the Warsaw ghetto went from approximately 350,000 inhabitants to about 65,000. Those deported were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp.[212] Similar deportations happened in other ghettos, with many ghettos totally emptied.[213]
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The first ghetto uprisings occurred in mid-1942 in small community ghettos.[214] Although there were armed resistance attempts in both the larger and smaller ghettos in 1943, in every case they failed against the overwhelming German military force, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the death camps.[215]
Pogroms
A number of deadly pogroms occurred during the Holocaust.[216] The Germans encouraged some, and others were spontaneous.[217] Some, such as the Iaşi pogrom, were in lands controlled by Germany's allies.[218] In the series of Lviv pogroms committed in occupied Poland,[o] some 6,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the streets in July 1941, on top of 3,000 arrests and mass shootings by Einsatzgruppe C.[220] During the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, in the presence of the German officers, several hundred Jews were murdered by some local Poles, with some being burned alive in a barn.[221][p]
Death squads
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.[222] German propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Romani and Slavic Untermenschen ("sub-humans").[223]
Local populations in some occupied Soviet territories actively participated in the killings of Jews and others. Besides participating in killings and pogroms, they helped identify Jews for persecution and rounded up Jews for German actions.[224] German involvement ranged from active instigation and involvement to more generalized guidance.[225] In Lithuania, Latvia, and western Ukraine locals were deeply involved in the murder of Jews from the beginning of the German occupation. Some of these Latvian and Lithuanian units also participated in the murder of Jews in Belarus. In the south, Ukrainians killed about 24,000 Jews and some went to Poland to serve as concentration and death-camp guards.[224] Military units from some countries allied to Germany also killed Jews. Romanian units were given orders to exterminate and wipe out Jews in areas they controlled.[226] Ustaše militia in Croatia persecuted and murdered Jews, among others.[156] Many of the killings were carried out in public, a change from previous practice.[227]
The mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories were assigned to four SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), which were under Heydrich's overall command. Similar formations had been used to a limited extent in Poland in 1939, but the ones operating in the Soviet territories were much larger.[228] The Einsatzgruppen's commanders were ordinary citizens: the great majority were professionals and most were intellectuals.[229] By the winter of 1941–1942, the four Einsatzgruppen and their helpers had killed almost 500,000 people.[230]
The largest massacre of Jews by the mobile killing squads in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev,[231] where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941.[232][q] A mixture of SS and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police, carried out the killings.[234] Although they did not actively participate in the killings, men of the German 6th Army helped round up the Jews of Kiev and transport them to be shot.[235] By the end of the war, around two million are thought to have been victims of the Einsatzgruppen and their helpers in the local population and the German Army. Of those, about 1.3 million were Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma.[236]
Gas vans
As the mass shootings continued in Russia, the Germans began to search for new methods of mass murder. This was driven by a need to have a more efficient method than simply shooting millions of victims. Himmler also feared that the mass shootings were causing psychological problems in the SS. His concerns were shared by his subordinates in the field.[237] In December 1939 and January 1940, another method besides shooting was tried. Experimental gas vans equipped with gas cylinders and a sealed compartment were used to kill the disabled and mentally-ill in occupied Poland.[238] Similar vans, but using the exhaust fumes rather than bottled gas, were introduced to the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941,[239] and some were used in the occupied Soviet Union, for example in smaller clearing actions in the Minsk ghetto.[240] They also were used for murder in Yugoslavia.[241]
Final Solution
Wannsee Conference
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), convened what became known as the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 at a villa, am Grossen Wannsee No. 56/58, in Berlin's Wannsee suburb.[242][243][244] It had been scheduled for 9 December 1941, and invitations had been sent on 29 November, but it had been postponed.[245] Christian Gerlach argues that Hitler announced his decision to annihilate the Jews on or around 12 December 1941, probably on 12 December during a speech to Nazi Party leaders. This was one day after he declared war on the United States and five days after the attack on Pearl Harbour by Japan. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, noted of Hitler's speech: "He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their destruction. ... Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence."[246][r]
The 15 men present at Wannsee included Adolf Eichmann (head of Jewish affairs for the RSHA and the man who organized the deportation of Jews), Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and other party leaders and department heads.[243] Thirty copies of the minutes were made. Copy no. 16 was found by American prosecutors in March 1947 in a German Foreign Office folder.[248] Written by Eichmann and stamped "Top Secret", the minutes were written in "euphemistic language" on Heydrich's instructions, according to Eichmann's later testimony.[249] The conference had several purposes. Discussing plans for a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe",[243] it was intended to share information and responsibility, coordinate efforts and policies ("Parallelisierung der Linienführung"), and ensure that authority rested with Heydrich. There was also discussion about whether to include the German Mischlinge(half-Jews).[250] Heydrich told the meeting: "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance."[243] He continued:
These evacuations were regarded as provisional or "temporary solutions" ("Ausweichmöglichkeiten").[251][s] The final solution would encompass the 11 million Jews living not only in territories controlled by Germany, but elsewhere in Europe and adjacent territories, such as Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary, "dependent on military developments".[251] There was little doubt what the final solution was, writes Peter Longerich: "the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of forced labour and mass murder".[253]
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