Ghetto Life During The Holocaust: The Final Solution

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The ‘Final Solution’ also meant that Jews were exposed to crowded and unsanitary lifestyles in places such as ghettos and concentration camps. Although ghetto life wasn’t harsh as concentration camps. This impacted them greatly as this led to the deaths of millions of Jews. In concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II), Jews were labored eleven hours as day in order to ‘destroy the prisoners’. A prisoner would last at the maximum, three months in a concentration camp being exposed to disease (such as tuberculosis), overcrowding, exhaustion and starvation. They either died from these conditions or were later exported to extermination camps. In ghettos, Jews had also experience intended shortages of food, overcrowding …show more content…
Jews were singled out to and had been harassed, humiliated, experienced violent beatings and murders. Nazi ideology included the thesis that Jews were ‘Untermenschen’ (sub-humans). Nazis used this kind of physiological warfare on the Jews by abusing and ridiculing the Jews in public places such as the streets. Jews were constantly propagandised to be viewed as inferior to the ‘Aryan Race’. Jews being actively degraded and dehumanised, certainly impacted the Jews in a very antagonistic manner. This would definitely coerce Jews to rethink their self-worth as an individual and an ethic/religious community and therefore, decreasing the Jews communal strength and unity. Source Two is an example of how Nazi’s used humiliation as a form of attack toward the Jews. In this source it shows a Nazi teaching two Jewish men how to correctly conduct a Nazi salute. This clearly shows the lack of respect as they are forced to show a form of acceptance towards a man (Hitler) who they believe to be the reason for the extermination of their people (Jews), men, women and children alike. In ghettos, SS and Gestapo (secret-state police) officers would normally force Jews to participate in “sadistic sports”. These officers sometimes would order Jews to ‘clean, with their bare hands, all the toilets’ and then ‘eat what they had found there’. These forms of