Weapons and War |
Cruelty And The Nazi Regime
Throughout history there have been people that seemed to be incredibly evil. Torture and death seemed to excite. Sometimes they were loners, sometimes they worked for an organization that may have condoned their actions, or just looked the other way. The Nazis were an example of a group that condoned murder and violence. They murdered their own to get what they wanted and then they turned their attention to the Jews, Poles, Catholics, Gypsies and others. Their solution to ensure Nazi dominance was to wipe out any race that they saw as a threat. One has only to see how many Jews and Gypsies were killed to know what I am talking about. It takes a particularity evil organization to use genocide as a weapon. Because of this policy, it became okay for those in the Nazi military to do almost whatever they wanted to these poor people, before they killed them. Some saw this as an opportunity to fulfill their evil desires without fear of reprisals. There is a burning question that has been asked ever since World War II ended. That question is, did Hitler have a mental illness or was he just evil? This may be hard to believe, but it is estimated that the Nazis were responsible for almost 21,000,000 deaths since they first became a party. It was said that Hitler had told Himmler that he did not just want to kill Jews, he wanted them to die a slow death and in agony. The story goes that Himmler did some research and came up with an idea and told Hitler about it. His idea was to coat the floor of railway cars with quick lime. He said that they could then fill the cars with Jews and leave them on the side of the road for about four days. This is the time it was estimated that it would take for the quick lime to burn the people in the cars to death. The Nazis had compiled quite a list of races and types of people that they wanted to eliminate. No one was safe and it was said that they were even going to turn on the Italians after they won the war. Many of those that helped Hitler get into power were then murdered. He used them and then destroyed them. If you were in Germany during the time of Hitler's rise to power, you did not want to be a conscientious objector or dissident, or even a pacifist. The Nazis had a unique way of dealing with these people, they just disappeared. They were probably shot and dumped into a ditch somewhere. If you didn't practice what the Nazis were teaching, your life was in danger and there were plenty of people that would have been glad to turn you in and they ranged from young children to old people, who believed the Hitler was the savior of Germany. I had read on a website that the odds of a German dying in Germany during the war was one in eleven. This counted death from battle, but also from the regime, because of something they didn't like about you.
Hans Michael Frank Individuals began to stand out during the Nazi regime, because of their extreme cruelty You can imagine how cruel they would have had to have been to stand out in a regime run by extremely cruel people. Hans Michael Frank was a high ranking Nazi officer. He was Governor-General of Poland during the war and he was directly responsible for putting all Polish Jews into ghettos and using Poles for forced labor. He is the person that carried out the holocaust against the gettos killing untold numbers of Jews. For his defense in the Nuremberg trials, he stated that he tried to resign his post 14 times but Hitler rejected his resignations. He also stated that it was not he who killed all the Jews, but Heinrich Himmler who controlled that action. In the end he decided to confess to many of the killings as atonement for his sins and he was hanged.
Irma Grese When I was a child, news reels were played in the movies. I remember seeing one as a very small child that showed a woman who had made lamp shades out of the skin of concentration camp prisoners. I never forgot that. That woman was one of the cruelest Nazis of all. Her name was Irma Grese and she was in charge of the woman's section of Auschwitz concentration camp. She regularly enjoyed beating the prisoners with a whip that she carried on her person for her enjoyment. She was not too bright having left school at 15 years old. The Nazis must have admired her treatment of prisoners, because they promoted her from female guard at Auschwitz to Senior Supervisor in a year. This was the second highest position. At that point she was in charge of about 30,000 Jewish female prisoners. She ended her career at Bergen-Belsen as a Work Service Manager. She used to set the dogs on prisoners, shoot them and beat them unmerciful with her whip. Survivors testified during her trial about her murders and tortures, along with her sexual excesses. She was one of the people that selected prisoners for the gas chambers. Survivors testified that she would starve her dogs so that when they were set on a prisoner, they would tear them apart. They also stated that she enjoyed the random shooting of prisoners. She was also accused of beating women until they died. She was one of the three women executed for war crimes. Hanging a woman did not sit well with some British soldiers who were responsible for the execution. A Sargent and corporal refused to walk her to the gallows and were court martialed. The military hangman refused to hang her and the British had to send to England for a civilian hangman.
Fritz Sauckel Fritz Sauchel was the Nazi who had organized the systematic enslavement of millions of people from Nazi occupied lands. He had been appointed as General Plenipotentiary for the labor Department from 1942 to the end of the war. He reported directly to Hitler and Albert Speer. He had helped develop a four year plan for German Labor. About five million people were taken to Germany where many were worked to death. His death sentence had always been considered strange in that his superior Albert Speer only got 20 years. Many say that Speer deserved death also. Josef Mengele was a physician and officer in the German SS. He worked at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was a very intelligent man possessing two doctorates and yet one of the cruelest. One of his jobs was to supervise the arriving groups of prisoners and decide who was going to be killed, who would be a forced laborer and who would have experiments done to them. He became known as the Angel of Death. Many believe that Mengele was the chief medical officer of the camp, but he wasn't. That dubious honor went to Dr. Eduard Wirths. Wirths had two other doctors under him besides Mengele, they were Horst Schumann and Carl Clauberg. Some of the human prisoner experiments were actually ordered by Wirths. One of the horrible things that Mengele did was round up 14 pairs of twins. He then put them to sleep and killed them all. He dissected them and recorded everything he found. He liked to work on twins and if they lived through the experiments, they would usually be killed and dissected. He performed all sorts of horrible amputations. It is estimated that about 3,000 twins had the misfortune of passing through that camp during the war. As luck would have it, after the biggest manhunt in history, he got away and eventually died of natural causes.
Alfred Rosenberg It certainly makes one wonder how a regime could be composed of such monsters. There were plenty of others that I could also mention. Many Nazis saw nothing wrong in taking human life. They viewed non aryan races as inferior and felt that had the right to do anything they wanted to them. One of the Nazis in power, while not doing or saying anything to protect the Jews, felt different about some of the other races. His name was Alfred Rosenberg. He was famous at the time for his racial theory and was the Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories. He often stated to Hitler that he felt that the Slavs were also aryan, but of a lesser type and should be treated accordingly. Hitler would get annoyed at this suggestion and when he suggested that the Russians who cooperated with the German invasion should be given their farms back instead of working on cooperatives, Hitler replied that this was just stupid. |
ARTICLE COMMENT
Try Our New Discussion Board
|
 |