What kind of labor did jews do

At the beginning of the war the high death rate in these camps was the result not only of the murderous conditions, but also of murder itself. Soviet prisoners-of-war POWs were routinely executed by shooting in — The random shooting of Jewish prisoners became commonplace.

Despite this, during the same period and until , almost all Jewish prisoners in concentration camps within the Reich were transferred to extermination camps and murdered, even though their labour was urgently needed. It was only after Propaganda Minister Goebbels announced the onset of Total War in in the aftermath of the defeat at Stalingrad that pragmatic economic considerations were given greater weight, although the ideological imperative of extermination continued to determine the ultimate fate of Jewish prisoners.

From , the principle of lending prisoners to the armaments industry came into full effect it reflected in a dense network of satellite camps to which inmates were sent as forced labour. From the perspective of the SS, the life of a prisoner had no value. Ultimately, after , the only quality that counted was the ability to work, and this was all the more brutally exploited as the war dragged on.

The use of Jewish prisoners for labour was only an interim measure while they were strong enough to work. Once they succumbed to starvation or disease as a result of the brutal conditions, the death camp remained their ultimate destination. Jews became scapegoats for everything awful that had happened to Germany over the previous several decades: inflation, economic depression, the loss of World War I, and the punitive Treaty of Versailles. During a Nazi-provoked riot known as Kristallnacht Night of Broken Glass on November 9, , at least synagogues were destroyed.

At least 91 people were murdered. Countless Jewish businesses and homes were vandalized and destroyed, and 30, Jews were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps.

It became difficult for Jews to leave Germany because few countries, including the United States, were willing to take them in, even though it was widely known that they were suffering horribly under the Nazis. When Hitler began his march of conquest in , Jews in countries under the fascist heel, beginning with heavily Jewish Poland, were herded into unsanitary ghettos, walled-off sections of the city where they were denied proper food, medical services, and heat.

Starvation and disease killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw and Lodz, two of the largest ghettoes in Poland. Many Jews escaped the ghetto and went into hiding, often relying on the kindness and bravery of non-Jewish friends.

If caught, those hiding Jews were imprisoned or shot. Few Jews were able to survive the war in hiding. Like German-born Anne Frank and her family, who spent much of the war hiding in Amsterdam, they were usually found and shipped off to concentration camps. After the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis began large-scale deportations from the ghettos.

Victims were herded together at train stations, loaded onto cattle cars, and taken—unknown to them—to extermination camps, killing centers in Poland with specially designed gassing facilities. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno and other SS-run camps employed industrial-style killing, using a pesticide designed to kill rats.

The old, the very young, and the physically weak—those unable to work—were killed first. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration. If we spoke and the guards saw us, we got beaten up. We only were allowed to work. During those exhausting working days, when the prisoners were attacked constantly with blows and screams, death from fatigue or work accidents were commonplace.

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