Humanity is the most civilized and morality-driven species that we are aware of. No matter how much
we advance and evolve as a collective race, every now and then actions of some of us embarrass the
entire humankind. The Holocaust was one such unfortunate affair that brought humanity shame.
The aftermath of the atrocities carried out at Auschwitz and more than forty thousand other
concentration camps still resonates in the history of the world we live in. But sometimes no matter
how disconcerting the truth is, it needs to be discussed, retold, and recalled so we can make
sure that those certain parts of history are never repeated ever again. Welcome to Nutty History,
today we discuss the punishments endured in Nazi concentration camps. Viewer discretion is advised.
The punishment would begin long before the Jewish community would make it to the camp. Nazis would
try to break the dignity and integrity of Jewish people long before they got to the
concentration camps. Stripping them of their dignity by pulling them out of their own homes
and rounding them up on streets. They were then stuffed in trains where they were treated worse
than cargo. The train system was disgustingly efficient and impressively large at showcasing
how cruel humans can be to each other. Train cars designed to comfortably hold up to 50 passengers
were overloaded with more than two hundred passengers forcibly. And that was the number
for the slow days. These passengers were stripped of their belongings and hardly had any warm
clothes on them. They were not provided food or water. They were not accommodated against harsh
weather and terrible diseases that may rampantly spread in situations worse than factory stables.
The journey to the camps was long and unforgiving, taking fifteen to twenty days without a sweat.
When one train arrived at a camp from Corfu after eighteen days of journey, the Nazis opened
the doors to find everyone inside had already perished. But that was not all. For some reason,
Nazis were not satisfied with this sort of cruelty and so they turned this whole process into a grim,
twisted joke. They began charging soon-to-be inmates for the “privilege” of riding the
train. To be sent to an extermination camp, a Jewish person had to pay the fee for a
standard-fare ticket as if they had an option. They were so serious about this scam/abhorrent
prank that they would let kids under the age of 4 board for free as was the case for
any normal train travel in those times and still is in most of the countries.
The generosity of Nazis toward Jewish kids stopped at waving their ticket fee for the train
to concentration camps. They were treated with no less malice and brutality than the Jewish adults
had to endure. Auschwitz alone witnessed over two hundred and thirty thousand kids under the age
of 18 enter the camp and hundreds of minors were gassed every day until the Soviets liberated them.
As children shared these camps with adult inmates, adults tried to protect them as much as possible.
However, minors who were inmates at the concentration camp in the Polish city of Lodz,
renamed Litzmannstadt by the Germans, were not so fortunate. The concentration camp in Litzmannstadt
was opened on December 1st, 1942 and it was the only camp to house Polish children as inmates.
This unique situation allowed SS guards to be fully unhinged. The adolescents suffered
punishment, exploitation, and dehumanization. There were kids from the age of 2 to 16
who were routinely beaten, starved, humiliated, and punished without any cause or reason. Hard
labor was demanded of these adolescents without any care of safety hazards or their capabilities.
These kids had to work in grueling conditions, pushing their endurance to the limit and then
some more. If they fell to fatigue or disease, their bodies were tossed away in pits without any
remorse. Due to the absence of higher directive monitoring, there is a lack of records regarding
how many kids were sent to this abhorrent camp and how many of them survived. Not all of the
children imprisoned in this camp were Jewish, some were arrested for petty theft, smuggling,
street trading, some were orphans and some were kids of people involved in the Polish resistance.
Surrounded by a Jewish ghetto, the isolated camp for children had wooden barracks and a
fence offering next to no protection against cold weather during winter. Children who could not help
but wet their beds would be punished for the act by depriving them of sleep or making them sleep on
planks outside. These children also worked under the threat of punishments if they failed to meet
the daily quota. The boys straightened needles, made shoes of straw, wicker baskets, belts for gas
masks, and leather parts for backpacks. The girls worked in the laundry, kitchen, tailor's workshop,
and garden. Those who somehow managed to live another day after Germany’s defeat in World War 2
and were liberated from the camp knew the true meaning of one single word. Hunger! For breakfast,
these children would receive a slice of camp bread and half a liter of black coffee,
sometimes sweetened with saccharin. Dinner was a liter of rutabaga or potato soup with beet leaves
or cabbage. Sometimes they were given a spoonful of marmalade. But even a small mistake would
result in denial of food. This caused the issue of chronic hunger in many of the inmates which forced
them to hunt birds for nourishment and use dead flies as garnish on the hot water that was served
as soup to them so they could consume it.. Some SS guards would get imaginative when devising new
methods of punishment. Edward August, an SS guard, was infamous for being constantly drunk on duty;
he was used to scaring other guards with his methods of torture. He would kick his victims in
sensitive places frequently, bury them in boxes of sand, dunk their heads in a barrel of water,
and hang them upside down by their legs on a chain to then lower them slowly into a tank of used car
lubricants. After the liberation, those who looked after these unfortunate kids
found their behavior closer to animalistic rather than human due to the conditioning.
The kids were hostile and could not differentiate polish caregivers from SS guards.
As a result, except for a few, the victims were not able to hold their jobs for more
than a week. Their situation improved slowly with time but these kids never
again could endure communal gatherings, walking in pairs, or being whistled at.
Jewish women were forcefully stripped of their dignity in every possible manner in
Nazi concentration camps. They were welcomed with hair shaving, mandatory undressing,
and genital inspection. This unpleasant scrutiny was commonly performed by male guards
who would violate their bodies using examination as an excuse.
Women were also punished with harassment and abuse for any wrongdoings and disobedience. There were
also cases of women being hurt and then left to die without medical aid just for not stripping on
command. Guards would also take young women from their barracks in the middle of the night only to
have them return to barracks in the morning with their clothes torn apart and appearing half-dead.
These girls were also sold off to superior officers in the SS, leaders of the Nazi Party,
and rich beneficiaries of the cause and war effort for a night or two. Some Jewish women began to use
this ordeal as a negotiation opportunity to help and save others seeing they had no other option.
Concentration Camps are mostly infamous for the dreaded gas chambers but that wasn’t half of
what went down there in those horrendous camps. Death by gas chamber was the quickest way to die
and perhaps the least torturous way to go as well. Living there were another seven layers of hell. A
lot of Jewish inmates would be left unattended in dark damp cells with no food, water, or clothes.
The SS would use these cells to simply torture or send the message to the whole inmate population.
But these were dark cells and then there were DARK CELLS! The cells officially called “dark
cells” contained no light and were sealed shut with prisoners inside who would be left with very
little oxygen. Oxygen would reduce with every breath the inmate takes, giving them no escape
from a slow, impeding, and inevitable death. We also mentioned earlier how food scarcity
was created to torture inmates just because the guards could. The daily food rations of
an average prisoner were scant at best. They were forced to eat bread made of sawdust and sausage
made of mangy horses. The lack of nutrition led to many inmates stealing food out of extreme craving
and a lot of them even resorted to eating rotten food from the garbage. The tea that was provided
to inmates was also made of wild weeds and the water offered to them was sometimes seawater
just so guards could see how badly it affects these inmates. This caused severe dehydration and
inmates were denied water when they begged for it. These poor souls had to resort to licking freshly
mopped floors just to quench their insufferable thirst with any drop they could taste.
Nazi Scientists and Doctors have become some urban legends and myths thanks to their portrayal in pop
culture today. But like every legend and myth, there were real evil scientists and doctors who
enacted horrible war crimes and practices in the name of science and to please the Fuhrer.
Inmates were no better than lab rats for these mad, mad people of power. Dr. Sigmund Rascher in
the Dachau concentration camp made a tablet from beet and apple pectin which he believed could stop
bullet wounds from bleeding. And then he forced inmates to take tablets before having them shot
in the chest and neck. Later the same inmates had to have their limbs amputated without any use of
anesthesia. While we do not know how many inmates died due to this crazy experiment, we do know that
Dr. Rascher went on to establish a manufacturing company for the tablets with inmates as workers.
If there could be a stark opposite of Oskar Schindler, it would be this guy. At Ravensbruck
concentration camp, an experiment was conducted to test the efficacy of sulfonamides, also
known as sulfa drugs. Subjects were intentionally wounded on the outer side of their calves and then
physicians would rub a mixture of bacteria into the open wounds before sewing them shut. Sometimes
they would also throw in some glass splinters just to observe the growth of these battle-like wounds.
Later on, to accurately simulate the gunshot wounds, they would also tie up blood vessels
on both sides to stop circulation causing horrible unimaginable pain to these inmates.
Despite the advances these experiments made in the scientific and pharmaceutical fields,
one must ask “at what cost?” There were more horrendous experiments where inmates were used
as guinea pigs to simulate battle wounds in an attempt to cure them,
they were exposed to hypothermia, poison, risky nerve operations just to gather a better knowledge
of ailments that a soldier could endure on the battlefield. They even conducted weird
and creepy genetic and sterilization in the name of attempts to eliminate non-Aryan races.
Would you like to watch a detailed video on these horrifying experiments conducted by
evil Nazi scientists? Tell us in the comments. And as always thanks for watching Nutty History.