What was selection in concentration camps

Healthy or ill? Everything was as silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream sequences. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It was disconcerting and disarming. They behaved with the calm assurance of people doing their normal duty of every day.

It was their everyday duty. In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living two days later….

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews was self-demonstrative to the Germans. Emilia, daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful, intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with tepid water which the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all to death. Thus in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared.

After deportation trains arrived at an extermination centre, Nazi guards would order the prisoners out of the packed trains and into a line to undergo the selection process. Prisoners would typically have come from Poland around 3 of the 6 million jews killed were Polish , Russia 1. During this process, men were placed separately from women and children, and an appointed officer of the Nazi party, typically an SS physician, would examine each of the deportees to determine whether they were in good physical health to be put to work — noting that they had usually passed several weeks or months by this point with very little food and had endured a packed train journey of several days without food or water.

One side was for those deemed healthy to undergo forced labour, the other was for those to be sent to the gas chamber. Those typically over the age of , who were deemed fit and able to work were sent for registration in the camp.

Here the prisoners would be stripped of all their clothes and valuables, be completely shaved of all their hair, disinfected and showered before being tattooed with a registration number. After all this had taken place, the prisoners were then handed the infamous striped uniform, hat and clogs and forced to strenuous work.

Prisoners who were brought over to the camps and fell under any of these categories were typically sentenced to death by the gas chamber. In order to stop the prisoners from panicking and potentially trying to escape during transportation to the gas chambers, the Nazi guards of the camps would tell victims that they were showering to clean themselves of grime and lice. All those sent to the gas chamber were forced to remove all items of clothing and to hand over all valuables.

Once all of the selected group of prisoners were in the gas chamber, the guards would shut and lock its doors and either begin to pump carbon monoxide or drop Zyklon B pellets down through to the chamber, dependent on what method the specified death camp used. Typically, within minutes of victims entering the chamber, every victim would suffocate within minutes.

Horrifically, people made a profit from the corpses of the victims; with guards from the camp stealing gold and other various items of jewellery. In addition to this, corpses were used to make soap and businesses would buy their hair to make many different products such as mattresses and ship rope. The experts who participated in the "Euthanasia" Program are later instrumental in establishing and operating the extermination camps.

December 8, First killing center begins operation The Chelmno killing center begins operation. Victims at Chelmno are killed in gas vans hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment. The Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps use carbon monoxide gas generated by stationary engines attached to gas chambers.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the killing centers, has four large gas chambers using Zyklon B crystalline hydrogen cyanide as the killing agent. The gas chambers at Majdanek use both carbon monoxide and Zyklon B. Millions of Jews are killed in the gas chambers in the killing centers as part of the "Final Solution.

These gas chambers were constructed to kill those prisoners the Nazis deemed "unfit" for work. Most of these camps used Zyklon B in their gas chambers. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.

Trending keywords:. Featured Content. Socks were not supplied, and as a result many prisoners suffered with sores from rubbing. This could be very dangerous in the poor and unhygienic conditions of most of the camps. Prisoners clothing was usually inadequate for the conditions in which they were expected to work and live.

A testimony given by Mr. Reinhold of his experience in several camps. Prior to the war, prisoners would typically be given an early breakfast of bread or porridge, accompanied by tea or ersatz coffee served in tin bowls and mugs. Lunch would be vegetable soup, occasionally served with bread, and dinner would be more soup, or in some of the earlier camps, bread and cheese.

In January , following the outbreak of war, prisoners food intake was further rationed. Food portions became smaller and less nutritious. Typically, this reduced the prisoners to soup for lunch and dinner, with just one piece of bread.

These rations were further limited by the SS guards, who often stole or limited the amount of food that the prisoners actually received. Calories per person per day typically averaged at calories. The modern day recommendation is calories per day for men and calories per day for women. In October , Himmler ordered that prisoners be able to receive packages from outside. This was a tactical move, aiming to reduce the number of prisoner deaths so that they could be exploited to work for longer.

In some camps, food could then be sent in by family members or organisations such as the Red Cross. For many, this move was a lifeline. However, a majority of prisoners remained unaffected by the change, as the packages from institutions such as the Red Cross were not equal to the number of prisoners, and many prisoners families were also imprisoned and therefore could not send parcels. In , with the German war economy failing , the rations for camp inmates were cut again.

Some inmates now received as little as calories per day, forcing them quickly into starvation. Some prisoners managed to survive by trading goods on the thriving black market in the camps. Anything and everything was traded, from food to buttons or clothing.

Prisoners who worked in places such as Kanada or the camp kitchens were at an advantage, with access to goods such as extra clothes or food to steal. Others were not so lucky, and had to steal from other prisoners. In Buchenwald, prisoners were issued with labour assignment cards, which details where they were to be forced to work. Altenburg was a sub-camp of Buchenwald, which provided forced labour for the German metalworks company Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft Metallwarenfabrik.

Prisoners were forced to work in some form in most Nazi camps throughout their existence. Whilst in the earlier camps forced labour was less common, when the SS took over control of the camps system in , labour became more central. Initially, in the prewar years between and , forced labour focused on building new camps or maintaining or extending current camps. As the Nazis began preparations for war, the SS economy expanded and prisoner labour became even more important.

The movement of labour to the forefront of prisoner life had a negative impact on their life expectancy and general wellbeing in the camps. As the Second World War began, the need for building materials increased. This again increased the need for forced labour. The types of labour that prisoners carried out depended greatly on which camp they were placed in.

Heavy physical labour, such as construction, was common throughout almost all camps. This labour could be based on the camp itself, or for external companies, such as building the infamous IG Farben complex which was part of Auschwitz. Inmates were also forced to complete other types of work. This work was hugely varied, from counterfeiting money and testing the soles of shoes in Sachsenhausen, to secretarial work, to sorting new arrivals possessions in the Kanada warehouses in Auschwitz.

At most camps, prisoners had their belongings confiscated on arrival. At Auschwitz specifically, a group of primarily Jewish prisoners were assigned to collect and sift through these confiscated possessions.

Valuables were separated and sorted in large warehouses and then transported back to Germany. These warehouses were ironically nicknamed Kanada, the German spelling of Canada.

Prisoners who worked as part of the Kanada commando were in a privileged position. They were able to obtain extra rations and clothing from the possessions — items which could saves lives in the harsh conditions of the camp. However, prisoners also faced extreme punishments if caught. Schaus was imprisoned in Dachau by the Nazis and discusses the malaria experiments he was subjected to there.

This report details the initial findings of the high altitude experiments which took place at Dachau. These experiments aimed to discover the limits at which the human body could survive with small amounts of oxygen. Concentration camp prisoners were used as live test subjects against their will. Out of the inmates used, 80 died directly from the experiments. In addition to forced labour, the Nazis used prisoners incarcerated in camps as live test subjects for medical experiments.

These experiments were usually extremely painful, debilitating , and in many cases, lethal. Just six months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, on 14 July the Nazis passed their first sterilisation law, which forced people with certain hereditary conditions to be sterilised by law. Following the mass imprisonments after the start of the Second World War, the Nazis escalated this sterilisation policy and also targeted other racial enemies such as Jews.

The Nazis conducted a number of experiments on concentration camp prisoners in an effort to discover a method for mass sterilisation.

The start of the Second World War also led to a number of medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners in attempts to discover new, cheaper and quicker treatments for common military injuries.