High School > History > Holocaust Videos
Perhaps the greatest evil ever committed in history is the Holocaust. This was what Adolf Hitler called his “Final Solution” in order to ensure that the Germans of the time would dominate the world. He deems his fellow Germans as the “superior race” and was obsessed with eliminating every single one of the Jews.
This happened in World War II, and because of how inhumane the methods that were used to kill innocent Jews, it went down in history as a horrific legacy of the war. The Nazis used a wide variety of means of murder, from firing squads to gas chambers.
Usually, the poor Jews were shepherded into what are known as concentration camps, which resembled overcrowded prisons. Living conditions there were terrible, causing most of the prisoners to be malnourished. But that’s not the worst part. Worse still is being the subjects of diabolical experiments by Nazi scientists like Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death”. He even used unsuspecting children for his crazy genetic experiments, killing many of them in the process.
The most common cause of death of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps is through a gas toxin called Zyklon-B. It is composed of hydrogen cyanide, and it was previously used as a pesticide. Commanding officers of the Auschwitz concentration camp first tried it on September 3, 1941. The victims were 600 Soviets and 250 Polish prisoners, who all succumbed to the poison within just minutes. The Nazis then realized that Zyklon-B was a quick and easy way to achieve their goal of exterminating the Jews. Later on, the Nazis would round up Jews in cubicles that resembled shower rooms. These rooms would be pumped full of Zyklon-B, killing the people inside in just a few minutes.
The Holocaust is the most notorious and well-known war crime in history, claiming the lives of six million Jews. Today, the Auschwitz concentration camp is now a huge Holocaust museum, forever serving as a testament to the monstrous acts of murder done by the Nazis in World War II.
