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World War II was full of atrocities and war crimes committed by both sides of the conflict. The standard way of thinking about atrocities has it that it is an acts of violence breaching the laws of war, but of the cultural construction (Kramer). It implies the various perceptions of every atrocity from the different nations perspectives; sometimes, it can even not involve violence, though, usually it does. This research paper will focus on crimes against humanity crimes not on the battlefield and unconnected with specific military activities. One of the most brutal examples was the creation of concentration camps across Europe by Nazis and the human experiments performed there. To be more precise, the paper will be devoted to Auschwitz the site of mass atrocities during the Second World War.
The Holocaust, which embodies a significant share of the different kinds of war crimes during the war, is directly connected with Auschwitz. According to Pettitt (1), nowadays, Auschwitz denotes a humans capacity to behave with such cruelty. It was a series of camps located around Oswiecim, a Polish town established in 1940. It was initially created as a detention center for Polish prisoners, though, later, around one million Jews, 7075,000 Poles, 15 thousand Soviet POWs, and others were kept there (Pettitt 2). During the early years, Jews were either selected for labor or executed (Halpin 3). Some of them were sent to extermination camps. However, as the camps population increased, the conditions worsened, leading to epidemics and deaths. The experiments were performed with various objectives, including the demoralization of the adversaries as well as the justification of some scientific assumptions about humans. For instance, the change of eye color did not have any practical purposes rather than abnormal interest in addition to the enormous cruelty. Children aged 9 to 19 were also the objects of the experiment, such as Arnold Dohmens Experiments (Halioua 2). Thus, the inmates went through all kinds of abuse and humiliation in Auschwitz, which no law could justify.
Although the atrocity from the perspective of the execution of civilians lies on the surface, the mental pressure was incredibly high as well. Prisoner in Auschwitz lost not only their families but also themselves. Their identity, culture, and sense of security are only a small part of a persons inner structure that allows them to endure all the difficulties (Halpin 7). Most prisoners died not from direct execution but from the indirect consequences of sickness, starvation, beatings, and exhaustion. People lost their minds and did not care if they lived any longer, making little resistance to the experiments, though any resistance was useless. Hardly can anyone survive the concentration camps, but those who succeeded still never could live without any posttraumatic disorders.
Such atrocities as the concentration camps and, particularly, Auschwitz, became a dark heritage of humanity, making people remember their mistakes and cruelty and never repeat these in the future. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum was established in 1947, with many million people visiting the site and honoring the victims of the Holocaust. Memory contributes to the peoples conscious attitude to the wars and war crimes that can ruin the lives of thousands of people and serves as the symbol of one of the most massive genocides in human history.
Works Cited
Halioua, Bruno. Human Experiments on Hepatitis During the Nuremberg Doctors Trial. Japanese Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, vol. 6, no. 6, 2021, pp. 1-6.
Halpin, Ross W. Jewish Doctors and the Holocaust: The Anatomy of Survival in Auschwitz. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2019.
Kramer, Alan. Atrocities . International Encyclopedia of the First World War. 2017.
Pettitt, Joanne. New Perspectives on Auschwitz. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 27, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-11.
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