Originally intended for commercial use as a disinfectant and an insecticide, the Nazis discovered through experimentation the gas could be used to kill humans.The brand of Zyklon-B used by the Nazis contained substances which gave the pellets a blue appearance and left blue stains inside gas chambers which can still be seen today in chambers that were left intact.During the killing process, prisoners at Auschwitz and other killing centers were forced into the air-tight chambers that had been disguised by the Nazis to look like shower rooms. The Zyklon pellets were then dumped into the chambers via special air shafts or openings in the ceiling.The pellets would then vaporize, giving off a noticeable bitter almond odor. Upon being breathed in, the vapors combined with red blood cells, depriving the human body of vital oxygen, causing unconsciousness, and then death through oxygen starvation.

Einsatzgruppen were death squads, primarily composed of SS men, who followed the German Army as it marched east through the Soviet Union. Each time they entered new territory they rounded up and murdered anybody they saw as a racial or political potential enemy. This included Jews, Gypsies and any communist party officials. People in the newly occupied territories often helped the einsatzgruppen. Victims were marched or transported by truck to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared. In some cases the captive victims had to dig their own graves. After the victims had handed over their valuables and undressed, men, women, and children were shot, either standing before the open trench, or lying face down in the prepared pit.In the late summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, noting the psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested that a more convenient mode of killing be developed. Einsatzgruppen are seen by many as having been the first step toward the Final Solution.

Concentration camps were used for many different reasons; from slave labour working camps, to staging points before prisoners were moved elsewhere and from 1942 onwards, as death camps.

All concentration camps were horrific. In all of them people died terrible deaths. In most of them the prisoners were used as slave labour.

After the Wannsee Conference of Jan 1942, Himmler ordered the first death camps to be built. This was a conscious human decision, taken at a meeting, to slaughter as many people as possible, as cheaply and as efficiently as possible. Auschwitz was the biggest and most infamous of the camps but there were others such as at Sobibor or Treblinka.

This was murder on an industrial scale. The extermination camps were like factories of death. Some, such as Auschwitz also had slave labour camps attached.

When the German army successfully conquered a territory the Nazi officials often forced the Jewish populations to live in ‘ghettos’. These were sections of a city that were specifically allocated to the Jews. A wall would be erected around the ghetto to stop people getting in and out. Starvation, desperation and death were common in the ghettos. Eventually the ghettos were ‘liquidised’ for example the most infamous ghetto was the Warsaw ghetto that was liquidised between 1942-43. Most of the former inhabitants of the ghetto were sent to a death camp for murder.

Kristallnacht in English means ‘The Night of the Broken Glass’. 1938 was arguably the point at which the Nazis accelerated their discrimination against the Jews. On Kristallnacht Jewish businesses were attacked, synagogues were burned down and Jewish people were assaulted and sometimes killed. The excuse given for the outbreak of violence was that a Jewish man had killed a Nazi diplomat in France.

Kristallnacht also led to a series of anti-Jewish laws such as banning Jewish students from state schools, banning the publication of Jewish magazines or newspapers and suspending any Jewish cultural activities.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were a series of racial laws passed by the Nazis. Amongst the laws was one that said that a Jew would no longer be considered a German citizen and one that stated a Jew was not allowed to marry a German.

They were an important turning point in the Nazi anti-Semitic policies.

In 1942 a remarkable conference was held, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, second only to Himmler in the SS. The conference was held in the Berlin district of Wannsee. At the conference the plans for the ‘Final Solution’ were laid out. It was decided to systematically murder the Jews of Europe in the most efficient way possible.

This was an important turning point in the Holocaust.

Some historians propose that, though there was a great deal of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Holocaust would not have happened, had it not been for the radically anti-Semitic views of the dictator and that Hitler himself was the main driving force behind the Holocaust. Other suggest that this is simplistic and that one man cannot produce a Holocaust.

Himmler was the head of the SS, which put him in overall command of the concentration and death camps.

His SS Death’s Head guards were chiefly responsible for guarding the prisoners in the death camp and many went on to commit hideous crimes against humanity.

Goebbels, as minister of propaganda, played a huge role in indoctrinating the population and in encouraging anti=Semitic thought.It was Goebbels who encouraged Kristallnacht, in an attempt to regain favour with Hitler because at the time Hitler was furious with Goebbels for having an affair with a Czech actress.

Reinhard Heydrich was head of the Reich Security Service under Himmler’s authority. It was he, as a prominent member of the SS, who chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 in which the Final Solution was decided. Four months later he was assassinated by Czech rebels in Prague.

Hitler ordered 13,000 Czech’s to be arrested, transported and imprisoned in response. He was livid.

Joseph Mengele was an SS physician who worked in Auschwitz. He carried out unscientific and deadly experiments on the prisoners. He was particularly interested in twin children who were kept in a different part of the camp and treated to better living conditions. When he visited the children he made them call him Uncle Mengele and he gave them sweets.

His experiments included the unnecessary amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with a deadly disease and leaving one healthy, then when the diseased child died, killing the healthy one to compare them in autopsies and many other horrible experiments.

Amon Goeth was camp commandant of Plaszow. He was known for his indiscriminate killing of prisoners, sometimes shooting them from his house on the boundary of the camp. He trained his dogs to rip prisoners apart on command. He was represented in the film Schindler’s List.

Rodulf Hoss was the camp commandant of Auschwitz. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about him was that he seemed to be an ordinary family man. Before he was executed he said ‘“Since I was Commandant of the extermination camp Auschwitz I was totally responsible for everything that happened there, whether I knew about it or not. Most of the terrible and horrible things that took place there I learned only during this investigation and during the trial itself. I cannot describe how I was deceived, how my directives were twisted, and all the things they had carried out supposedly under my orders. I certainly hope that the guilty will not escape justice. It is tragic that, although I was by nature gentle, good-natured, and very helpful, I became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what.”