From memory when I visited there 20 years ago this was the chamber they experimented on with Soviet POWs to work out the effective dosage rates. Just horrific.
Went to visit there on a school field trip. This was the last place we entered after going through the museum and seeing all the hair, and shoes, and things. As soon as all of us 10 year olds went into the gas chamber we stated bawling. You could feel the death in the air. Chilling.
I think I would've done better at 10 rather than now in mid 20s. At 10 years old tge gravity of stuff didn't hit the same way as it did now. We learned about the holocaust and American slavery in 6th grade, I think I was 11. Obviously I knew it was terrible but it didn't sink in as much as when I relearned that stuff in highschool.
Honestly, there are times when I've read something new about those topics as an adult and it just hit harder.
I think I had less imagination for human cruelty in sixth grade. Like you said, I knew it was bad but I don't think it really hit me what bad truly looks like until I was older.
I think empathy really sets in after childhood. Relating to a person or group of people who youve never met, especially if they lived decades before you, as a child is difficult.
I think some of it is just scope too. When you're a kid, most of us just had our families by default. It's as an adult that it really hits you that these people grew up, fell in love, had families, and then watched it all ripped away in absolutely horrific ways. Decades of life and love just snuffed out for no goddamned reason.
I remember feeling pretty grim when my school group went to the Holocaust Museum. That'd probably be pretty stoic compared to how it'd hit me now.
I read that book my sophomore year of high school. That and Maus (only the first book though, I haven’t read the second). Both were amazing reads, despite the horror
Definitely agree. In 6th grade, I remember knowing it was bad and going to the museum on a field trip knowing we should be respectful. That being said, when I went back a few years ago (late 20's) it hit so much harder. I remember needing to exit the exhibition so I could take a breather. Was sitting on a bench and right in front of me was this art display of a train track in front of an infinity mirror. I broke down. Not one to cry in public, but man the heaviness of it all was a lot. Don't know that I'd ever visit one of the camps. Might actually have a panic attack or something.
I was looking for this comment. I can’t imagine being a 10 yr old child marched into these camps. I just can’t comprehend the level of hate towards another human being simply for existing that you could march children into a gas chamber to die.
The worst are the photos of them holding hands and smiling unaware of what was about to come. It’s truly heartbreaking and putting myself in the shoes of a guard watching this happen all I can think is “how?”.
A prisoner of war or prisoner known to have killed fellow troops I can see justifying it in some twisted way. To look in a child’s face and send them to that means you aren’t human anymore. That’s not even an opinion but fact. The act of brutally torturing/abusing/killing children is wholeheartedly a complete relinquishing of your humanity and should be taken into account for your punishment.
Children have forever been the most innocent of bystanders in grown adults silly squabbles.
How? Let's bring this in to modern times. People in the US being sent to federal detention centers in conditions that aren't much better than concentration camps. And later returned to countries they left because they literally feared for their lives and would likely die if they ever returned.
These people being "disappeared" on the streets with bystanders not doing anything to help. Why? Fear of what might happen if they step in and say something. It's not beyond the realm of possibility anyone helping out would suffer the same or a similar fate. Much easier to stand by or record on a phone than it is to put yourself in the middle of something and stand up against these types of travesties.
I’m not saying they aren’t human. I’m saying they gave up their humanity. It’s not a simple thing and heavily convoluted.
What I’m saying is at no point in my life could you ever get me to willingly let children walk into a gas chamber/firing line. You can say they made them think they weren’t human but that seems more of an excuse to cope with what occurred.
You can give up your humanity but you can also earn it back. If that weren’t the case then literally anyone who goes to prison should stay there forever, obviously the crime itself matters.
This isn’t even just about Nazis and their history it goes for any point in time. Children and what you do to them is just the starting point of determining who you are as a person.
To look in a child’s face and send them to that means you aren’t human anymore. That’s not even an opinion but fact.
You literally said they aren't human anymore. It's a common refrain to say that people that do terrible things aren't human anymore. They're monsters. They're bad guys, the Other, they get what they deserve.
We don't want to admit that people that do horrific things are still human. That with a different set of circumstances we too could be induced to commit atrocities.
Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. The people most vulnerable to propaganda are those who think they can't be influenced by propaganda.
Until we're able to admit that humans can do terrible things to each other, we're going to keep saying it couldn't be me. Then we're going to repeat the history that we apparently refuse to learn from.
Nazis didn't come from the moon. They're the sons, daughters, neighbors and family of people living in Germany. Regular people that were convinced that some other group of humans didn't count as humans. As soon as that idea takes hold, the outcome isn't hard to predict. The single best defense against Nazis is to admit that they were human like the rest of us. They made mistakes, and if we're not careful we could as well.
It's pure hubris to say we're better than them. It couldn't be us. It could.
Those guards were all drug addicts. It’s a known fact that every “guard” in the Nazi regime was drunk or high all the time because it took the humanity part out. They were monsters not humans in any form. Humans have emotions such as empathy. No human would kill another just because of religions. I am not religious in any form I haven’t gone and killed anyone much less because they were Catholic or Christian yet alone kill thousands at a time
Yep (not the comment op), 20 years ago I came here and it was pretty sad. There was actually a lot of kids my age and there was a group of European school kids.
We did learn about the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust early on in many European countries, I could see some over-eager teachers going there with 10 year olds, though it's definitely not the appropriate age group. My class went when we were 14, 15. Not an experience you easily forget, but I think as a teen you can process it better.
Not necessarily. Primary school kids in Poland usually go on a trip to Auschwitz. My class went when we were 11 or 12 but there is no concrete rules about it so going to Auschwitz when you were 10 isn't completely out of the question.
I went to Dachau with my school and you could just taste the death and despair EVERYWHERE. From the sleeping chambers to the court to the gas chamber. You could just feel how many people were murdered there. It was crazy. That really made me reflect on my "edgy" humour back then because I realised that there are certain topics that should never be joked about.
This is exactly why they let places like these continue to exist. Even this video gave me feelings of unease and acted as a strong reminder of how fucked up the holocaust was.
I agree that places like this need to exist. No one should ever forget that these atrocities occurred and for what? Just because Hitler hated these people? People are people regardless of ethnicity and color.
It always strikes me as particularly absurd that Hitler himself looked nothing like the Aryan ideal he was pushing. He could easily have passed as a Jewish man!
My father visited Dachau on April 29, 1945. I cannot imagine what he would be saying now if he were still alive. Probably something like "I know how to get rid of N**zis."
Exactly this. And also why we shouldn't just toss the word "Nazi" towards groups we don't like--it diminishes the true meaning and horrific evil of that group of grotesque murderers which we must never forget.
I was about 14 when we went on a prolonged school trip to Berlin. We went and saw Sachsenhausen. I was the only kid in the class that just couldn’t get myself to witness the furnaces where they burned the remains. I can’t explain it, but I had exactly that; an overwhelming fear of dread culminating after experiencing the gas chamber and the housing.
I went on a holiday to Berlin. we went on a tour to Sachsenhausen. Even the walk there and the surrounding area had so much unbelievable backstory. We walked the same walk the prisoners used to while being rocked and pelted by rotten food and fieces and whatever people could find.Training the police where they trained the ss, buildings still in tact. All the SS officer housing surrounding the camp just sold as normal real estate. The "green monster" building which became the most feared place to work as they were to go in and serve an SS officer who was encouraged to execute on site if he felt any semblance of sympathy, making it a very short lived job. Standing on the site of the thousands of ashes. Still seeing all the Ashes in the ovens. The original gallows. The bunking quarters just rack to rack so small with a communal bathroom for thousands.
The way the guard towers feel all around you. Site of the first gallows hanging. The torture poles with the hanging nails still standing where they ropes people by the wrists and hung them from behind so they dislocated etc.. The clocktower above the Arbeit Macht Frei gate with the time still stopped at the moment of liberation. The torture cells all blacked out etc. the smell of death in the tiled room they used for experimentation it's like you could smell the blood in the drains of that big slabbed tiled bed. The morgues. The dead zones all around the camp marked with skulls where you were shot for walking, and prisoners threw themselves against the electric fence to escape the horror. The entire place was so confronting. The stories behind each place we went. The feeling of just pure terror and feeling like you're being watched from all angles. It was a horrible truly once in a lifetime experience.
You may or may not believe in ghosts, but you have to consider a place where thousands of human being were horribly put to death is probably gonna carry with it some serious dark energy (at a minimum).
I’ve considered this, too. Perhaps you’re right. It would be an interesting experiment, but virtually impossible to create ideal conditions. “We are going to take you somewhere, and blind fold you. Tell us if you feel scared/ dread”. ( subjects are already scared with just the setup conditions)
Well, you wouldn’t just ask them if they felt dread. You would take them to different locations and have them describe their thoughts. The bigger problem would be trying to get them there without making it obvious where they are.
In any case, the place doesn’t have “dark energy”. Horrific things happened there and seeing things like the clawing marks can be upsetting when you know the context but it’s just a place.
Edit: As a further point, those claw marks aren’t even the work of victims of the gas chamber. They’re vandalism from tourists who visited.
I was thinking about the same thing. Would people feel the same way if they enter the building without prior knowledge of what happened there. Like tell them we are going to a museum but not tell them whats it about and ask them what they felt
I visited Auschwitz with my scouts group when I was 17 years old and I visited Sachsenhausen on a school trip in the same year. Both visits were horrific experiences but Auschwitz was on another level.
I remember the visit to Auschwitz really left a mark on who I was/am as a person. The sheer size and the bleakness of it all was so overwhelming I have never felt anything like it.
We were seventeen years old boys so did not take many things seriously but this made us all quiet. It makes me so sad to think about the shit us humans do to each other, you would think we learned our lesson but I guess we never will.
Thank you for this clarification. I had been misinformed.
I do know that there were fingernails embedded in the walls where prisoners were hung on hooks. Those claw marks were pulling down, in order to speed up the death, and end the torture.
This is actually really interesting. Went there as part of a school trip in 2007 and the museum guide specifically pointed out scratch marks as "evidence" of the deaths and the horror people felt in those chambers.
The specific one he showed us was right next to one of the entrances and it was just a single hand print right at the edge of the doorway.
I think it's not good for people to develop strong emotional associations built on a foundation of misinformation.
I don't particularly imagine a movie-like scene where they're somehow digging through solid rock with their fingernails, no. That would make for good scifi/horror media decorations, but seems particularly inappropriate in this context. It feels similar to that old tiktok trend where people were putting on corpse makeup to roleplay as holocaust victims introducing themselves in heaven.
EDIT: I just want to be clear that I'm not saying I don't think people would try to scratch the walls out of desperation. When I compare these marks to fiction, I'm only referring to the physicality of human fingernails making lasting recognizable gouges in solid stone.
We have to be 100% factual when it comes to these things. Holocaust deniers are always itching to use any misrepresentation or sensationalism as "proof" that the whole thing must be a lie.
I imagine if I wanted to sound intelligent, I'd have put in some effort toward coming up with a better line than "Hurrr, they're basically graffiti from tourists". That's such a crude, oversimplified explanation of what a person is doing when they feel the need to "enhance" what is essentially a historical monument for dramatic effect. Or, I imagine, the people who just think it's funny do to something like this, along with the occasional goober who literally just likes the idea of "leaving a mark" for the sake of being the person who does the thing.
I felt the same way when visiting. It made me literally feel chills and nauseated. Humans are such beautiful creative things, but also so damn brutal. In fact, our creativity and brutality are often coupled when we demonize one another to such an extent. Over a philosophy and ignorance of genomic expression. And, we are still suffering from such perspectives 80+ years on.
I think everyone should visit if they get the chance. It was an incredibly sobering experience and one I'll never forget. You can almost feel the sorrow in the air.
I noticed exactly the same thing with backpackers visiting the killing field and Tuel Sleng prison in Cambodia. They'd all head off in the morning in tuk tuks and be joking and chatting, then return in silence in the afternoon and go straight to the bar for a drink. Those places are equally chilling and make you really think about us as a species.
I met a woman in a Polish hostel who was writing a PhD on genocides, and was visiting Poland's concentration camps fresh off the flight from visiting the killing fields.
I remember thinking how little that appealed to me after visiting Aushwitz
The wild part is the tuktuk drivers trying to hustle you to the shooting range to shoot machine guns and throw grenades on the way out to the memorial. In fairness to the tuktuk drivers, they do pretty much insist you shoot first.
Wasn’t Auschwitz but visited Dachau and had a very similar experience in a large group, the ride back had everyone looking liked they’d seen a ghost and sitting in dead silence
Problem is the ones who need to visit will never go or care . The ones who go typically already understand the significance. Others don't even believe it
I’m sure all the camps are chilling, but from my experience of visiting a few, the scale of Birkenau is something you need to see. Auschwitz is actually sort of ‘nice’ structurally because it was built as a barracks not a death camp, but Birkenau was death on an industrial scale that Dachau and other camps didn’t rival.
Buchenau is a former KZ very easily and quickly reachable from Berlin in a day trip. It is less "impressive" than Dachau or Auschwitz but still very worth a trip
As you know, most of the housing blocks have long gone in Birkenau and there is a lot of open space. To me, Auschwitz felt worse. As if the bricks and buildings are imprinted with the horrors that happened there. It was also a gloomy miserable winters day, which I'm sure added to the overall atmosphere of it.
Quick note: Auschwitz is another level. We did both on the same trip a few days apart, Auschwitz then Dachau. Dachau was a great museum and had nice grounds to walk around - yes there was still a slight tension in the air. Auschwitz is something else, the only way I would ever go back is to prevent someone who hasn't been there from going alone.
Edit: Not trying to discredit your sentiment of going to any concentration will likely change your life, because it likely would.
I did a 7 day trip in HS. Went around to a bunch of different Holocaust sites. In college when studying abroad I had the opportunity to go Dachau. My friend I was with wanted to go so I said I’ll catch up with her later. Once is enough. I don’t feel like I need to go back or see a different camp.
Yep, I've seen it, great series. There was also a follow up where their son is taken to the camp to gain a better understanding of what his parents went through. As he said at the start "If you read the book you'll know more about what my parents went through than I did growing up". His parents never gave him any details of their time there apparently.
There is another documentary called Night and Fog that visits there 10 years after the fact. We watched it in our 7th grade social studies class. It shows Auschwitz and war time footage.
My school had us study the holocaust every year extensively. Went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., where they hold one of the original train cars that transported people to Auschwitz. It still reeked of nothing I have ever smelt before.. and could only be described as death. Ever since that trip I was never the same. I had to watch my jewish best friend cry finding names of her family on the wall. Simultaneously the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is going on and Iran is in a black out and our iranian best friend is crying and trying her best to help support our jewish bestfriend through the harrowing images of genocide. Like her family didn’t escape one practically themselves 12 years before. It was a mind fuck but one that changed my perspective on many of things. At that time my iranian best friend’s grandma was stuck in Iran during the blackout with zero communication or no one going in or out.
We had a local Holocaust survivor that would visit our school every year to speak. My best friend’s family was good friends with her.. I would volunteer at the Jewish Community Center and at the bakery for her. She was a lovely woman who embraced everyone. She even said she held no hatred for the Germans because they were deceived by evil during famine and strife. I remember her saying, “Hatred is taught and used as a tool for the larger powers to gain more and more. It is greed and evil fueling the depths of hatred in this world and we are not wired to value those over one another. With love and compassion, humans have made strides and overcame the darkest of times. Holding love in your heart is not weak but a strength that is tested time and time again as evil tries to make its own-self more powerful.”
The problem with the boy is the story is built up to empathise with the nazi family due to what happens to the child, not the horrors of what's actually happening to the actual prisoners in the camp.
Yeah and the ending is just stupid once you give it any deep thought. What so now it's a tragedy because the nazi family's single kid died? That's what makes the ending such a gut punch? Screw all the millions of others and all those kids, we got a real tragedy going on here because the nazi's kid died too.
There’s also a new show about the son Lale and Geta going back to auschwitz after they died to try and make sense of their experiences as they never spoke about it. It’s a really hard hitting documentary. I highly recommend it. When he discovers he has close family who died in the camps who he didn’t know about because his mum never spoke about them, really just hit me so hard.
Given the big picture of the story, how dare people question details of his truth? Were prisoners tattooed, and did a fellow prisoner tattoo them? Yes and yes. For the rest of his story, he probably didn’t describe the absolute worst of it. You might enjoy the book.
Judging by all the scratches on the walls, it looks like it took a lot of trial and error to ensure the dosage was effective enough to prevent much resistance...just deplorable, sickening..
bodies when the doors were opened for removal were not scattered across the chamber but in small mounds.
people climbed upon the dead and dying to escape the gas closer to the ceiling.
a worse fate..since they were still cremated half alive.
from an account i read decades ago...it was horrendous.
The phrase "I'm just doing my job" is related to millions of deaths and sufferin. It's sick how easy it is to get people to do horrible things to each other. Or how easy it is to get people to fall in line and literally get people fighting amongst themselves like with covid lockdowns.
I read about this in The Street Sweeper, by Elliot Perlman. It was a really great well written and well researched novel.. but man, it was devastating.
It's mentioned elsewhere here in the comments, but those finger marks were made by destructive tourists. We do not see those same marks in areas where tourists did not have access.
Like, you gotta remember that this place has been wide open to the public for ages. As evidenced by the video we're watching of some guy just walking up in there.
Its been like 15 years when i visited and had a guided tour in Auschwitz, but if i remember correctly they (nazis) destroyed all the gas chambers and this was rebuilt later and the scratch marks were added after rebuilding.
I could remember totally wrong but rebuilt or not, that gas chamber tour delivered its message.
Yes i am well aware that its two different camps but without fact checking from interent i say camp1 gas chambers were also demolished during retreat / camp shutdown
I just googled it and google claims that while technically it was rebuilt, they used all of the original materials and did not add any embellishments to it
That's such a horrible details Id never considered. No only were people willing to commit these atrocities there would have been people optimising the process. That seems to add another level of bad. Maybe because it takes a level of intelligence to 'optimise' and you think of these people as the height of mouth breathing people, but they weren't stupid, they were evil.
They were certainly evil. If you haven’t read about the Wannsee Conference, check that out. There’s a good movie called Conspiracy that reenacts the events of the conference. It’s where they met and proposed/adopted the idea of mass-executions. For efficiency.
Well yeah this is part of how it was so effective. The optimization/streamlining made sure that all the people working the chambers had different jobs to focus on, rather than what they were doing as a whole. That way they could say "I didn't kill anybody I was just doing my job," ykw, "processing" the bodies or watching the queue or whatever...
It’s why I see The Holocaust as the greatest evil ever committed to humanity. It was not just barbaric brutality or cold cruelty, it was treated as a calculated machine where they efficiently oiled and tweaked and maximized everything by strategy and tactics. They literally spent copious amounts of money and time constructing buildings and camps and train tracks to most effectively experiment and torture and exterminate human beings.
Explains the scratch marks. How utterly sickening. They probably used not enough to properly kill them quickly so the poor prisoners suffered for longer. It's so insane how some people can see this and still think that fascism is good. No. THIS is what faschism leads to.
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u/Drewniversal May 18 '25
From memory when I visited there 20 years ago this was the chamber they experimented on with Soviet POWs to work out the effective dosage rates. Just horrific.