LogFAQs > #946352889

28. The Nazi concentration camps of World War 2 (21 points)
Nominated by: paulg235 (1/5 remaining)


Importance: 10
Fear: 10
Snake: 1

I pray and hope we'll never have a time in the world that was scarier or more tragic than Nazi-era Germany. The concentration camps, still standing today, serve as stark, sobering reminders, still erect so that we may never forget the atrocities that occurred here in these forsaken places. You've definitely heard of Dachau or Auschwitz, but all together, there were 23 of these camps, full of human suffering and totally devoid of happiness & mercy. Originally, concentration camps was for political prisoners who would build and extend the reach of the camps, or other general forced labor like quarry or coal mining. By the roaring of heights of World War II, the camps would transform into cold places of death, as Nazis killed large numbers of people opposed to their regime or beliefs, whilst also increasing the efforts of the German war machine including production of vehicles, artillery, and armaments. Camps would regularly torture their prisoners, through such vicious methods as total starvation, flogging, or strappado, more commonly known as hanging torture. There were actually several different types of camps, and the ones known as "killing centers" are the ones typically thought of when the the term enters the mind, the camps like Auschwitz, with gas chambers carrying out the mass genocide of the Jewish people. To think that there was a time when these murders were taking place for years on end can just boggle the mind sometimes, truly pushing the limits of humanity's most disgusting, despicable, and atrocious traits to nauseating degrees. Concentration camps tend to not get brought up in horror media much, even ones set in WW2. The Twilight Zone is the closest I can think of, in the episode Deaths-Head Revisited, which features an ex-SS officer returning to Dachau years after the war ends to get a twisted taste of nostalgia for himself, only to get tortured by the ghostly victims of the prisoners he brutalized and tortured himself all those years ago. It's a great source of cathartic justice as Serling writes it, and I think his outro sums it up best:

"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

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