The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Chapter 27 describes the Nazi’s most horrific atrocities, including the “Final Solution”: the planned, industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.

Nazi plunder of conquered territories, which included the theft of everything from gold to works of art, constituted the “mildest part” of Hitler’s terrifying New Order (946). In occupied countries, Nazi thugs seized non-disabled men, women, and children for forced labor. British and American prisoners of war generally fared better than their Soviet counterparts, whom the Nazis were content to see starve to death. The SS Einsatzgruppen carried out mass executions in the East. Himmler personally ordered the murder of women and children by herding them into vans and killing them with poison gas.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives in such ways, but even this figure pales in comparison to the ghastly results of the death camps, where victims numbered in the millions. At Auschwitz, the demonic agents of the Holocaust herded as many as 2,000 naked victims at a time into chambers fitted with phony showerheads and then released Zyklon B, a crystallized prussic acid. Sometimes it took 15 minutes for the screaming to stop. One Nazi official estimated that the crematoria at Auschwitz burned as many as 16,000 bodies in a single day.