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K n o w l e d g e i s p o w e r |
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| The
number of children killed by Hitler
and the Nazis is not fathomable and full statistics for the
tragic fate of the children will never be known. Estimates range
as high as 1.5 million murdered children during
the Holocaust.
This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens
of thousands of Gypsy
children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped
children. Plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, the children had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, illness and brutal labor, until they were consigned to the gas chambers. In the late 1930's the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns. Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing. Six extermination centers were established in occupied Poland - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka - where large-scale murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically. Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. |