World War I: Life For Prisoners Of War

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.

In World War 2, Germany was using the labor of prisoners which is permitted by the third Geneva Convention. The fact that they were making them work in the worst of conditions known to man and furthermore, not keeping them healthy, both in body and in mind was by definition- a war crime.

The book “Unbroken” was a seemingly impossible tale of triumph and survival of an Olympic runner and WWII veteran named Louis Zamperini. He constantly had to overcome adversity in his early years, for he was an immigrant from Italy and a trouble maker before his brother Pete steered him into running track. This immediately turned him around as he did well enough to in running to break all sorts if local records, which were accomplished while his competitors were trying to sabotage his runs. This qualified him for the 1936 Olympic in Berlin, where he met Hitler. He still had running aspirations but felt he had no choice other than fighting in the world due to the fact that the 1940 Olympics were

Imagine your government blaming you for the actions of the race you come from and them ultimately imprisoning you with no remorse. During WWII this situation happened to innocent Japanese Americans out of fear and prejudice. Americans put these innocent citizens in internment camps without solid evidence of them being spies and traitors.By the US acting on fear and prejudice we have damaged and harmed innocent Japanese Americans going against what America stands for and what is right.

Prison camps were very brutal and had hard living conditions. There were some prisons that stood out, such as Andersonville, Alton Federal Prison Belle Isle, and Salisbury prison, which was one of the better prisons. Andersonville was not a good prison to be at and it had 45,000 people in the 12 months it was around

Bergen-Belsen had tens of thousands of prisoners in it and had 60,000 prisoners in a very critical condition. Bergen-Belsen was full of unsanitary conditions, the prisoners had lack of food, shelter, and they died because of overcrowded areas. The Nazis starved the prisoners so much that some couldn’t even move. “Moving vaguely on rickety skeleton legs were too ill to eat.”(ushmm.org) Most of the survivors were too hungry to even move to get food. The Nazis wanted prisoners to suffer, so they put them to work everyday, giving them one meal to eat.

Many citizens of the United States immediately after the Civil War knew very little of the atrocities of that occurred in the prisoner of war camps. News that their family member was in a prisoner of war camp was usually dreaded by the family of the captured soldiers. While being dead was much worse the families never truly knew what was going on inside the camps. For the Confederacy, many feared Rock Island, but there was a just as deadly camp just north of Rock Island in Chicago. Once the war had ended the atrocities of what occurred inside the prisoner of war camps became apparent. Suddenly multiple fingers were pointed at what was the culprit for such deplorable conditions. The pictures, descriptions, and accounts of what happened inside the prisoner of war camps became a part of not only history but the media as well. Multiple books were written about the prisoner of war camps, several works of fiction reference the prisoner of war camps. Andersonville is almost unanimously regarded as the worst camp for a Union soldier to get sent to. Rock Island seems to be the place that many agree as the worst camp that a Confederate soldier could get sent to. Rock Island is even mentioned in several works of fiction, including Gone With The Wind. In Gone With The Wind the main character Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in law, Melanie Wilkes received a letter telling her that her husband Ashley Wilkes had been captured and taken to a horrible place called Rock Island. However, while Rock

being forced to ride in horse stalls like similar to slaves. Most families being torn apart and put into separate camps, thinking to never see them again. The prisoners could live there up to 4 years, including the children.

In the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Natzweiler, more than seven hundred prisoners were subjected to the typhus experiments. Not only did these two camps run experiments for typhus but also for diseases such as yellow fever, smallpox, cholera and many more. The typhus experiments were very repugnant in the way that doctors would kill people just to keep the disease still intact with them. They had prisoners known as ‘passage persons’ who acted like capsules for the diseases. The doctors would use these people to take their blood and inject it in others. “They

The concentration camps medical practices were torturous and were one of the main contributors to the deaths of millions of Jews. The way Jews were treated while they were in the concentration camps was inhumane. “The camp destroyed human beings by humiliation and psychological murder, by dissociation and repression, by labor, starvation, and epidemic.” (Sofsky 215). From the moment they arrived to their impending death, they were treated as animals, or property instead of humans. The medical practices taken place in the concentration camps were morally dehumanizing. Severe wounds were often left to infect and if patients could not move, they were most often left to die. Diseases spread rapidly, effecting many of the captured people and resulting in the deaths of thousands. When Jews contracted these diseases they were put in separate quarantined buildings where they were essentially left to die. There bodies were then brought off to where they would be cremated along with any other body. The American internment camps maintained a cleaner and more hygienic approach compared to the torturous concentration camps in Germany. Although the internment camps did have lice infestations and some accounts of diarrhea due to uncooked and unrefrigerated food, the atmosphere was cleaner resulting in the spreading of diseases being minimal to none. The American internment camps had some issues but compared to the concentration camps, the issues did not cause such epidemics like ones in concentration

No one is more vulnerable during wartime than prisoners of war (POW 's). They are at the mercy of an enemy who they had been trying to kill and defeat up until the moment of their capture. During previous wars, this rather precarious situation was handled with a certain amount of professionalism and dignity on the part of captors. The two world wars in Europe are cases in which POW 's were given a fair amount of food, clothing, and the ability to write and receive letters in most cases. However, the war in the Pacific involving the United States and the Japanese involved a great deal of abuse and substandard treatment of POW 's resulting in a death rate of about 40% compared to only 1% in the European theater. The Soviet Union also did

There were multiple camps in numerous locations all across Europe. There were nine camps in Poland, nine in Germany, one in Ukraine, one in Austria, one in France, one in Czech Republic, and one in Netherlands (Concentration Camps 1 and 2). Out of all the camps: 12 were forced labor, two holding centers, one holding center/transit, one transit, five annihilation, and two annihilation; forced labor (Concentration Camps 1 and 2). Most of the camps today are monuments or museums; but some of the camps were not maintained and are now graveyards. If you are ever in one of the countries go visit one of the museums and learn more about what happened.

One camp that hitler established was Sachsenhausen, which is a concentration and experimentation camp. This camp was one of the earliest camp to be established, July 1936, and it was “to hold political prisoners that opposed the Nazis”(Concentration Camps). Between 1936 and 1945, 200,000 people passed through this camp. “About 100,000 inmates died there from exhaustion, disease, pneumonia from the freezing winter cold”("Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg): History & Overview). Many were died from brutal medical experimentations or they were executed because they were suffering too much. Some experimentations they did there was, they infected people with epidemic jaundice, killing them or caused great pain and suffering, and another experimentation

It ran from 1943 to 1944 and held all the non-Jewish prisoners. Part of the camp became the recuperation camp, where any sick prisoners were sent (Bergen-Belsen: Camp Complex). This part of the camp was established in 1944 to keep healthy prisoners from getting sick (USHMM). The most people died there because there was no medical care or good food, and the conditions were very bad (Bergen-Belsen: Camp Complex). About 35,000 of these prisoners died when the typhus epidemic struck, including Anne and Margot Frank. Many of them were also killed by lethal injections (Webb and Lisciotto). When the recuperation camp became too full, officials moved all the girls to the tent camp (Bergen-Belsen: Camp Complex). This happened in 1944 (USHMM). The tent camp was later damaged by a storm, so the small women’s camp was created (Bergen-Belsen: Camp Complex). Prisoners who survived the death marches were brought to Bergen-Belsen, and many of them were women, so officials turned the prisoner-of-war camp into the large women’s camp (USHMM).

Prisoners in WW1 were mistreated. In 1914 Germany captured far more prisoners than Britain or France. By 1915 Germany had over a million prisoners. Germany was expecting a short war and was not prepared for the number of soldiers captured. Prisoners of war transported to Germany from the front often had to sleep in fields, where they suffered from exposure, while they waited for the camps to be built. They were also used as labor to build the camps. In Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, in 1915, prisoners were very unsanitary and that year several typhus epidemic broke out which cost the lives of thousands of prisoners. IN some places up to 186 prisoners died a day of typhus.