Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Presentations 4/23

My first question is: What was the purpose of having zoos and parks in Buchenwald?  I am not sure I understood why they did this.  The Germans did many very weird, crazy, and wrong things, but even those things had reasons.  I did not even get a warped reason for them including bears and the like.  It sounds like a costly thing that they did without a very good reason.  

The interesting thing I did find about these awful places is that they grew and grew as time passed.  Auschwitz had three sections that they added for specific purposes each time.  Buchenwald even had 88 satellite sites.  I knew that they kept getting more and more prisoners, but I did not know that they made the camps bigger multiple times.  I guess I assumed that they either killed the prisoners or they created new camps.  This is just something that i had not realized before today.   

2 comments:

Justin Sadowski said...

You make a good point, though I suppose the Germans wouldn't have minded being able to kill the camp inmates to provide room for more. It's just the vast scale of things that you have to talk about when musing on the Holocaust.

Alex Fischer said...

It is my understanding that the purpose of the zoo and park at Buchewald was for the amusement of the camp commander's children. I also have read that when the guards called the prisoners for roll call that they had to line up facing the bears in the zoo, and from time to time the guards threw a Jew to the bears while the other prisoners, and the commander's children, watched.