Eight hundred children are gassed to death at Auschwitz
On October 10 1944 800 Gypsy children including more than a hundred boys between 9 and 14 years old are systematically murdered.Auschwitz was really a group of camps designated I II and III.There were also 40 smaller satellite camps.It was at Auschwitz II at Birkenau established in October 1941 that the SS created a complex monstrously orchestrated killing ground 300 prison barracks four bathhouses in which prisoners were gassed corpse cellars and cremating ovens.
Thousands of prisoners were also used as fodder for medical experiments overseen and performed by the camp doctor Josef Mengele (the Angel of Death).A mini-revolt took place on October 7 1944.As several hundred Jewish prisoners were being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to the furnace to dispose of the bodies they blew up one of the gas chambers and set fire to another using explosives smuggled to them from Jewish women who worked in a nearby armaments factory.Of the roughly 450 prisoners involved in the sabotage about 250 managed to escape the camp during the ensuing chaos.
They were all found and shot.Those co-conspirators who never made it out of the camp were also executed as were five women from the armaments factory-but not before being tortured for detailed information on the smuggling operation.None of the women talked.Gypsies too had been singled out for brutal treatment by Hitlers regime early on.
Deemed carriers of disease and unreliable elements who cannot be put to useful work they were marked for extermination along with the Jews of Europe from the earliest years of the war.Approximately 1.5 million Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis.In 1950 as Gypsies attempted to gain compensation for their suffering as were other victims of the Holocaust the German government denied them anything saying Gypsies have been persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record.
They were stigmatized even in light of the atrocities committed against them.
