Jews were forced to obey the guard's orders from the moment they arrived at the camps. If they didn't, they would be beaten, put into solitary confinement or shot. The prisoners usually had marks on their clothes or numbers on their arms to identify them. Gold fillings, wedding bands, jewelry, shoes and clothing were taken from the prisoners when they first entered the camps and were sold. The sanitary conditions of the camps were horrible. There was only one bathroom for four hundred people. They had to stand for hours in snow, rain, heat, or cold. Within the first few days of being at the camps, thousands of people died of hunger, starvation and disease. Other people died from the cruel punishments of the guards; beatings and torture(Alder 43). .
Typhus, a disease caused by germs carried by flies, was the main disease that spread throughout the camps. Even when people were sick, they still continued working because they knew that sickness meant death. When someone escaped from the camp, all the prisoners in that group were shot. Joseph Mengele, one of the most notorious of the Nazi doctors. Hummed when selecting among the new arrivals for the gas chamber or for medical experiments(Wiesenthal 182). .
Some inmates were frozen to determine the best way to revive frozen German soldiers. He also well know for his work on twins, using them to test different chemicals. Once the camps became too full, they would invent new ways to dispose of the prisoners. Women were sent to one side to have their hair shaven and the men to the other. They were all sent to the "showers", naked with a bar of soap, so as to confuse them into believing that they were truly going into a shower. Most people smelled the burning bodies and knew the truth. There were several death camps; Chelmno, Treblinka, Aischwitz, Birkenau, Sobibor, Maidanek, and Belzec are some. These camps used gas from the shower heads to murdertheir victims.
