World War II Nazi soldiers who worked at concentration camps committed horrible acts of cruelty and brutality against Jews and others. Most soldiers enjoyed their job while a few others actually tried to help the prisoners. The soldiers working at the camps were called the Schutzstaffel, or SS for short. The SS began as an elite group of bodyguards for Hitler. The job of many of the SS was to kill every communist party official and every Jew they could capture. A normal job involved marching victims out of a town or city, lining them up at the edge of a .
ravine, mowing them down with machine guns, and bulldozing soil and earth over the mass .
grave. To Hitler, the Jews were a problem. He called them "a pestilence " and .
"personifications of the Devil. " He believed that Jews wanted to dilute pure German blood .
and take control of the world. To fix this problem he came up with the idea of the "Final .
Solution. " This solution was the answer to the question of how to get rid of the Jews. People .
that were very close to Hitler decided that the best way of killing hundreds of thousands of .
people would be to gas them. The new duties of the SS were to implement the "Final .
Solution, " which was the extermination of the Jews. .
Before the war had begun, some of the soldiers had been nurses, farmers, salesmen, .
and factory workers. Few of them had criminal records. They were not chosen because they .
were cruel. Some of these people actually wanted to join the SS because they thought they .
were ridding the world of Jews who were subhumans. Others were drafted. These normal, .
everyday people were willing to kill a population of Jews who did nothing to them. The .
Germans viewed the Jews not as human beings, but as animals and creatures that were .
inferior to them. Since the Nazis had taken over, the German people had consistently been .
reading and hearing about how evil the Jewish people were and how they were going to take .