Question

Most prisoners at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp were Jewish. What evidence does the following excerpt from Angela Merkel's 2013 speech at Buchenwald provide to support the conclusion that Nazis pursued a policy of genocide toward Jews during World War II?

At the beginning of our joint visit to the Buchenwald Memorial the American president and I stood in front of a plaque commemorating all the victims. When you put your hand on the memorial you can feel that it has warmed up — it is kept at a temperature of 37 degrees, the body temperature of a living human being. This, however, was not a place for living, but a place for dying.

Unimaginable horror, shock — there are no words to adequately describe what we feel when we look at the suffering inflicted so cruelly upon so many people here and in other concentration and extermination camps under National Socialist terror. I bow my head before the victims. — German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 20131


A. Merkel suggests that the Buchenwald camp was built to inflict suffering.

B. Merkel states that prisoners experienced "unimaginable horror."

C. Merkel suggests that most of the prisoners died in the camps.

D. Merkel states that the Nazi Socialist Party used "terror" against its prisoners.

Answer 1

Merkel strongly suggested that most of the prisoners had died in the camps, therefore your answer would be C.)

Answer 2

The correct answer is C.

In her speech, the German chancellor Angela Merkel evidences the existence of the genocide perpetrated by the nazis, when she states that the camps (as she referred to Buchenwald and also other concentration and extermination camps) were not places for living, but places for dying.

The nazis used their camp system to systematically exterminate the Jewish population using gas chambers and crematories, and putting in practice what the nazis denominated Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Also political defectors and enemies, and other human groups that German nazis considered could contaminate the superior German Aryan race, were killed in the camps: disabled, gypsys, homosexuals, communists...