Question

1. How did the Nazis maintain calm and order during the extermination process?

Answer 1

1. Nazis kept the people calm before killing them by claiming that they were going through a "routine cleansing or delousing procedure". They hid the idea of the gas chambers by disguising them as showers. This made the people not suspect what was actually awaiting them. 
2. Operation Reinhard served mainly as a concentration camp designed to house Jews and other groups for the purposes of slave labor. Auschwitz on the other hand killed the majority of the people that came in, sparing only a few for slave labor. 
3. There appeared at first to be little to no major press about the liberation of the camps because the Russians viewed the Holocaust in a different light than its western counterparts. For Russia, the Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out the entire Russian people, not just Jews, gypsies, political opponents, etc. There was also confusion in the reporting. Some leaders claimed it was Ukrainians, not Russians. This showed signs of the political strife that can still be seen today. However, Russia did release information on the liberation of the camps. Their purpose, upon finding them, still remained the same. They did not add a secondary mission to save those suffering. Many of those soldiers had seen and endured horrible scenes almost as bad as what they saw when they marched into Auschwitz. 
4. Survivors of Auschwitz were given food and clothing. Many received and found help from various organizations that were created to help them relocate to Western European nations, the US, Palestine, or other countries around the world. They were given shelter in refugee camps. 
5. The primary goal of the death marches was to move those in the camps to camps away from the front line and to continue to use them as slave labor. They marched them as a way to weed out the weak. This would lessen the number that would need to be watched over and "cared for."