On coming to power during 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of camps. These were initially concentration camps due to the fact that they were used to concentrate enemies and certain groups of people in one place.
Local SS and police forces set up these first camps. However, very soon the Nazi leadership began to develop a systematic and centrally controlled system of camps. Later, as the Nazi regime imposed their influence over countries they occupied, they developed a range of different types of camps. These were concentration camps, transit camps, forced-labour or work camps and extermination camps.
A concentration camp is a place where people are detained or confined without trial. Prisoners were kept in extremely harsh conditions and without any rights. In Nazi Germany after 1933, and across Nazi controlled Europe between 1938 and 1945, concentration camps became a major way in which the Nazis imposed their control. The first concentration camps in Germany were set up as detention centres to stop any opposition to the Nazis by so called ‘enemies of the state’. These people included communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, and so called ‘asocials’.
However, after March 1938, when the Germans annexed Austria into German territory, many thousands of German Jews were arrested and detained in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
After Kristallnacht (the ‘Night of broken glass’) in November 1938, the Nazis and their supporters arrested many thousands of male Jews above the age of 14 years. They imprisoned them in camps for days or sometimes weeks. They were kept in poor conditions, given little food or water and subjected to brutal treatment and torture. When the German army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the SS set up many concentration camps to house Polish political prisoners and many thousands of Polish Jews. Many of the inmates of these camps were subjected to increasingly poor conditions. In addition they were subjected to forced labour, the result of which was often death.
During the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Nazis began the first mass killings of Jews. Between June and September 1941, the Einsatzgruppen supported by local collaborators murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews across Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the Soviet Union. Having observed the killings, Adolf Eichmann ordered a more efficient method of killing the Jews of Europe be developed.
The Nazis established six extermination camps on Polish soil. These were Chelmno (December 1941-January 1945), Belzec (March-December 1942), Sobibor (May-July 1942 and October 1942-October 1943), Treblinka (July 1942-August 1943), Majdanek (September 1941-July 1944) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (March 1942-January 1945).
The first of these camps, Chelmno, was established to exterminate the Jews of the Lodz ghetto and the surrounding area, and 5,000 Roma. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered. Only two Jews survived the camp.
After the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the Germans established death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Their sole purpose was murder. They were set up near railway lines to make transportation of the victims easy. As they were purely killing centres, there were no selections. The victims were sent directly to the gas chambers.
A concentration camp to house Soviet prisoners of war and Poles had been established at Majdanek, close to the Polish city of Lublin, during 1941. In the spring of 1942 gas chambers and crematoria were added, turning Majdanek into an extermination camp that would murder 78,000 people. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps, was a massive concentration, forced labour and extermination camp at the centre of a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Upwards of 80 per cent of those Jews transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau were selected for immediate death.
Those who were selected for work were set on a whole range of tasks. These included sorting and processing the possessions of everyone who arrived at the camp and heavy manual work. Some Jewish prisoners were put into units called Sonderkommandos, whose role was to work in the gas chambers and crematorium. They were kept apart from the rest of the camp prisoners, but were also sent to their deaths in the gas chambers after a few weeks or months of work.
The majority of those selected for any kind of work would die within weeks or months of their arrival from lack of food, disease or overwork.
The Nazis set up a number of transit camps in occupied lands. After being rounded up, Jews were imprisoned in transit camps before being deported to a concentration camp, labour camp or one of the six Nazi extermination camps in Poland.
Examples of transit camps include Drancy in France, Mechelen in Belgium, and Vught and Westerbork in the Netherlands.
More on the camps can be read here.
More info on the Holocaust and the concentration camps can be found here.
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