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Nazi concentration campsFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager [kntsntatsii onsla],

KZ or KL) throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps were erected
in Germany in March 1933 immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party was given
control over the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior
Minister Hermann Gring.[2] Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, the camps
initially held around 45,000 prisoners.[3]
Heinrich Himmler's SS took full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany in
193435.[4] Himmler expanded the role of the camps to holding so-called "racially undesirable elements"
of German society, such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani.[5] The number of people in camps,
which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II[6] and peaked at 715,000 in
January 1945.[7]
The concentration camps were administered since 1934 by Concentration Camps Inspectorate which in
1940 was merged into SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and were guarded by SSTotenkopfverbnde (SS-TV).
Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and
extermination, which were established by Nazi Germany for the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews and
concentration camp populations.

1Pre-war camps

2World War II
o

2.1Internees

2.2Treatment

3Total casualties

4Liberation

5Types of camps

6Post-war use

7See also

8References

9Bibliography

10Further reading

11External links
Pre-war camps
Use of the word "concentration" came from the idea of using documents confining to one place a group of
people who are in some way undesirable. The term itself originated in the "reconcentration camps" set up

in Cuba by General Valeriano Weylerin 1897. Concentration camps had in the past been used by the U.S.
against Native Americans and by the British in theSecond Boer War. Between 1904 and 1908,
the Schutztruppe of the Imperial German Army operated concentration camps in German South-West
Africa (now Namibia) as part of their genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples. The Shark Island
Concentration Camp in Lderitz was the biggest and the one with the harshest conditions.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to suppress all real or potential
opposition. The general public was intimidated through arbitrary psychological terror of the special courts
(Sondergerichte).[8] Especially during the first years of their existence these courts "had a strong deterrent
effect" against any form of political protest. [9]
The first camp in Germany, Dachau, was founded in March 1933.[10] The press announcement said that
"the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000 persons. All
Communists and where necessary Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger
state security are to be concentrated there, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual
functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons." [10] Dachau was the first
regular concentration camp established by the German coalition government of National Socialist
Workers' Party (Nazi Party) and the Nationalist People's Party (dissolved on 6 July 1933). Heinrich
Himmler, thenChief of Police of Munich, officially described the camp as "the first concentration camp
for political prisoners.[10]

Dachau served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi concentration camps. Almost every
community in Germany had members taken there. The newspapers continuously reported of "the removal
of the enemies of the Reich to concentration camps" making the general population more aware of their

presence. There were jingles warning as early as 1935: "Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not come
to Dachau."[11]
Between 1933 and the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, more than 3.5 million Germans were forced to
spend time in concentration camps and prisons for political reasons, [12][13][14] and approximately 77,000
Germans were executed for one or another form of resistance by Special Courts, courts-martial, and the
civil justice system. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions,
which enabled them to engage in subversion and conspiracy against the Nazis.[8]
As a result of the Holocaust, the term "concentration camp" carries many of the connotations of
"extermination camp" and is sometimes used synonymously. Because of these ominous connotations, the
term "concentration camp", originally itself a euphemism has been replaced by newer terms such as
internment camp, resettlement camp, detention facility, etc., regardless of the actual circumstances of the
camp, which can vary a great deal.

After September 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, concentration camps became places
where millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the war effort, often starved, tortured and
killed.[15] During the war, new Nazi concentration camps for "undesirables" spread throughout the
continent. According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and sub
camps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany,[16] while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates
that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all of occupied Europe [17] and that many of these
camps were created for a limited time before being demolished.[17] Camps were being created near the
centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews,
Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Romani. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps
were located in the area of General Government in occupied Poland, for logistical reasons. The location
also allowed the Nazis to quickly remove the German Jews from within Germany proper. In 1942,
the SS built a network of extermination camps to systematically kill millions of prisoners by gassing. The
extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) and death camps (Todeslager) were camps whose primary
function was genocide. The Nazis themselves distinguished between concentration camps and the
extermination camps.[18][19] The British intelligence service had information about the concentration
camps, and in 1942 Jan Karski delivered a thorough eyewitness account to the government.
Internees
The two largest groups containing prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were the Polish
Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held without trial or judicial process. There were also large
numbers of Romani people, ethnic Poles, Serbs, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with
disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic clergy, Eastern European intellectuals and others (including
common criminals, as declared by the Nazis). In addition, a small number of Western aviators were sent
to concentration camps as spies.[20] Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or whom the Nazis believed to

be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number were sent to
concentration camps under anti-Semitic policies.[21]

American soldiers view a pile of corpses found in the newly liberatedBuchenwald concentration camp in
April 1945
Sometimes the concentration camps were used to hold important prisoners, such as the generals involved
in the attempted assassination of Hitler; U-boat Captain-turned-Lutheran pastor Martin Niemller;
and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was interned at Flossenbrg on February 7, 1945, until he was hanged
on April 9, shortly before the wars end.
In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying overalls with colored badges according to their
categorization: red triangles for Communists and other political prisoners, green triangles for common
criminals, pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for asocials and the "work
shy", yellow for Jews, and later brown for Romani. [22]
Treatment
Many of the prisoners died in the concentration camps through deliberate maltreatment, disease,
starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. Prisoners were transported in inhumane
conditions by rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. The prisoners were
confined to the boxcars for days or even weeks, with little or no food or water. Many died
of dehydration in the intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter. Concentration camps also existed
in Germany itself, and while they were not specifically designed for systematic extermination, many of
their inmates perished because of harsh conditions or were executed.
A mass grave inside Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
In the spring of 1941, the SS along with doctors and officials of the T-4 Euthanasia Program
introduced the Action 14f13programme meant for extermination of selected concentration camp
prisoners.[23] The Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps categorized all files dealing with the death of
prisoners as 14f, and those of prisoners sent to the T-4 chambers as 14f13. Under the language regulations
of the SS, selected prisoners were designated for "special treatment (German: Sonderbehandlung) 14f13".
Prisoners were officially selected based on their medical condition; namely, those permanently unfit for
labor due to illness. Unofficially, racial and eugenic criteria were used: Jews, the handicapped, and those
with criminal or antisocial records were selected.[24]:p.144 For Jewish prisoners there was not even the
pretense of a medical examination: the arrest record was listed as a physicians diagnosis. [24]:pp.147148 In
early 1943, as the need for labor increased and the gas chambers at Auschwitz became operational,
Heinrich Himmler ordered the end of Action 14f13.[24]:p.150

After 1942, many small sub camps were set up near factories to provide forced labor. IG
Farben established a synthetic rubber plant in 1942 at Monowitz concentration camp (Auschwitz III);
other camps were set up next to airplane factories, coal mines and rocket propellant plants. Conditions
were brutal and prisoners were often sent to the gas chambers or killed if they did not work quickly
enough.
On 31 July 1941 Hermann Gring gave written authorization to SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard
Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for a "total
solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of
all involved government organisations.[25] The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called
for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave
labour or to be murdered.[26]

Commander-in-Chief of all Allied Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, witnesses the corpses found
at Ohrdruf concentration camp in May 1945.
Towards the end of the war, the camps became sites for medical experiments. Eugenics experiments,
freezing prisoners to determine how downed pilots were affected by exposure, and experimental and
lethal medicines were all tried at various camps. A cold water immersion experiments at Dachau
concentration camp were performed by Sigmund Rascher.[27]
Total casualties
The lead editors of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 19331945 of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps
throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself,
operating from 1933 to 1945. They estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned
in the sites.[28]
Some of the most notorious slave labour camps included a network of subcamps. Gross-Rosen had 100
subcamps,[29]Auschwitz had 44 subcamps,[30][30][31] Stutthof had 40 sub-camps set up contingently.
[32]
Prisoners in these subcamps were dying from starvation, untreated disease and summary executions by
the tens of thousands already since the beginning of war.[33]
Liberation

Starving
camp liberate

prisoners in Mauthausen concentration

d on May 5, 1945

Post-war use

A concentration camp victim identifies an SS guard in June 1945

Though most Nazi concentration and extermination camps were destroyed after the war, some were made
into permanentmemorials. In Communist Poland, some camps such
as Majdanek, Jaworzno, Potulice and Zgoda were used by the Soviet NKVD to hold German prisoners of
war, suspected or confirmed Nazis and Nazi collaborators, anti-Communists and other political prisoners,
as well as civilian members of the German, Silesian and Ukrainian ethnic minorities. Currently, there are
memorials to both Nazi and communist camps at Potulice; they have helped to enable a German-Polish
discussion on historical perceptions of World War II. [46] In East Germany, the concentration camps
at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausenwere used for similar purposes. Dachau concentration camp was used
as a detention centre for the arrested Nazis. [47]