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Nazi Concentration Camp

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Title: Nazi Concentration Camp  
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Nazi Concentration Camp

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps (in German Konzentrationslager, or KZ) throughout the territories it controlled. The term was borrowed from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War.


Only about 3,000 inmates remained in the camps when in 1934–35 Heinrich Himmler's SS took full control of the police and concentration camps throughout Germany. It was then that Hitler allowed Himmler to start using the camps' facilities and personnel to purge German society of so-called "racially undesirable elements" such as Jews, criminals, homosexuals, and Romani people.[2]

Between 1939 and 1942 during World War II, the number of camps exploded to more than 300,[3] as political prisoners and "undesirable elements" from across Europe were mass-incarcerated[4] generally without judicial process.


Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps, which were established by the Nazis for the industrial-scale mass murder of the predominantly Jewish ghetto and concentration camp populations.

Pre-war camps


When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they quickly moved to ruthlessly suppress all real or potential opposition. The general public was intimidated through arbitrary psychological terror of the special courts (Sondergerichte).[5] Especially during the first years of their existence these courts "had a strong deterrent effect" against any form of political protest.[6]

The first camp in Germany, Dachau, was founded in March 1933.[7] 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."[7] 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, then Chief of Police of Munich, officially described the camp as "the first concentration camp for political prisoners."[7]


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,[9][10][11] 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.[12]


World War II

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.[13] 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 subcamps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany,[14] while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all of occupied Europe[15] and that many of these camps were created for a limited time before being demolished.[15] Camps were being created near the centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Roma. 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.[16][17] The British intelligence service had information about the concentration camps, and in 1942 Jan Karski delivered a thorough eyewitness account to the government.


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. Large numbers of Roma (or Gypsies), ethnic Poles, 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 Allied aviators were sent to concentration camps as spies.[18] 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 antisemitic policies.[19]





In the spring of 1941, the SS – along with doctors and officials of the T-4 Euthanasia Program – introduced the Action 14f13 programme meant for extermination of selected concentration camp prisoners.[21] 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 gas 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.[22]:p.144 For Jewish prisoners there was not even the pretense of a medical examination: the arrest record was listed as a physician’s “diagnosis”.[22]:pp.147–148 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.[22]:p.150


After much consideration, the extermination of the Jewish prisoners (the “Final Solution”) was announced to high-ranking officials at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.




In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors.[27] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,[28] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[29] The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.[30]

Types of camps

According to Moshe Lifshitz,[31] the Nazi camps divided as follows:

  • Hostage camps: camps where hostages were held and killed as reprisals.
  • Extermination camps: These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and many camps could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, four were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed – the "Aktion Reinhard" camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), together with Chelmno. Two others (Auschwitz and Majdanek) were combined concentration and extermination camps. Others like Maly Trostenets were at times classified as "minor extermination camps".[32]

Post-war use

Though most Nazi concentration and extermination camps were destroyed after the war, some were made into permanent memorials. 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 Nazis and 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 camps in Potulice; they have helped to enable a German-Polish discussion on historical perception of World War II. In East Germany (Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen), concentration and extermination camps were used for similar purposes. Dachau concentration camp was used as a prison for arrested Nazis.

See also






External links

  • Yad Vashem website
  • Pages show pictures and videos of the day taken at places connected with World War II (Second World War)
  • Yad VaShem—The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  • The Holocaust History Project
  • Official U.S. National Archive Footage of Nazi camps
  • Jewish Virtual Library
  • PBS Frontline
  • Podcast with one of 2,000 Danish policemen in Buchenwald
  • Nazi Concentration Camp Page with links to original documents


