Camps

The Nazis used camps as a form of persecution, torture and control throughout their time in power. (1)

Generally speaking, a concentration camp is a place where people are concentrated and imprisoned without trial. The term 'concentration camp' is often broadly used for all camps and so it is important to note there were different types of camps, with different functions and can be roughly divided into four types: forced labour camps, extermination or death camps, transit camps, and prisoner-of-war camps. The administration of all camps had a distinct disregard for inmates’ lives and health, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people died in 'general' camps, outside of the specific extermination camps.

Concentration camps are often inaccurately compared to a prison in modern society. But concentration camps, unlike prisons, were independent of any judicial review. Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:

To incarcerate people whom the Nazi regime perceived to be a security threat. These people were incarcerated for indefinite amounts of time.
To eliminate individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals by murder, away from the public and judicial review.
To exploit forced labour of the prisoner population. This purpose grew out of a labour shortage. (2)

Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis established more than 40,000 camps for the imprisonment, forced labor, or mass killing of Jews, Gypsy Sinti and Roma, Communists, and other so-called “enemies of the state." (3)

When we think of Nazi evil, we think of Auschwitz: the deadliest Nazi camp and the deadliest Holocaust site. But there was more to the history of the camps and the Holocaust than Auschwitz. (4)

In March 1933, several weeks after Hitler assumed power, the first organized attacks on German opponents of the regime and on Jews broke out across Germany. (5) The first concentration camps were set up as detention centres for "enemies of the state". Initially, these people were primarily political prisoners such as communists, but this soon expanded to also include Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Gypsies, and so-called ‘ a-socials ’. The mass detention of Jews on the basis of the Nazis’ racial ideology intensified following Kristallnacht and continued until the end of the Second World War. (6)

During the Second World War, the camp system spread far beyond the German pre-war borders, especially into occupied Poland. Prisoner numbers grew faster than ever in the second half of the war. This was a result of the brutal police repression of resistance in occupied Europe, of the hunger for slave labour, and of mass deportations of Jews during the Holocaust. (7)

The SS (Schutzstaffel - elite guards of the Nazi party) operated over 25 concentration camps during the Nazi dictatorship (1933–45), and over 1,100 attached satellite camps. These camps did not all operate at the same time, however. The SS system changed all the time, and so did the prisoner population, the conditions and the buildings. There was no typical concentration camp. (3)

The Nazi camps - An overview

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established thousands of camps. There were several types of camps in the Nazi system: concentration camps, labour camps, extermination camps, transit camps, and prisoner of war camps.

Transit Camps

Following the start of the Second World War, the Nazis implemented antisemitic and racial policies that led to the establishment of a number of transit camps across the occupied countries. Prisoners were held in these camps prior to their deportation to other camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.

Unlike most of the concentration camps within Germany, not all of the transit camps were run by the SS. Camps could be run by local collaborators in the countries that they were based, such as Drancy, near Paris in France, which was run by the French Police until 1943. (6)

Forced Labour Camps

Nazi Germany created one of the largest forced labour systems in history: Over twenty million foreign civilian workers, concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war from all of the occupied countries were required to perform forced labour in Germany in the course of the Second World War. (8)

The use of forced labour first began to grow significantly in 1937, as rearmament caused labour shortages, and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further heightened demands on the war economy, and in turn, for labour.

Jews were enslaved and interned in a far-reaching network of forced-labour camps across Europe, in the Reich itself, in the west and, foremost, in the east. The SS Central Office for Administration and Economy defined the new goal: labour exploitation of concentration camp prisoners, who would be taken to hundreds of labour camps for service on behalf of the German war machine.

Economic needs and the prolonging of the war established the need to utilize Jews as a labour force. However, this was only a temporary setback in the extermination process – extermination by means of merciless forced labour. ‘Extermination by labour’ – as this “compromise” was called between those who called for immediate extermination and those who sought to exploit Jewish labour until their very end. (9)

"Death Camps"

Killing centres (also referred to as "death camps" or "extermination camps") were designed to carry out genocide. Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis established six killing centres in former Polish territory — Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau (part of the Auschwitz complex), and Majdanek.

Both Auschwitz and Majdanek functioned as concentration and forced-labour camps as well as killing centres. The overwhelming majority of the victims of the killing centres were Jews. An estimated 3.5 million Jews were killed in these six killing centres as part of the Final Solution. Other victims included Roma (Gypsies) and Soviet prisoners of war. (11)

Killing Centres: An overview

The Nazis established killing centres in German-occupied Europe during World War II. They built these killing centres exclusively or primarily for the mass murder of human beings. Nazi officials employed assembly-line methods of murder in these facilities.

Einsatzgruppen and extermination

There was nothing inevitable about the decision of the Nazis and their collaborators to attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews. Persecution and violence towards Jewish people living within the Reich became sinister and overt. The events that followed eventually led to the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

A special report from BBC News, 23 January 2020

Learn about the Death Marches

In January 1945, the Third Reich stood on the verge of military defeat. As Allied forces approached Nazi camps, the SS organised death marches of concentration camp inmates, in part to keep large numbers of concentration camp prisoners from falling into Allied hands.