The Nazi concentration camp evolved from a makeshift facility to imprison political opponents into a more permanent structure, fully under the control of the German state and the SS, whose Main Economic and Administrative Office SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, or WVHA , administered the system.
During World War II, the Nazi concentration camp system greatly expanded in order to provide prisoner labor for the German war effort. Over the course of time, the distinctions between the various types of Nazi camps blurred, creating confusion in the use of proper terminology. They were imprisoned and brutalized in makeshift camps set up in workhouses, abandoned factories, cellars, and even taverns. At this early stage, the Nazis themselves used a variety of terms, such as detention, work, or transit camps, to describe these facilities, but the most frequent designation was concentration camp.
These early facilities were rather haphazard in structure and policies. It quickly became the model for all subsequent concentration camps. Beginning in , control of the Nazi camp system fell more and more into the hands of Heinrich Himmler and the SS. Using his growing power as head of the political police in most of the German states, Himmler set about taking over, sometimes by force, the camps run by the SA, Order Police , and local Nazi officials. All concentration camps were officially designated by the initials KL Konzentrationslager; Concentration Camp , though SS guards, inmates, and the public often used the initials KZ.
Today, camp memorials tend to use the initials KZ. The killing centers , also called extermination camps, with the major exception of Auschwitz II Birkenau did not fall under the Nazi concentration camp system. Belzec , Sobibor , Treblinka , and Chelmno were never officially designated by the SS as concentration camps, though they were under the control of the SS. Generically defined, a concentration camp is a site for the detention of civilians whom a regime perceives to be a security risk of some sort.
What distinguishes it from a prison in the modern sense is that incarceration in a concentration camp is independent of any judicial sentence or even indictment, and is not subject to judicial review. The term concentration camp was used long before the Nazis came to power. It came into popular usage at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was applied to the housing of military troops and especially to the imprisonment of civilians during the Boer and Spanish-American Wars.
At the height of the deportations, an average of 6, Jews were gassed each day at the Auschwitz II Birkenau killing center. These gas chambers used the poisonous gas Zyklon B. By November , more than one million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles , and Soviet prisoners of war were killed there. Many scholars have traditionally counted the Majdanek camp, which was located just outside the city Lublin, as a sixth killing center.
However, recent research has shed more light on the functions and operations at Lublin-Majdanek. Within the framework of Operation Reinhard, Majdanek primarily served as a place to concentrate Jews who were spared temporarily for forced labor. It occasionally functioned as a killing site for victims who could not be killed at the Operation Reinhard camps.
The Majdanek camp also included a storage depot. There, the Nazis held property and valuables taken from the Jewish victims at the killing centers. The SS considered the killing centers top secret. Sonderkommandos or special prisoner units were deployed to obliterate all traces of gassing operations.
These prisoners were forced to remove corpses from the gas chambers and cremate them. The grounds of some killing centers were landscaped or camouflaged to disguise the murder of millions. Moreover, Special Action Sonderaktion began in May This effort deployed prisoners to exhume and burn bodies from mass graves where cremation was not practiced.
Arad, Yitzhak. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Berenbaum, Michael, and Yisrael Gutman, editors. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Delin, Grant. Lebensraum: Extermination Camps of the Third Reich. London: Westzone Publishing, Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Stuart Woolf. Mendelsohn, John, editor. The Red Cross facilitated many of these letters between countries at war with each other.
This telegram was sent from Dr. Wilhelm Gross, who was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp, to his daughter Dora Gross, who had escaped as a refugee to Britain. Transit camps were camps where prisoners were briefly detained prior to deportation to other Nazi camps. Following the start of the Second World War , the Nazis occupied a number of countries. Here, they implemented antisemitic and racial policies as they had done in Germany. These policies led to the establishment of a number of transit camps across the different occupied countries.
Prisoners were held in these camps prior to their deportation to other camps, such as Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz. Overall, the conditions in the transit camps were similar to that of concentration camps — unsanitary and awful.
Facilities were poor and overcrowding was common. 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 The Nazis started using forced labour shortly after their rise to power.
They established specific Arbeitslager labour camps which housed Ostarbeite r eastern workers , Fremdarbeiter foreign workers and other forced labourers who were forcibly rounded up and brought in from the east. These were separate from the SS-run concentration camps, where prisoners were also forced to perform labour. The use of forced labour first began to grow significantly in , as rearmament caused labour shortages.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the use of labour again increased sharply. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June further heightened demands on the war economy, and in turn, for labour. At the same time, this invasion brought thousands of potential new workers under Nazi control.
These prisoners were called Ostarbeiter eastern workers and Fremdarbeiter foreign workers. The Nazis deported these people to forced labour camps, where they worked to produce supplies for the increasingly strained war economy or in construction efforts. As in most Nazi camps, conditions in forced labour camps were inadequate. Inmates were only ever seen as temporary, and, in the Nazis view, could always be replaced with others: there was a complete disregard for the health of prisoners.
They were subject to insufficiencies of food, equipment, medicine and clothing, whilst working long hours. There was little or no time for rest or breaks. As a result of these conditions, death rates in labour camps were extremely high. By , more than fourteen million people had been exploited in the network of hundreds of forced labour camps that stretched across the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe.
This drawing by prisoner R. This camp was used to incarcerate British Navy personnel from until its liberation in May Typically, inmates in prisoner of war camps were allowed to send and receive letters from their families, although this process could take several weeks or months.
This is an unused prisoner of war airmail letter. The prisoner of war camps were subject to strict rules and regulations. The prisoners of war must observe strict military discipline in the camp and outside the camp. The camp leader and the guards are the superiors of all the POWs of the camp to whom they must behave according to military honours.
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