From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other Nazi internment facilities, see Types of Nazi camps and Extermination camp.
For the 1945 documentary film, see Nazi Concentration Camps (film).
“Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany” redirects here. For the book, see Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany (book).
All of the main camps except Arbeitsdorf (Lower Saxony), Niederhagen (Westphalia), Herzogenbusch (NL), and those from “Reichskommissariat Ostland” (Kauen, Kaiserwald, and Vaivara). Germany is shown in its 1937 borders. Camps color-coded by date of establishment as a main camp: blue for 1933–1937, gray for 1938–1939, red for 1940–1941, green for 1942, yellow for 1943–1944.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager[a]), including subcamps[b] on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Following the 1934 purge of the SA, the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Initially, most prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany, but as time went on different groups were arrested, including “habitual criminals”, “asocials“, and Jews. After the beginning of World War II, people from German-occupied Europe were imprisoned in the concentration camps. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment.[c] Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. Following Allied military victories, the camps were gradually liberated in 1944 and 1945, although hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in the death marches.
Museums commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime have been established at many of the former camps and the Nazi concentration camp system has become a universal symbol of violence and terror.
Background
Concentration camps are conventionally held to have been invented by the British during the Second Boer War, but historian Dan Stone argues that there were precedents in other countries and that camps were “the logical extension of phenomena that had long characterized colonial rule”.[4] Although the word “concentration camp” has acquired the connotation of murder because of the Nazi concentration camps, the British camps in South Africa did not involve systematic murder. The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps.[5]
During the First World War, eight to nine million prisoners of war were held in prisoner-of-war camps, some of them at locations which were later the sites of Nazi camps, such as Theresienstadt and Mauthausen. Many prisoners held by Germany died as a result of intentional withholding of food and dangerous working conditions in violation of the 1907 Hague Convention.[6] In countries such as France, Belgium, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany, civilians deemed to be of “enemy origin” were denaturalized. Hundreds of thousands were interned and subject to forced labor in harsh conditions.[7] During the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Armenians were held in camps during their deportation into the Syrian Desert.[8] In postwar Germany, “unwanted foreigners” – mainly Eastern European Jews – were confined at Cottbus-Sielow and Stargard.[9]
History
Early camps (1933–1934)
Main article: Early camps
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany after striking a backroom deal with the previous chancellor, Franz von Papen.[10] The Nazis had no plan for concentration camps prior to their seizure of power.[11] The concentration camp system arose in the following months due to the desire to suppress tens of thousands of Nazi opponents in Germany. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was the pretext for mass arrests. The Reichstag Fire Decree eliminated the right to personal freedom enshrined in the Weimar Constitution and provided a legal basis for detention without trial.[10][12] The first camp was Nohra, established on 3 March 1933 in a school.[13]
The number of prisoners in 1933–1934 is difficult to determine; historian Jane Caplan estimated it at 50,000, with arrests perhaps exceeding 100,000.[13] Eighty per cent of prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany and ten per cent members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.[14] Many prisoners were released in late 1933, and after a Christmas amnesty, there were only a few dozen camps left.[15] About 70 camps were established in 1933, in any convenient structure that could hold prisoners, including vacant factories, prisons, country estates, schools, workhouses, and castles.[13][12] There was no national system;[15] camps were operated by local police, SS, and SA, state interior ministries, or a combination of the above.[13][12] The early camps in 1933–1934 were heterogeneous and fundamentally differed from the post-1935 camps in organization, conditions, and the groups imprisoned.[16]
Institutionalization (1934–1937)
On 26 June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke the second commandant of Dachau, which became the model followed by other camps. Eicke drafted the Disciplinary and Penal Code, a manual which specified draconian punishments for disobedient prisoners.[17] He also created a system of prisoner functionaries, which later developed into the camp elders, block elders, and kapo of later camps.[18] In May 1934, Lichtenburg was taken over by the SS from the Prussian bureaucracy, marking the beginning of a transition set in motion by Heinrich Himmler, then chief of the Gestapo (secret police).[19] Following the purge of the SA on 30 June 1934, in which Eicke took a leading role, the remaining SA-run camps were taken over by the SS.[14][20] In December 1934, Eicke was appointed the first inspector of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (IKL); only camps managed by the IKL were designated “concentration camps”.[14]
In early 1934, the number of prisoners was still falling and it was uncertain if the system would continue to exist. By mid-1935, there were only five camps, holding 4,000 prisoners, and 13 employees at the central IKL office. At the same time, 100,000 people were imprisoned in German jails, a quarter of those for political offenses.[21] Believing Nazi Germany to be imperiled by internal enemies, Himmler called for a war against the “organized elements of sub-humanity”, including communists, socialists, Jews, Freemasons, and criminals. Himmler won Hitler’s backing and was appointed Chief of German Police on 17 June 1936.[22] Of the six SS camps operational as of mid-1936, only two (Dachau and Lichtenburg) still existed by 1938. In the place of the camps that closed down, Eicke opened new camps at Sachsenhausen (September 1936) and Buchenwald (July 1937). Unlike earlier camps, the newly opened camps were purpose-built, isolated from the population and the rule of law, enabling the SS to exert absolute power.[23] Prisoners, who previously wore civilian clothes, were forced to wear uniforms with Nazi concentration camp badges. The number of prisoners began to rise again, from 4,761 on 1 November 1936 to 7,750 by the end of 1937.[24]
Rapid expansion (1937–1939)
By the end of June 1938, the prisoner population had expanded threefold in the previous six months, to 24,000 prisoners. The increase was fueled by arrests of those considered habitual criminals or asocials.[24] According to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the “criminal” prisoners at concentration camps needed to be isolated from society because they had committed offenses of a sexual or violent nature. In fact, most of the criminal prisoners were working-class men who had resorted to petty theft to support their families.[25] Nazi raids of perceived asocials, including the arrest of 10,000 people in June 1938,[26] targeted homeless people and the mentally ill, as well as the unemployed.[27] Although the Nazis had previously targeted social outsiders, the influx of new prisoners meant that political prisoners became a minority.[26]
To house the new prisoners, three new camps were established: Flossenbürg (May 1938) near the Czechoslovak border, Mauthausen (August 1938) in territory annexed from Austria, and Ravensbrück (May 1939) the first purpose-built camp for female prisoners.[24] The mass arrests were partly motivated by economic factors. Recovery from the Great Depression lowered the unemployment rate, so “work-shy” elements would be arrested to keep others working harder. At the same time, Himmler was also focusing on exploiting prisoners’ labor within the camp system. Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, had grand plans for creating monumental Nazi architecture. The SS company German Earth and Stone Works (DEST) was set up with funds from Speer’s agency for exploiting prisoner labour to extract building materials. Flossenbürg and Mauthausen had been built adjacent to quarries, and DEST also set up brickworks at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.[28][29]
Political prisoners were also arrested in larger numbers, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and German émigrés who returned home. Czech and Austrian anti-Nazis were arrested after the annexation of their countries in 1938 and 1939.[30] Jews were also increasingly targeted, with 2,000 Viennese Jews arrested after the Nazi annexation. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, 26,000 Jewish men were deported to concentration camps following mass arrests, overwhelming the capacity of the system. These prisoners were subject to unprecedented abuse leading to hundreds of deaths – more people died at Dachau in the four months after Kristallnacht than in the previous five years. Most of the Jewish prisoners were soon released, often after promising to emigrate.[30][31]
World War II
At the end of August 1939, prisoners of Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps were murdered as part of false flag attacks staged by Germany to justify the invasion of Poland.[32] During the war, the camps became increasingly brutal and lethal due to the plans of the Nazi leadership: most victims died in the second half of the war.[33] Five new camps were opened between the start of the war and the end of 1941: Neuengamme (early 1940), outside of Hamburg; Auschwitz (June 1940), which initially operated as a concentration camp for Polish resistance activists; Gross-Rosen (May 1941) in Silesia; and Natzweiler (May 1941) in territory annexed from France.[34][35] The first satellite camps were also established, administratively subordinated to one of the main camps.[34] The number of prisoners tripled from 21,000 in August 1939 to about 70,000 to 80,000 in early 1942.[35] This expansion was driven by the demand for forced labor and later the invasion of the Soviet Union; new camps were sent up near quarries (Natzweiler and Gross-Rosen) or brickworks (Neuengamme).[34][36]
In April 1941, the high command of the SS ordered the murder of ill and exhausted prisoners who could no longer work (especially those deemed racially inferior). Victims were selected by camp personnel or traveling doctors, and were removed from the camps to be murdered in euthanasia centers. By April 1942, when the operation finished, at least 6,000 and as many as 20,000 people had been killed[37][38] – the first act of systematic killing in the camp system.[39] Beginning in August 1941, selected Soviet prisoners of war were killed within the concentration camps, usually within a few days of their arrival. By mid-1942, when the operation finished, at least 34,000 Soviet prisoners had been murdered. At Auschwitz, the SS used Zyklon B to kill Soviet prisoners in improvised gas chambers.[40][37]
In 1942, the emphasis of the camps shifted to the war effort; by 1943, two-thirds of prisoners were employed by war industries.[41] The death rate skyrocketed with an estimated half of the 180,000 prisoners admitted between July and November 1942 dying by the end of that interval. Orders to reduce deaths in order to spare inmate productivity had little effect in practice.[42][43] During the second half of the war, Auschwitz swelled in size – fueled by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews – and became the center of the camp system. It was the deadliest concentration camp and Jews sent there faced a virtual death sentence even if they were not immediately killed, as most were. In August 1943, 74,000 of the 224,000 registered prisoners in all SS concentration camps were in Auschwitz.[44] In 1943 and early 1944, additional concentration camps – Riga in Latvia, Kovno in Lithuania, Vaivara in Estonia, and Kraków-Plaszów in Poland – were converted from ghettos or labor camps; these camps were populated almost entirely by Jewish prisoners.[45][46] Along with the new main camps, many satellite camps were set up to more effectively leverage prisoner labor for the war effort.[47]
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps
