What kind of camps were in the holocaust

Between its establishment in and its liberation in , over 78, people were murdered at Majdanek. Extermination camps were used by the Nazis from to to murder Jews and, on a smaller scale, Roma. These were:. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning. Once dead, the vans were driven to a nearby forest and the victims were buried in mass graves. These camps were specifically built near railway lines to make transportation easier.

Instead of vans, stationary gas chambers, labelled as showers, were built to murder people with carbon monoxide poisoning created using diesel engines. A concentration camp had been established at Majdanek in In the spring of , following the Wannsee Conference, the camp was adapted to become an extermination camp by the addition of gas chambers and crematoria.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex, consisting of a concentration camp, a forced labour camp and an extermination camp. Eventually it had a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Following tests in September , the lethal gas Zyklon B was selected as the method of murder.

Auschwitz initially had one gas chamber at the Auschwitz I camp, but this was soon expanded. By , four new crematoria, with gas chambers attached, had been built in Auschwitz II. Approximately 1. Not everyone who arrived at the extermination camps was murdered on arrival.

Some were selected for various work tasks to help the camp operations run smoothly. Jobs included sorting and processing the possessions of everyone who arrived at the camp, administrative work and heavy manual work. The majority of those selected for any kind of work within this type of camp would die within weeks or months of their arrival from lack of food, disease or overwork. Those that survived were often killed after a short period and replaced with new arrivals.

Over the course of the Holocaust, more than three million people were killed at extermination camps. To escape antisemitism in Germany, the Wiener family had moved to Amsterdam in In , Ruth was incarcerated in Westerbork transit camp and later Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with her mother and two sisters.

At some camps inmates could still receive and send post. The Red Cross facilitated many of these letters between countries at war with each other. The perpetrators used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state, and for mass murder. In March , the first concentration camp, Dachau, opened outside of Munich, Germany.

It was used primarily for political prisoners and was the longest running camp in operation, until its liberation in April Nazi officials established more than 44, i ncarceration sites during the time of the Third Reich. Not all facilities established were concentration camps, though they are often referred to in this way. These sites varied in purpose and in the types of prisoners detained there. From its rise to power in , the Nazi regime built a series of incarceration sites to imprison and eliminate real and perceived "enemies of the state.

Many of these sites were called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. After Germany's annexation [Anschluss] of Austria in March , Austrian political prisoners came into the Nazi concentration camp system.

Following the violent Kristallnacht "Night of Broken Glass" pogroms in November , Nazi officials conducted mass arrests of adult male Jews throughout the country, the first time Jews were arrested en masse precisely because they were Jews. Over 30, German Jews were incarcerated in the Dachau , Buchenwald , and Sachsenhausen concentration camps in Germany, initially until each could provide proof of their ability to emigrate. Many people refer to all of the Nazi incarceration sites during the Holocaust as concentration camps.

The term concentration camp is used very loosely to describe places of incarceration and murder under the Nazi regime, however, not all sites established by the Nazis were concentration camps. Nazi-established sites include:. Camp System: Maps. Other types of incarceration sites numbered in the tens of thousands. 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:. The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the s was to incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime. The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau , established in March , near Munich. There were various categories of concentration camp subcamps.

Along with the smaller SS detachments at manufacturers and for unskilled work, there were detachments such as Bombensuchkommandos for searching bombs and Reparaturkommandos for repairs , subcamps in the arms production Siemens, Daimler, BMW, etc. Most prisoners were housed in subcamps; the main camps now only served to register, provide the administration for, and quarantine the prisoners, and as camps for the dying; it was here that the firms selected their prisoners and the wardens were trained.

The penal camps that were not established by the SS, but by the regional Gestapo offices, hired out their prisoners, who were usually only interned for a few weeks, to private firms for slave labor. Altogether there were around work education camps. As intermediate stop on the way to extermination, the ghettos served in the isolation and exploitation of deported Jews. The prisoner-of-war camps were operated by the Wehrmacht offices. Except for the collection camps and transit camps just behind the front, in every military district there were several Oflags officers camps and Stalags camps for non-commissioned officers as well as thousands of Arbeitskommandos sub-camps of prisoner-of-war camps for holding prisoners of war of lower ranks who were working in industries and on farms and in forestry.

Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces. These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief—we know that they were true—but they are, in some sense, beyond imagination. It is very hard, maybe impossible, to imagine being one of those men, still less one of those infants. And such sights raise the question of why, exactly, we read about the camps.

If it is merely to revel in the grotesque, then learning about this evil is itself a species of evil, a further exploitation of the dead. If it is to exercise sympathy or pay a debt to memory, then it quickly becomes clear that the exercise is hopeless, the debt overwhelming: there is no way to feel as much, remember as much, imagine as much as the dead justly demand. What remains as a justification is the future: the determination never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to exist.

And for that purpose it is necessary not to think of the camps simply as a hellscape. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited.

When these forms of dehumanization were combined, and amplified to the maximum by ideology and war, the result was the Konzentrationlager , or K. The K. At its peak, in early , it housed more than seven hundred thousand inmates. It was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S. Long before the Nazis took power, concentration camps had featured in their imagination.

Wachsmann finds Hitler threatening to put Jews in camps as early as But there were no detailed plans for building such camps when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, in January, A few weeks later, on February 27th, he seized on the burning of the Reichstag—by Communists, he alleged—to launch a full-scale crackdown on his political opponents.

Euphemism, too, was to be a durable feature of the K. In the legal murk of the early Nazi regime, it was unclear who had the power to make such arrests, and so it was claimed by everyone: national, state, and local officials, police and civilians, Party leaders. The camp was guarded not by police but by members of the S. The name, along with the skull-and-crossbones insignia, was meant to reinforce the idea that the men who bore it were not mere prison guards but front-line soldiers in the Nazi war against enemies of the people.

Now, in the years before actual war came, the K. The metaphor of war encouraged the inhumanity of the S. Particularly hated was the roll call, or Appell , which forced inmates to wake before dawn and stand outside, in all weather, to be counted and recounted. The process could go on for hours, Wachsmann writes, during which the S. The camps were outside ordinary law, answerable not to judges and courts but to the S.

At the same time, they were governed by an extensive set of regulations, which covered everything from their layout including decorative flower beds to the whipping of prisoners, which in theory had to be approved on a case-by-case basis by Himmler personally.