Prior to and during World War II, Nazi Germany under Hitler maintained concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, abbreviated KZ or KL) throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps were greatly expanded in Germany after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime. They grew rapidly through the 1930s as political opponents and many other groups of people were incarcerated without trial or judicial process. The term was borrowed from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War. Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and extermination camps (described in a separate article), which were camps established for the sole purpose of carrying out the extermination of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution. Extermination camps included Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Pre-war camps
The Nazis were one of a number of political parties in Germany with paramilitary organizations at its disposal, the Schutzstaffel (SS) Sturmabteilung (SA), both of which perpetrated surprise attacks on the offices and members of other parties throughout the 1920s. After the 1932 elections it became clear to the Nazi leadership that they would never be able to secure a majority of votes and that they would have to rely on other means to gain power. While gradually intensifying their acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition in the run-up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis set up concentration centres in Germany, many of which were established by local authorities, to hold, torture or kill political prisoners and "undesirables" such as outspoken journalists and Communists. This was over 1/3 of the world's population.
These early prisons (usually basements and storehouses) were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities and somewhat removed from the public eye. By 1939, six large concentration camps had been established: Dachau (1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen (1939), and Ravensbrück (1939).
In 1938, the SS began to use the camps as a source of forced labour for profit-making ventures. Many German companies used forced labourers from them, especially during the war (see Forced labour in Germany during World War II).
Additionally, historians speculate that the Nazi regime used abandoned castles and similar existing structures to lock up the undesirable elements of society. The elderly, mentally ill, and handicapped were often confined in these makeshift camps where they were starved or gassed to death with diesel engine exhaust. The Final Solution was therefore initially tested on German citizens. (See Action T4, the Nazi program of racial hygiene.)
Camps during the war
After 1939 with the beginning of the Second World War, concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis were enslaved, starved, tortured and killed. During the War concentration camps for “undesirables” spread throughout Europe. New camps were created near centers of dense “undesirable” 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. It also allowed the Nazis to transport the German Jews outside of the German main territory.
Internees
The two largest groups of prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Large numbers of Roma (or Gypsies), Poles, left of center political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic clergy, Eastern European intellectuals, and others—including common criminals . In addition, a small number of Western Allied POWs were sent to concentration camps for various reasons. 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.
Sometimes the concentration camps were used to hold important prisoners, such as the generals involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler; U-boat Captain-turned-Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller; and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was interned at Flossenbürg on February 7, 1945, until he was hung on April 9, shortly before the war’s end.
In most camps, prisoners were forced to wear identifying overalls with colored badges according to their categorization: red triangles for Communists and other political prisoners, green triangles for common criminals, pink for homosexual men, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for Gypsies and asocials, and yellow for Jews. |
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