Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called "enemies of the state." Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehova's Witness, homosexuals, and persons accused of "asocial" or socially deviant behavior. These facilities were called “concentration camps” because those imprisoned there were physically “concentrated” in one location. After Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis arrested German and Austrian Jews and imprisoned them in the Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, all located in Germany. After the violent Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis conducted mass arrests of adult male Jews and incarcerated them in camps for brief periods.
Types of camps
- Hostage camps: camps where hostages were held and killed as reprisals.
- Labor camps: concentration camps where interned inmates had to do hard physical labor under inhumane conditions and cruel treatment. Some of these camps were sub-camps of bigger camps, or "operational camps", established for a temporary need.
- POW camps: concentration camps where prisoners of war were held after capture. POWs were usually soon assigned to labor camps.
- Camps for rehabilitation and re-education of Poles: camps where the intelligentsia of the ethnic Poles were held, and "re-educated" according to Nazi values as slaves.
- Transit and collection camps: camps where inmates were collected and routed to main camps, or temporarily held (Durchgangslager or Dulag).
- Extermination camps: These camps differed from the rest, since not all of them were also concentration camps. Although none of the categories is independent, and many camps could be classified as a mixture of several of the above, and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps. Of these, four were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed – the "Aktion Reinhard" camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), together with Chelmno. Two others (Auschwitz and Majdanek) were combined concentration and extermination camps. Others like Maly Trostenets were at times classified as "minor extermination camps".
Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as Buna–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps. This was one of the most famous and biggest concentration camps.
Gas chambers were used in the Third Reich as part of the "public euthanasia program" aimed at eliminating physically and mentally retarded people and political undesirables in the 1930s and 1940s. In June 1942 many hundreds of prisoners of Neuengamme concentration camp, amongst which 45 Dutch communists, were gassed in Bernburg. At that time, the preferred gas was carbon monoxide, often provided by the exhaust gas of gasoline-powered cars, trucks or army tanks. Some Nazi extermination camps including Auschwitz used hydrogen cyanide in the form of Zyklon B. Gas chambers in vans, concentration camps, and extermination camps were used to kill several million people between 1941 and 1945. Some stationary gas chambers could kill 2,000 people at once. The use of gas chambers during the Holocaust was attested to by several sources including the Vrba-Wetzler report and testimony from Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and other German soldiers.