Nazi concentration camps
On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany after striking a backroom deal with the previous chancellor, Franz von Papen. The Nazis had no plan for concentration camps prior to their seizure of power. 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. The first camp was Nohra, established on the 3rd of March 1933 in a school. 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. 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. 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. There was no national system; camps were operated by local police, SS, and SA, state interior ministries, or a combination of the above. The early camps in 1933, 1934 were heterogeneous and fundamentally differed from the post-1935 camps in organization, conditions, and the groups imprisoned. Many prisoners were released in late 1933, and after a Christmas amnesty, there were only a few dozen camps left.
On the 26th of 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 that ranged from 25 strikes with a cane to execution. He created a system of prisoner functionaries, which later developed into the camp elders, block elders, and kapos of later camps. 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). Following the purge of the SA on the 30th of June 1934, in which Eicke took a leading role, the remaining SA-run camps were taken over by the SS. 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. 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. 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 the 17th of June 1936. 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. 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 the 1st of November 1936 to 7,750 by the end of 1937.
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. During the war, the camps became increasingly brutal and lethal; most victims died in the second half of the war. 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. The first satellite camps were also established, administratively subordinated to one of the main camps. The number of prisoners tripled from 21,000 in August 1939 to about 70,000 to 80,000 in early 1942. 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. 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 potentially as many as 20,000 people had been killed , the first act of systematic killing in the camp system. 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. In 1942, the emphasis of the camps shifted to the war effort; by 1943, two-thirds of prisoners were employed by war industries, particularly armaments factories. 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. Although the death rate was reduced in relative terms after 1942 to preserve labor, deaths continued to increase in absolute numbers as the prisoner population swelled. 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. 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. Along with the new main camps, many satellite camps were set up to more effectively leverage prisoner labor for the war effort.
Before World War II, most prisoners in the concentration camps were Germans. After the expansion of Nazi Germany, people from countries occupied by the Wehrmacht were targeted and detained in concentration camps. In Western Europe, arrests focused on resistance fighters and saboteurs, but in Eastern Europe arrests included mass roundups aimed at the forced recruitment of workers. Already in the first half of the war, Eastern Europeans predominated in the population of some camps. By the end of the war, only 5 to 10 per cent of the camp population was Reich Germans from Germany or Austria. More than 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war and smaller groups from other nationalities were transferred to the concentration camps in violation of the Geneva Convention. Most Jews who were persecuted and killed during the Holocaust were never prisoners in concentration camps. Significant numbers of Jews were imprisoned beginning after the pogrom in November 1938, after which they were always overrepresented as prisoners. During the height of the Holocaust from 1941 to 1943, the Jewish population of the concentration camps was low. The majority of Jews who were killed by poison gas were murdered in dedicated camps outside the concentration camp system, while the existing IKL camps Auschwitz and Majdanek gained additional function as extermination camps. After mid-1943, some forced-labor camps for Jews and some Nazi ghettos were converted into concentration camps. Other Jews entered the concentration camp system after being deported to Auschwitz. As many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the camp system.
Prior the war, food was generally adequate and although prisoners feared SS brutality, deaths were not common. Conditions worsened after the outbreak of war due to reduction in food, worsening housing, and increase in work. Deaths from disease and malnutrition increased, outpacing other causes of death. However, the food provided was usually sufficient to sustain life. Life in the camps has often been depicted as a Darwinian struggle for survival, although some mutual aid existed. Individual efforts to survive, sometimes at others' expense, could hamper the aggregate survival rate. The influx of non-German prisoners from 1939 meant that prisoners were treated more or less badly based on their nationality than the reason for their imprisonment, which had been the deciding factor before the war. Jews, Slavic prisoners, and Spanish Republicans who had sought refuge in France and were arrested after the fall of France were targeted for especially harsh treatment which led to a high mortality rate during the first half of the war. In contrast, Reich Germans enjoyed favorable treatment compared to other nationalities. A minority of prisoners obtained substantially better treatment than the rest because they were prisoner functionaries mostly Germans or skilled laborers. Prisoner functionaries served at the whim of the SS and could be dismissed for insufficient strictness. As a result, sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky emphasizes that They took over the role of the SS in order to prevent SS encroachment and other prisoners remembered them for their brutality.
Major evacuations of the camps occurred in mid-1944 from the Baltics and eastern Poland, January 1945 from western Poland and Silesia, and in March 1945 from concentration camps in Germany. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners died in large numbers as a consequence of these death marches. Although held during the disintegration of the Nazi regime in the final weeks of the war, the marches required central coordination and elaborate logistics, and were deliberately ordered by Himmler in order to keep the prisoners under Nazi control to use as a bargaining chip. Local German politicians had an incentive to keep the deportees moving and make them someone else's problem, due to the lack of supplies at the time, which affected the German civilian population. When the columns were halted, local guards and politicians saw prisoners as a liability and a threat and they were often executed. The decision whether to massacre the prisoners or leave them to fall alive into enemy hands was made without orders from above. The executions were carried out by SS guards, but also many groups that had previously been uninvolved in Nazi murders, such as Volkssturm, police, local Nazi officials, Hitler Youth members, and German civilians. Individual perpetrators were often eager to be rid of their charges, who slowed their efforts to flee westwards and evade capture by the Red Army, and who were evidence of earlier crimes in which many were complicit. The liberation of the camps as documented by the Western Allies went viral in world newspapers. The conditions encountered at liberation have played a prominent part in perception of the camp system as a whole. Retroactively, the news justified the Allied war effort as the good war. Both Western and Soviet liberators conducted occasional reprisal shootings against SS guards found at the camps. Many prisoners died after liberation due to their poor physical condition.
Since their liberation, the Nazi concentration camp system has come to symbolize violence and terror in the modern world. After the war, most Germans rejected the crimes associated with the concentration camps, while denying any knowledge or responsibility. Under the West German policy of Wiedergutmachung, some survivors of concentration camps received compensation for their imprisonment. A few perpetrators were put on trial after the war. Accounts of the concentration camps , both condemnatory and sympathetic , were publicized outside of Germany before World War II. Many survivors testified about their experiences or wrote memoirs after the war. Some of these accounts have become internationally famous, such as Primo Levi's 1947 book, If This is a Man. The concentration camps have been the subject of historical writings since Eugen Kogon's 1946 study, The SS State. Substantial research did not begin until the 1980s. Scholarship has focused on the fate of groups of prisoners, the organization of the camp system, and aspects such as forced labor. As late as the 1990s, German local and economic history omitted mention of the camps or presented them as exclusively the responsibility of the SS. Two scholarly encyclopedias of the concentration camps have been published: The Place of Terror and Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933, 1945. According to Caplan and Wachsmann, more books have been published on the Nazi camps than any other site of detention and terror in history. Stone argues that the Nazi concentration camp system inspired similar atrocities by other regimes, including the Argentine military junta during the Dirty War, the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Brazilian military dictatorship and Pitești Prison in the Romanian People's Republic.
Up Next
Common questions
When did Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany and how did this lead to the creation of Nazi concentration camps?
Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933 after striking a backroom deal with Franz von Papen. The Nazis had no plan for concentration camps prior to their seizure of power, but the system arose in the following months due to the desire to suppress tens of thousands of Nazi opponents.
Who was appointed as the first inspector of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and when did this occur?
Theodor Eicke was appointed the first inspector of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate in December 1934. Only camps managed by the IKL were designated concentration camps under his leadership which began standardizing the system.
Which Nazi concentration camp became the deadliest center of the camp system during World War II?
Auschwitz became the deadliest concentration camp and the center of the camp system during the second half of the war. It swelled in size fueled by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews and held 74,000 of the 224,000 registered prisoners in all SS concentration camps by August 1943.
What percentage of the camp population consisted of Reich Germans from Germany or Austria by the end of the war?
By the end of the war only 5 to 10 per cent of the camp population was Reich Germans from Germany or Austria. Most prisoners were people from countries occupied by the Wehrmacht including Eastern Europeans who predominated in some camps during the first half of the war.
When did major evacuations of the Nazi concentration camps take place and what caused prisoner deaths during these events?
Major evacuations occurred in mid-1944 from the Baltics and eastern Poland January 1945 from western Poland and Silesia and March 1945 from concentration camps in Germany. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners died in large numbers as a consequence of death marches deliberately ordered by Himmler to keep prisoners under Nazi control.