Nazi concentration camps

• 1. Introduction

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  Nazi concentration camps were not born from a master plan. On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a backroom deal with his predecessor Franz von Papen. Within weeks, a system that would eventually hold more than a thousand camps across Germany and occupied Europe had begun to take shape. The first of these was Nohra, opened on the 3rd of March 1933 in a converted school. By the time Allied forces liberated the last of them in 1945, an estimated 1.65 million people had been registered as prisoners. Nearly a million of those died.

  The camps were not a fixed institution but a shape-shifting machinery. They began as tools of political suppression, filled largely with communists and social democrats. They evolved into engines of forced labor. They became sites of systematic mass murder. And they were known, to varying degrees, by the German population that surrounded them. How that system was built, how it operated, and how ordinary people responded to it are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. From School to System

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  Nohra was makeshift by design. In the first months after Hitler took power, the Nazis had no blueprint for what a concentration camp should look like. About seventy camps sprang up across Germany in 1933, housed in whatever structures could hold prisoners: vacant factories, country estates, prisons, workhouses, and castles. Local police, the SS, the SA, and state interior ministries each ran their own camps with no coordination between them.

  The Reichstag fire in February 1933 gave the regime its legal cover. The Reichstag Fire Decree eliminated the constitutional right to personal freedom and allowed detention without trial. Historian Jane Caplan has estimated that roughly 50,000 people were held in 1933-1934, with arrests possibly exceeding 100,000. Eighty per cent of those early prisoners were Communist Party members, ten per cent Social Democrats.

  By late 1933, many prisoners had been released. After a Christmas amnesty, only a few dozen camps remained. In 1934, it was genuinely uncertain whether the system would survive at all. Five camps holding 4,000 prisoners, with just thirteen employees at the central inspectorate office, was all that was left by mid-1935. The machinery of terror looked more like a failing experiment than a permanent institution. What changed that was one man, appointed to run a single camp on the 26th of June 1933.

• 3. The Dachau Blueprint

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  Theodor Eicke arrived at Dachau as its second commandant and proceeded to build a system that every subsequent camp would copy. He drafted a document called the Disciplinary and Penal Code, a manual laying out punishments ranging from twenty-five strikes with a cane to execution. He invented the hierarchy of prisoner functionaries, the block elders and kapos who would manage prisoners on behalf of the SS.

  In December 1934, Eicke became the first inspector of what was formally called the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, known by its German initials IKL. From that point forward, only camps managed by the IKL carried the official designation of concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, who had been appointed Chief of German Police on the 17th of June 1936, backed a vision of the camps as weapons against what he called the organized elements of sub-humanity: communists, socialists, Jews, Freemasons, and criminals.

  The new camps Eicke built at Sachsenhausen in September 1936 and Buchenwald in July 1937 were a different species from the improvised structures of 1933. They were purpose-built, physically isolated from German civilian life, and designed so that the SS could exercise what the source describes as absolute power. Prisoners who had once worn civilian clothes were now forced to wear uniforms with Nazi concentration camp badges. Between November 1936 and the end of 1937, the prisoner population climbed from 4,761 to 7,750.

• 4. The Logic of Expansion

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  By the end of June 1938, the prisoner population had grown to 24,000, tripling in just six months. The surge was driven not only by political persecution but by economics and social policy. Himmler claimed that criminal prisoners needed to be isolated because of sexual or violent offenses. In practice, most of the people arrested under the criminal label were working-class men who had stolen to feed their families.

  A June 1938 sweep arrested 10,000 people classified as asocials: homeless people, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. Three new camps were built to absorb the overflow. Flossenbürg opened in May 1938 near the Czechoslovak border, Mauthausen in August 1938 on territory annexed from Austria, and Ravensbrück in May 1939 as the first purpose-built camp for female prisoners. Both Flossenbürg and Mauthausen were placed next to quarries because Hitler's architect Albert Speer had grand ambitions for monumental Nazi architecture. The SS company DEST was created with funding from Speer's agency specifically to extract building materials using prisoner labor.

  The November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom brought 26,000 Jewish men into the camps in a single wave, overwhelming the system. More people died at Dachau in the four months after Kristallnacht than in the previous five years combined. Most of the surviving Jewish prisoners were released after agreeing to emigrate. That release was not mercy but policy: the camps at this stage were instruments of expulsion, not yet of mass killing.

• 5. War and the Machinery of Death

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  At the end of August 1939, before a single shot of the Polish campaign had been fired, prisoners at Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, and other camps were murdered in staged false-flag attacks designed to justify the invasion. War transformed the camps in every dimension.

  Five new camps opened between the start of the war and the end of 1941. Auschwitz began in June 1940 as a camp for Polish resistance activists. The prisoner population tripled from 21,000 in August 1939 to between 70,000 and 80,000 in early 1942. In April 1941, SS high command ordered the systematic killing of prisoners too ill or exhausted to work. Victims were removed from the camps and murdered in euthanasia centers. By April 1942 when that operation ended, at least 6,000 and possibly as many as 20,000 people had been killed in what was the first organized program of systematic killing in the camp system.

  Beginning in August 1941, selected Soviet prisoners of war were killed within the camps, usually within days of arrival. At Auschwitz, the SS used Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners in improvised gas chambers. By mid-1942, at least 34,000 Soviet prisoners had been murdered by this operation. Auschwitz then swelled as the deportation of Jews accelerated. In August 1943, it held 74,000 of the 224,000 registered prisoners across all SS concentration camps. A million Jews were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, never registered as prisoners at all. Including those victims, the total death toll across the camp system is estimated at between 1.8 million and more than two million.

• 6. Forced Labor and Private Industry

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  From moorland farming to munitions assembly, hard labor defined daily existence in the camps. The nature of that labor shifted with Germany's wartime needs. In the early years, prisoners performed economically useless tasks or extracted stone and brick for SS construction projects. By 1942, the calculus had changed: two-thirds of prisoners were working for war industries by 1943.

  In September 1942, Himmler and Speer reached a formal agreement to deploy prisoners in armaments production and bomb-damage repair. Private companies could rent prisoners from the SS for a fixed daily rate of between 3 and 6 Reichsmark, roughly half the wage of a free worker. The prisoner got nothing. The resulting system of subcamps proliferated; by mid-1944, transfers from prisons and forced labor programs had caused the prisoner population to double twice over.

  Historian Marc Buggeln has calculated that no more than 1 per cent of Germany's total arms production actually came from concentration camp prisoners, even at the system's height. Prisoners made up 3 per cent of all workers in Germany at the camps' peak in 1945. The subcamps where prisoners did construction work carried significantly higher death rates than those assigned to munitions factories. As the war neared its end, main camps functioned increasingly as transit points, funneling prisoners into the satellite network of forced labor.

• 7. What Germans Knew

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  From March 1933, detailed press reports on camp conditions circulated inside Germany. Nazi propaganda simultaneously demonized prisoners as race traitors, sexual degenerates, and criminals, and framed the camps as facilities for re-education. Historian Karola Fings describes this as a dual strategy of publicity and secrecy: the regime used terror both to punish its direct targets and to deter the wider population.

  As the war progressed and subcamps multiplied, ordinary German life became entangled with the camp system. Subcamps were placed in schools, restaurants, barracks, and factory buildings in town centers. Entrepreneurs provided land and services. Foremen oversaw prisoner labor. Doctors certified which prisoners were fit to keep working. SS construction brigades were hired by municipalities to clear bombing debris. Historian Robert Gellately argues that Germans were generally supportive of locking away people they saw as outsiders or criminals. Fings writes that the demand for SS construction brigades points to general acceptance of the concentration camps.

  Some Germans were shocked when they saw prisoners up close, but most did not help, fearing imprisonment themselves. Others found the prisoners' degraded condition consistent with what propaganda had told them to expect. In Cologne, construction brigade prisoners were shot in broad daylight. A minority of Germans helped prisoners; the source notes that those who did rarely faced punishment for it.

• 8. Death Marches and Legacy

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  Himmler ordered the evacuation of camps deliberately, intending to keep prisoners alive as bargaining chips in the final collapse of the Nazi regime. Major evacuations moved from the Baltic states and eastern Poland in mid-1944, from western Poland and Silesia in January 1945, and from camps inside Germany in March 1945. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners died in enormous numbers on these marches.

  The decision about whether to massacre prisoners or leave them alive for Allied forces was not made centrally. Local guards, Volkssturm militia, police, Nazi officials, Hitler Youth members, and ordinary German civilians all participated in killings. Perpetrators were often motivated by a desire to flee westward and avoid capture by the Red Army, and by a need to eliminate witnesses to crimes in which many had participated.

  When Western Allied forces liberated the camps, photographs and footage spread through newspapers worldwide. Primo Levi's 1947 book If This is a Man became one of the most internationally recognized survivor accounts. The first major historical study of the system, Eugen Kogon's The SS State, appeared in 1946. Substantial scholarly research did not begin in earnest until the 1980s, and as late as the 1990s, German local history still omitted or minimized the camps' presence in German communities. Two encyclopedic reference works have since been published: Der Ort des Terrors and the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. Historian Dan Stone has argued that the Nazi camp system served as a model for atrocities carried out by other regimes, including military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.