Concentration camps why

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. In many of the concentration camps, the Nazi SS either installed or had plans to install gas chambers to assist in their daily business of killing prisoners who were too weak or sick to work.

Gas chambers were also to kill small targeted groups of individuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, etc. All concentration camps were structured in the same way. Each had an internal camp staff that consisted of five sections:. Following the German invasion of Poland in September , the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure.

SS units guarded the camps. In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners. Some new camps were built at existing concentration camp complexes such as Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek , was established in the autumn of as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in Thousands of Soviet POWs were shot or gassed there. Dachau was originally intended as a camp for political prisoners such as communists, trade unionists and other political opponents of the Nazis. Built by prisoner labour, the camp became the model for all Nazi concentration camps. Dachau did not initially house many Jewish prisoners, however after Kristallnacht an increasing number of Jews were imprisoned, with 10, men held captive there.

Though concentration camps were not specifically set up to kill their inmates, the harsh conditions and cruel treatment resulted in large numbers of prisoners dying, with many being arbitrarily murdered by camp guards. Humiliation and harassment were intended to destroy the spirit of the people held in the camp.

The outbreak of World War Two resulted in the Nazi camp system being massively expanded, both within Germany and across occupied Europe. Strangely, however, it was possible, in the prewar years, at least, for a guard to be prosecuted for such a killing. In , Paul Zeidler was among a group of guards who strangled a prisoner who had been a prominent churchman and judge; when the case attracted publicity, the S. He was sentenced to a year in jail. In , Himmler agreed to allow the Red Cross to deliver food parcels to some prisoners in the camps.

To send a parcel, however, the Red Cross had to mark it with the name, number, and camp location of the recipient; requests for these details were always refused, so that there was no way to get desperately needed supplies into the camps. Even the distinction between guard and prisoner could become blurred. From early on, the S. This system spared the S. In some cases, Kapos became almost as privileged, as violent, and as hated as the S. Mory was sentenced to death but managed to commit suicide first.

At the bottom of the K. Once there, however, they found themselves subject to special torments, ranging from running a gantlet of truncheons to heavy labor, like rock-breaking. As the chief enemies in the Nazi imagination, Jews were also the natural targets for spontaneous S. The systematic extermination of Jews, however, took place largely outside the concentration camps.

They had almost no inmates, since the Jews sent there seldom lived longer than a few hours. By contrast, Auschwitz, whose name has become practically a synonym for the Holocaust, was an official K. The first people to be gassed there, in September, , were invalids and Soviet prisoners of war.

It became the central site for the deportation and murder of European Jews in , after other camps closed. The vast majority of Jews brought to Auschwitz never experienced the camp as prisoners; more than eight hundred thousand of them were gassed upon arrival, in the vast extension of the original camp known as Birkenau. Only those picked as capable of slave labor lived long enough to see Auschwitz from the inside. Many of the horrors associated with Auschwitz—gas chambers, medical experiments, working prisoners to death—had been pioneered in earlier concentration camps.

Oswald Pohl, the S. The most ambitious was the construction of a brick factory near Sachsenhausen, which was intended to produce a hundred and fifty million bricks a year, using cutting-edge equipment and camp labor. The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the incompetence of the S. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment.

It would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible circumstances.

Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. This debacle did not discourage Himmler and Pohl. On the contrary, with the coming of war, in , S. On the eve of the war, the entire K. New camps were built to accommodate the influx of prisoners from conquered countries and then the tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in the first months after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the U.

The enormous expansion of the camps resulted in an exponential increase in the misery of the prisoners. Food rations, always meagre, were cut to less than minimal: a bowl of rutabaga soup and some ersatz bread would have to sustain a prisoner doing heavy labor. The result was desperate black marketing and theft.