IV.

Nazi Camps

In Germany, the Nazis established concentration camps almost immediately after assuming power on January 30, 1933. A decree in February removed the constitutional protection against arbitrary arrest. The security police had the authority to arrest anyone and to commit that person to a camp for an indefinite period. The political police, known as the Gestapo, imposed “protective custody” on a wide variety of political opponents: Communists, socialists, religious dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews. The criminal police, known as the Kripo, imposed “preventive arrest” on professional criminals and numerous groups of so-called asocials: Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, and prostitutes. The SS (Schutzstaffel, or protective units) operated the camps with brutal military discipline. During the 1930s six major camps were established: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and, for women, Ravensbrück. In 1939 these camps held about 25,000 prisoners.

During World War II the camps increased in size and number. Important new ones included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof, Lublin-Majdanek, Hinzert, Vught, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen. Millions of prisoners entered these camps from every occupied country of Europe: Jews, partisans, Soviet prisoners of war, and impressed foreign laborers. Early in 1942 the SS Central Office for Economy and Administration (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or WVHA) assumed operational control of the concentration camps, and inmates were exploited as forced laborers in industrial production. In addition to the central camps, the WVHA operated hundreds of subsidiary camps, and local offices of the security police in the occupied territories maintained large numbers of forced labor camps. Inmates were worked to death in industries such as the I. G. Farben chemical works and the V-2 rocket factories. Those no longer able to work were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injections. Inmates were also used for “medical experiments.” Early in 1945 the camp population exceeded 700,000.

During World War II the Nazis also established extermination centers to kill entire populations. There the SS systematically gassed millions of Jews and thousands of Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. Two extermination centers operated in concentration camps under the authority of the WVHA: Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek. Five operated in camps established by regional SS and police leaders: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka in eastern Poland; Kulmhof (Chelmno) in western Poland; and Semlin outside Belgrade, in Serbia. More than 6 million persons, the majority of whom were Jews, perished in the Nazi camps. (Millions of Jews were also exterminated outside the camps.)