The Nazi camp system included around 40 main camps and over 1,200 sub-camps by 1944. Of the main camps, a relatively small number became significant in the Holocaust by virtue of size, length of operation, or the function they served in the killing programme. The pages below describe the major sites in turn.
Auschwitz
Auschwitz, in the Polish town of Oświęcim, was the largest single Nazi camp and is the camp most identified with the Holocaust in modern memory. It was opened in May 1940 to hold Polish political prisoners. From early 1942 it grew, on Himmler’s orders, into the central killing site of the Final Solution. By 1944 the Auschwitz complex consisted of three main camps. Auschwitz I was the original prisoner camp, with the headquarters block and the experimental gas chamber in Block 11. Auschwitz II, called Birkenau, was the killing camp, with four large gas chamber and crematorium complexes and the rail platform onto which the deportation trains arrived. Auschwitz III, called Monowitz, was a labour camp attached to the IG Farben Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant, where Primo Levi was held. The complex also operated dozens of smaller sub-camps in the surrounding region.
Around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. Around a million of those were Jews. The remaining 100,000 were Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, homosexual men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other categories. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces on 27 January 1945, the date now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen, near Hannover in northern Germany, began life as a prisoner of war camp and became, in the last months of the war, the destination of repeated forced evacuations from camps further east. By April 1945 it held around 60,000 prisoners and 13,000 unburied dead in conditions of complete physical collapse. The British 11th Armoured Division liberated the camp on 15 April 1945 and found the worst conditions any Allied force encountered anywhere in the war. Around 50,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen, with the great majority of the deaths in the final three months. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died there, of typhus, in February or March 1945, weeks before the liberation.
Buchenwald
Buchenwald, on the Ettersberg ridge above Weimar in central Germany, opened in July 1937. It was a major political prisoners’ camp throughout its existence. Around 280,000 people passed through it; around 56,000 died. The communist resistance organisation built up by political prisoners over years became, by April 1945, strong enough to seize the camp from the SS in the hours before American troops arrived. Buchenwald is the only major camp where prisoners liberated themselves. American forces of the 6th Armored Division entered the camp on 11 April 1945. The photographs of the survivors taken by Margaret Bourke-White, including the famous one of Elie Wiesel as a teenager looking out from a wooden bunk, were published worldwide and remain among the central images of the Holocaust.
Dachau
Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp, opened on 22 March 1933. It was the model on which the rest of the system was built. Around 200,000 people passed through Dachau; around 40,000 died. The camp was liberated by American forces on 29 April 1945. The conditions found by the liberators included a train standing in the camp siding with around 2,300 dead on board, evacuees from Buchenwald who had died in transit. Some American soldiers shot SS guards on capture in response to what they had found. The events have been the subject of long historical and legal debate.
Mauthausen
Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria, opened in 1938 and was classified by the SS itself as a Stage III camp, the most severe in the system. Prisoners worked in the granite quarry attached to the camp, climbing the so-called staircase of death with stone blocks on their backs. Around 90,000 of the approximately 190,000 prisoners who passed through Mauthausen died there. The camp was liberated by American forces on 5 May 1945.
Sachsenhausen
Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, opened in 1936 and served as the central administrative camp of the system, since the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was based at Oranienburg next door. Around 200,000 prisoners passed through Sachsenhausen; around 30,000 died. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces on 22 April 1945. Around 3,000 prisoners had been left behind by the SS evacuation of the camp; the rest had been sent on a death march toward the Baltic coast.
Ravensbruck
Ravensbruck, around 90 kilometres north of Berlin, was the major women’s camp of the system. It opened in 1939 and held, over its career, around 130,000 women prisoners and around 20,000 male prisoners in a separate sub-camp. Many of the medical experiments on women, including sulphonamide infections of deliberately wounded subjects and the sterilisation experiments, were conducted there. Around 30,000 to 50,000 women died at Ravensbruck. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces on 30 April 1945.
The Operation Reinhard camps
Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka were the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps, built specifically to murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement, the German-occupied part of Poland that was not annexed to the Reich. They had no labour camp function. Around 600,000 people died at Bełżec, around 200,000 at Sobibor, around 800,000 at Treblinka. None of the three was liberated; all were dismantled by the SS in 1943 and the sites planted with trees. The killing was complete by then. The Sonderkommando revolts at Treblinka in August 1943 and at Sobibor in October 1943 are described on their own pages.
Chełmno and Majdanek
Chełmno, in the part of Poland annexed to the Reich, was the first dedicated extermination site, operating from December 1941. It used mobile gas vans rather than stationary gas chambers. Around 320,000 people were murdered there. Majdanek, near Lublin, was the only major dual-purpose camp other than Auschwitz, with both labour and extermination functions. Around 80,000 people died there, of whom around 60,000 were Jews. Majdanek was liberated by Soviet forces in July 1944, the first major camp to fall into Allied hands; the photographs and films the Soviets produced of it were widely distributed but were widely disbelieved at the time, partly because of Cold War suspicion of Soviet sources, until the Western liberations of April 1945 confirmed everything.
The smaller camps
Beyond the major camps listed above were dozens of smaller main camps and over a thousand sub-camps. Stutthof, Neuengamme, Flossenburg, Mittelbau-Dora and Natzweiler-Struthof are the better-known smaller main camps. Each held tens of thousands of prisoners and saw thousands of deaths. The full list, with each site’s function and approximate death toll, is on the next page.
See also
Sources
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
- Geoffrey Megargee (ed), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, USHMM and Indiana University Press
- USHMM Camp Encyclopedia