The concentration camp system of Nazi Germany was the largest network of detention and killing facilities in modern history. At its peak in early 1945 it consisted of around 40 main camps, around 1,200 sub-camps, and held around 700,000 prisoners. It had begun, twelve years earlier, with a single camp at Dachau, near Munich, holding around 200 political opponents of the new regime. Between those two states the system grew through every stage of Nazi policy, and the camps came to do every kind of work the regime needed done: mass detention, forced labour, medical experimentation, and finally industrial mass murder.
The pages in this section cover the camp system as it actually was. Not the textbook summary, not the list of names. The system itself, what happened inside it, and what it was like to be a prisoner.
What is here
The first three pages give the structural picture. From Internment Camps to Death Camps covers the development of the system from 1933 to 1945, how it grew, who built it, who ran it, and how it changed character at each stage of the war. Types of Camps covers the difference between concentration camps, labour camps, transit camps and extermination camps, distinctions that mattered for the prisoners and that still matter for the historical record. Major Concentration Camps and Full List of All Camps identify and describe the principal sites.
The pages that follow cover the prisoner experience. The Arrival Process and Selection describes what happened in the first hours after a prisoner stepped off the deportation train. The Tattooing of Prisoners, unique to Auschwitz, was the most concrete reduction of a human being to a number in the entire camp system. The Psychology of Survival, The Experience Inside the Camps, Sanitation and Disease, Food and Starvation and The Muselmann describe the conditions that defined daily life and slow death.
Several pages cover specific groups inside the camps. The Experience of Children in the Camps, The Fate of Twins, The Four Women of Auschwitz, Sexual Violence in the Camps and Pregnancy in the Camps address the categories of prisoner whose experience differed from the general male labour population.
Two pages cover the prisoners who worked at the killing itself. The Sonderkommando describes the Jewish prisoner units forced to operate the gas chambers and the crematoria. The Treblinka Revolt 1943, The Sobibor Revolt 1943 and The Auschwitz Sonderkommando Revolt 1944 describe the three armed prisoner uprisings inside the killing camps, all of which failed in their immediate aim of mass escape but each of which produced survivors whose testimony is now central to the historical record.
What the system was for
The concentration camp system was not built in 1933 to commit genocide. It was built to detain political opponents, to break them, and to provide forced labour. The mass killing function came later. By the time it came, the system had a workforce of around 800,000 SS and auxiliary personnel and a bureaucratic apparatus that had been refined for almost a decade. The killing machine fitted into the existing camp system because the existing camp system had been designed to do whatever the regime asked of it. When the regime asked it to kill millions of people, it did.
The operational record
The operational record on The Concentration Camps is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994