The Nazi concentration camp system began in March 1933 with one camp, Dachau, holding around 200 political prisoners. Twelve years later it was a network of forty main camps and over a thousand sub-camps holding around 700,000 prisoners. The system did not begin as a killing programme. It became one. Each stage of its growth fed the next.
The early camps, 1933 to 1936
Dachau opened on 22 March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became Chancellor. It was set up by Heinrich Himmler in his capacity as the new chief of the Bavarian police, and run from the start by the SS. The first prisoners were Communists, Social Democrats, and trade union officials arrested under the emergency decrees that followed the Reichstag fire. The early Dachau model, built by the camp commandant Theodor Eicke, became the template for the rest of the system. The prisoners wore numbered uniforms. The day was structured around long roll-calls and forced labour. The guards were brutal as a matter of policy.
By 1934 there were several other camps in the same model: Sachsenhausen near Berlin, Lichtenburg in Saxony, several smaller sites. Most of them held a few thousand prisoners. The category of prisoner expanded steadily: from Communists and Social Democrats to homosexual men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, recidivist criminals, Roma, and a small number of Jews arrested for specific offences against the new racial laws. By 1936 the central administration of the camps had been reorganised into the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, run from a department in Oranienburg. The system had a senior bureaucracy and a defined SS career path within it.
The expansion, 1937 to 1939
The camp system grew sharply in the late 1930s. Buchenwald opened in 1937, Mauthausen in 1938, Flossenburg in 1938, Ravensbruck (the major women’s camp) in 1939. Each was bigger than its predecessor. The reason was partly political, partly economic. Politically, the regime’s definition of enemy was expanding: by 1938 the Anschluss with Austria added Austrian opponents, and Kristallnacht in November 1938 led to the arrest of around 30,000 Jewish men and their temporary detention in the camps. Economically, the SS had begun to recognise that prisoner labour could be a major economic asset. The German Earth and Stone Works company, owned by the SS, was set up in 1938 to exploit camp labour for construction materials.
By the outbreak of war in September 1939, the camp system held around 25,000 prisoners. Most of them were political detainees and habitual criminals, some were Jews. The system was about to triple in size and change character.
The war years, 1939 to 1942
The war brought new categories of prisoner: Polish resistance fighters, Soviet prisoners of war, Western European resistance fighters, and increasingly Jews. New camps were built in occupied territory. Auschwitz was opened in May 1940 in the Polish town of Oświęcim, originally for Polish political prisoners. Majdanek opened near Lublin in October 1941, originally as a prisoner of war camp. The first dedicated extermination camps, Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka, were built between November 1941 and July 1942, specifically for the killing of the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement, the German-occupied part of Poland that was not annexed to the Reich.
The years 1941 to 1942 are the period in which the camp system developed its killing function. The first Auschwitz gassing, an experimental killing of around 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish prisoners using Zyklon B, took place in the basement of Block 11 in early September 1941. The pattern was extended through the year. By the spring of 1942, dedicated gas chambers and crematoria were being built at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Operation Reinhard camps were already operating. In the same year, the Wannsee Conference brought the senior civil servants of the Reich into the planning loop. The killing was now industrial.
The peak, 1943 to 1944
By 1944 the camp system had grown beyond its original character entirely. Auschwitz alone, with its dozens of sub-camps, held around 135,000 prisoners. The system as a whole held around 700,000 at its peak in early 1945. The prisoners were now overwhelmingly slave labourers for German industry. IG Farben’s Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz Monowitz, where Primo Levi was held, was one of the most-discussed examples. Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Heinkel, Messerschmitt and dozens of other major German companies operated camp-labour factories.
The killing continued at Auschwitz-Birkenau into the autumn of 1944. The other Operation Reinhard camps had been closed and dismantled in 1943, their work essentially complete. The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 were the last great mass killing phase, in which around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in eight weeks. The crematoria at Birkenau ran twenty-four hours a day for most of that period.
The collapse, 1944 to 1945
From mid-1944 the camps began to be evacuated as Allied and Soviet forces approached. The mass prisoner movements of late 1944 and early 1945, the death marches, are covered in their own section. By the time British, American and Soviet troops entered the surviving camps in April and May 1945, most of the prisoner population had been either killed in the marches or moved repeatedly between camps. The conditions the liberators found, particularly at Bergen-Belsen, were the worst of the system’s entire existence: thousands of unburied dead, prisoners dying at rates of several thousand a day from typhus and starvation, and a level of physical chaos that no one had been prepared for.
What the trajectory shows
The camp system did not become a killing system in one decision. It got there in twelve years of steady expansion, each stage authorised by people who could plausibly tell themselves that they were just doing their job within an existing structure. The doctors who selected prisoners on the Auschwitz ramp had been trained at the same medical schools as their pre-war predecessors. The clerks who tabulated the deaths had been doing more or less the same work in 1934 as in 1944, with a different category of victim. The men who built the gas chambers were construction firms competing on bids. The system that committed industrial mass murder was, in nearly all of its day-to-day operations, a continuation of the system that had detained Communists in 1933.
See also
- The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
- Heinrich Himmler
- Political Prisoners
- Soviet Prisoners of War
- The Hungarian Deportations 1944
- IG Farben
Sources
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
- Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999
- USHMM: Concentration Camp System