Not all Nazi camps were the same. The system included camps with different purposes, run under different administrations, with different rules and different death rates. The distinctions matter, both because they were real to the people held in each kind, and because the historical record is repeatedly muddled by people who treat all camps as if they were Auschwitz. Most camps were not Auschwitz.
Concentration camps
The original camps, set up from 1933 onwards, were concentration camps in the strict sense. They were detention sites for political prisoners, common criminals, and other categories the regime defined as enemies. They were brutal, lethal, and designed to break the prisoner. They were not, in their original form, designed to kill prisoners on arrival. Death came through overwork, beatings, disease, malnutrition, and the routine cruelty of the SS. Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Ravensbruck, Neuengamme and Stutthof are the major examples. Each held tens of thousands of prisoners over its career. Each had a death rate that varied with the period: around 10 to 30 per cent over the camp’s career, much higher in the final months when conditions collapsed.
A prisoner sent to a concentration camp might survive for years. Most did not, but many did. The literature of camp memoir is overwhelmingly the literature of concentration camp survivors. The prisoners who lived to write down what had happened to them had almost all been in concentration camps rather than extermination camps.
Extermination camps
The extermination camps, also called death camps, were a different category. They were built specifically to kill Jews on arrival. There were six: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of these, the four pure extermination camps were Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka; they had no other purpose, and few prisoners stayed in them for more than a few hours after arrival. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were combined: each had a labour camp section that detained prisoners and an extermination section that killed them.
The pure extermination camps were small in physical area and operated by surprisingly small staffs, around 30 to 40 SS men each. They received deportation trains, killed everyone on board within a few hours, and burned the bodies. The Operation Reinhard camps, Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka, killed around 1.7 million Jews between March 1942 and the autumn of 1943. The four were then dismantled and the sites planted with trees to hide what had happened. The men who ran them were redeployed to anti-partisan operations in Yugoslavia.
Survival from a pure extermination camp was almost impossible. The total survivor count from Bełżec, where around 600,000 Jews were murdered, is two known survivors. From Treblinka, with around 800,000 dead, about 70 survivors. From Sobibor, with 200,000 dead, around 50 survivors. The Sonderkommando uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor are the reason for these unusually high figures relative to Bełżec. Almost all the survivors from each camp were members of the prisoner units forced to operate the killing machinery, who had been kept alive precisely to do that work.
Labour camps
Forced labour camps were smaller sites, often run as sub-camps of a major concentration camp, attached to a particular factory or construction project. By 1944 there were over a thousand of these in the Reich and occupied territory. They held prisoners contracted out to private German industry: IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler-Benz and many others. The conditions were generally lethal, with prisoners worked until they could no longer work and then either killed or returned to the parent camp to be killed.
Transit camps
Transit camps were the assembly points from which prisoners were deported to the killing camps. The most-cited examples are Westerbork in the Netherlands, Drancy in France, Mechelen in Belgium and Theresienstadt in the Czech protectorate. Each had distinct character. Theresienstadt was used as a propaganda showpiece, presented to the Red Cross as a model Jewish settlement, while in fact serving as the assembly point from which Czech, Dutch, Danish, German and Austrian Jews were deported to their deaths. Westerbork was a Dutch holding camp from which weekly trains went east. Drancy was a Paris suburb where the French police ran the camp themselves and the Germans only collected the trains.
The category of internment
Some Jewish populations were held in internment camps under regimes allied to Germany without ever being deported. The Italian camps for Jews in Italian-occupied territories were generally not lethal. Some Vichy camps in unoccupied France were lethal. The Romanian and Croatian camps were extremely lethal, with conditions and death rates similar to the German concentration camps. The general rule is that the further from German direct control, the wider the variation in conditions, and the more the local government’s own attitudes shaped what happened.
The category of ghettos
Ghettos were not technically camps. They were enclosed urban districts where Jewish populations were forced to live, primarily in occupied Poland and the western Soviet Union. Conditions were lethal in the same way concentration camps were lethal: through deliberate underfeeding, overcrowding, disease, and routine violence by the German guards and the local police. Around 250,000 Jews died in the Warsaw ghetto, around 45,000 in the Łódź ghetto, and tens of thousands in dozens of smaller ghettos, before the deportations to the death camps even began. The ghettos are covered in their own section.
Why the distinctions matter
The Holocaust killed around six million Jews. About half of those were killed in the death camps. The other half were killed in shootings in the east, in the ghettos, on the death marches, and in the lethal conditions of the concentration camps and the labour camps. The death camp deaths are the ones most often pictured. The other half is no less real, but it happened in different places under different conditions, and the people who survived to write about what happened to them were generally not at Bełżec or Sobibor. They were at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Mauthausen, or in the ghettos. Their accounts are the central record of the Holocaust as a lived experience. Reading them, it is worth remembering that the worst of what happened was not survived by anyone.
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, multiple volumes
- USHMM: Concentration Camps