Numbers in the circles show how many camps were in each area. There were also four main extermination camps -- Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka -- devoted solely to killing everyone who passed through their gates. Treblinka nearly rivaled Auschwitz in the sheer number of people who were murdered there.
Between , and , people were killed at Treblinka in Poland, , died at Sobibor, at least , were murdered at Chelmno, and about , Jews were killed at Belzec. In all, about 6 million Jews and millions of others died in the Holocaust. But the exact numbers of dead will probably never be known, nor will the total number of people held prisoner in Nazi camps.
Nazi-established sites include:. Camp System: Maps. Other types of incarceration sites numbered in the tens of thousands. Concentration camps are often inaccurately compared to a prison in modern society. But concentration camps, unlike prisons, were independent of any judicial review. Nazi concentration camps served three main purposes:. The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the s was to incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.
The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau , established in March , near Munich. In many of the concentration camps, the Nazi SS either installed or had plans to install gas chambers to assist in their daily business of killing prisoners who were too weak or sick to work. Gas chambers were also to kill small targeted groups of individuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate Polish resistance fighters, Soviet POWs, etc.
All concentration camps were structured in the same way. Each had an internal camp staff that consisted of five sections:. Following the German invasion of Poland in September , the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. SS units guarded the camps.
In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners. Some new camps were built at existing concentration camp complexes such as Auschwitz in occupied Poland. The camp at Lublin, later known as Majdanek , was established in the autumn of as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in Thousands of Soviet POWs were shot or gassed there. Jews in Nazi-occupied lands often were first deported to transit camps such as Westerbork in the Netherlands, or Drancy in France, en route to the killing centers in German-occupied Poland.
The transit camps were usually the last stop before deportation to a killing center. To help carry out the " Final Solution " the genocide or mass destruction of Jews , the Nazis established killing centers in German-occupied Poland, the country with the largest Jewish population. Killing centers were designed for efficient mass murder. The first one, which opened in December , was Chelmno , where Jews and Roma were gassed in mobile gas vans.
In , the Nazis opened the Belzec , Sobibor , and Treblinka killing centers to systematically murder the Jews of the General Government the territory in the interior of German-occupied Poland. At the Auschwitz camp complex , the Birkenau killing center had four gas chambers, known here as crematoria. Here gassing took place using the pesticide Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide, or prussic acid.
During the height of deportations to the camp in , an average of 6, Jews were gassed there each day. Millions of people were imprisoned, mistreated, and murdered in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone.
Generally speaking, a concentration camp is a place where people are concentrated and imprisoned without trial. Inmates are usually exploited for their labour and kept under harsh conditions, though this is not always the case. In Nazi Germany after , and across Nazi controlled Europe between and , concentration camps became a major way in which the Nazis imposed their control. The aim of the Nazi concentration camps was to contain prisoners in one place.
After March , when Germany annexed Austria in an event known as Anschluss thousands of German and Austrian Jews were arrested and detained in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps was usually indefinite, and whilst initially some people were released in just a few days, most endured weeks, months or years of detention. Sanitation and facilities were extremely poor across all camps. Brutal treatment, torture and humiliation was commonplace.
Inmates in concentration camps were also usually subject to forced labour. Typically, this was long hours of hard physical labour, though this varied across different camps. Many camps worked their prisoners to death.
Approximately one million people died in concentration camps over the course of the Holocaust. This figure does not include those killed at extermination camps. The crematorium at Majdanek Extermination Camp. Between its establishment in and its liberation in , over 78, people were murdered at Majdanek. Extermination camps were used by the Nazis from to to murder Jews and, on a smaller scale, Roma.
These were:. The facility contained three gas vans in which victims were murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning. Once dead, the vans were driven to a nearby forest and the victims were buried in mass graves. These camps were specifically built near railway lines to make transportation easier. Instead of vans, stationary gas chambers, labelled as showers, were built to murder people with carbon monoxide poisoning created using diesel engines.
A concentration camp had been established at Majdanek in In the spring of , following the Wannsee Conference, the camp was adapted to become an extermination camp by the addition of gas chambers and crematoria.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex, consisting of a concentration camp, a forced labour camp and an extermination camp. Eventually it had a network of more than 40 satellite camps. Following tests in September , the lethal gas Zyklon B was selected as the method of murder.
Auschwitz initially had one gas chamber at the Auschwitz I camp, but this was soon expanded. By , four new crematoria, with gas chambers attached, had been built in Auschwitz II. Approximately 1. Not everyone who arrived at the extermination camps was murdered on arrival. Some were selected for various work tasks to help the camp operations run smoothly.
Jobs included sorting and processing the possessions of everyone who arrived at the camp, administrative work and heavy manual work. The majority of those selected for any kind of work within this type of camp would die within weeks or months of their arrival from lack of food, disease or overwork.
Those that survived were often killed after a short period and replaced with new arrivals.
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