Nazi Concentration Camps

Nazi Concentration Camps

Introduction

It was the Nazis who gave the concept concentration camp its definitive and most notorious shape. Under their regime, concentration camps became a central element of the repressive system and the racial state. The Nazi concentration camps imparted to the twentieth century some of its defining images that achieved almost iconic character, such as the gate and ramp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or the skeletal survivors behind the barbed-wire fences of Bergen-Belsen. This paper discusses Nazi concentration camps. This paper also provide comparison of the treatment of prisoners between work camps and extermination camps.

The system of Nazi concentration camps started out in an ad hoc and widely improvised way. An emergency presidential decree of 28 February 1933 following the burning of the Reichstag laid the foundations for imprisonment without trial outside the regular penal system. Subsequently, thousands of political opponents of the Nazis, most of them communists, social democrats, and trade unionists, were taken into so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft). Camps to hold them were set up and run, often in administrative rivalry, by the SS (Schutzstaffel), the SA (Sturmabteilung), the political police, and other local and regional state agencies. The first SS camp was established on the order of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), on 21 March 1933 at Dachau near Munich, but it was only in 1934 that all "protective custody" camps came under the control of the SS. Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke (1892-1943), the commandant of Dachau, as head of the inspectorate of concentration camps and SS guard units (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager und SS-Wachverbände) and ordered him to reorganize and standardize the concentration camp system. Apart from Dachau, all the other camps were disbanded in the mid-1930s and new purpose-built concentration camps, modeled on Dachau, were set up to take their place.

Discussion

The Nazis' most radical innovation was indeed the creation of death factories in which the technology and efficiency of industrial production was transferred to the killing, processing, and destruction of human bodies. The camps themselves varied considerably in character. Because there were so few survivors, the Chelmno camp near Lodz, and the three extermination camps in the General Government—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—are less well known than Auschwitz, though together they accounted for twice as many deaths. Like the regular concentration camps they were ultimately under Himmler's control, but they stood outside the main camp system and were run locally, with the "Action Reinhardt" camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka under the command of SS Major General Odilo Globocnik in Lublin. Within the camps, security police personnel and transferees from the euthanasia program were in charge while Ukrainian auxiliaries did much of the day-to-day guard duty. There were no selections at the camps: with the exception of the small Jewish labor force temporarily required to keep the machine running, all Jews brought there were murdered. The Chelmno camp near Lodz eliminated its inmates in specially constructed mobile gas vans, whose carbon monoxide fumes were pumped back into the sealed ...